Adonis Syndrome
Group show
13.09.2025 - 01.11.2025

The term Adonis Syndrome (also known as the Adonis Complex) refers to men’s obsession with their appearance. Adonis, in Greek mythology, was a beautiful youth adored by the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, and upon his death, was transformed into an anemone. He has long been regarded as a symbol of male beauty.

Korean society is strongly collectivist in nature, where social status, recognition, and one’s identity as a member of a group hold great importance. Accordingly, following new trends is often regarded as an essential part of social adaptation. The distorted consciousness of beauty and obsession with appearance in Korea are phenomena shaped by deep social and cultural contexts - arising from the complex interplay of traditional and modern values. Traditional Korean aesthetics emphasized facial balance, clear skin, and a healthy physique. However, in the modern era, these values have shifted: under the influence of detailed criteria and media, expectations surrounding appearance have become highly specific and rigid.

K-pop, television dramas, and films continually reinforce particular standards of beauty, and these standards evolve at an exceptionally rapid pace. As celebrities maintain appearances considered normative, the general public increasingly strives to follow these ideals. Social pressures regarding appearance generate significant psychological stress, especially among younger generations, for whom social expectations and media-driven beauty standards play a major role in shaping self-perception.

Obsession with appearance, packaged under the term “self-care,” has become a commercialized practice. In Korea, where social evaluation carries great weight, appearance remains a powerful determinant of personal worth. My recent curatorial research has been particularly engaged with body dysmorphic disorder, a social issue observable everywhere but one that takes on heightened significance when combined with Korea’s cultural context. A majority of people believe that appearance is a decisive factor in determining one’s value and success. Korean cosmetic surgery techniques are internationally recognized, renowned for their precision, innovation, and technical expertise, attracting many visitors from abroad seeking such procedures.

Latvia and Korea, while both independent republics, share parallels in history: both declared independence around the First World War, yet the establishment of their nation-states occurred more than fifty years apart. Both nations also experienced dramatic upheavals in relation to larger powers - Latvia with the Soviet Union, and Korea with Japan. These turbulent experiences resonate visibly in the ways that art movements have unfolded within comparable categories in each country’s artistic history. This exhibition, composed of works by four artists from Korea and Latvia, seeks to explore these phenomena. It offers a space where audiences can encounter and reflect on the aesthetic standards of both nations, while also considering the potential for artistic solidarity that emerges across cultures through shared experiences in the realm of art.

Curator of the exhibition is Taeho Choi.

Seo Ujeong

This work reconstructs ancient mythological symbols within a contemporary context. Adonis no longer remains a purely mythological figure. Through the juxtaposition of expressionless faces and mechanical devices, the work generates a sense of visual theatricality and psychological tension. The staged settings of laboratories and theatrical spaces in the paintings transform into a hybrid realm where nature, humans, machines, and mythological beings coexist. The scientific and alchemical apparatuses evoke the image of an alchemist’s workshop. While alchemy was once an esoteric practice aimed at transforming metals and discovering eternal life, here it is reimagined as a metaphor for the transformation of the human body and mind.

The figures resembling scientists or alchemists appear to conduct repeated experiments as if trying to resurrect Adonis, while birds, light, and shadows intervene symbolically in the process. These scenes overlap with contemporary practices of cosmetic surgery, biotechnology, and bodily modification. Fragmented faces, masks, and artificially lit figures reveal a mechanized desire for beauty and youth. Just as the ancient alchemists transformed metals, modern individuals reconstruct their bodies and identities through surgery and technology. Adonis is reinterpreted not as a mythical figure but as a post-human entity continually reborn.

Thus, through the figure of Adonis, the work stages a world where antiquity and modernity, myth and science, alchemy and cosmetic surgery are fused together. The characters are arranged like actors, and the experimental devices and machines function as stage props. This becomes a theatrical laboratory where the audience witnesses how beauty and regeneration, desire and transformation intersect. Along the chain stretching from the myth of death and rebirth to alchemical experiments in transformation, and to the technological desires of contemporary cosmetic practices, the work presents a surreal stage that reveals how humans endlessly remake themselves while existing precariously in a hybrid world.

Jung Choulgue

Jung Choulgue’s practice reveals the cracks and wounds concealed beneath polished surfaces. His use of everyday materials, white shirts and exfoliating cloths, embroidered or inscribed with words, delicately captures the traces of repression and anxiety produced within the social rules of “beauty” and “conformity.” Phrases such as “That day’s sorrow was not mine alone” stitched into fabric, or “Sorry, I’ll change it for you” repeatedly sprayed, may appear as gentle gestures of consolation, but in fact expose the violent language of correction and exclusion.

The artist recalls his childhood memories from a coal-mining town, when a newly transferred girl refused to sit next to him and burst into tears, and the teacher said, “I’ll change it for you,” while moving her seat. This experience expands beyond personal memory into a testimony of unconscious exclusion shaped by social norms and discrimination. Jung’s paintings, installations, and hand-sewn drawings serve as poetic devices that record such “invisible wounds.” His works subvert the Adonis-like myth imposed by society, an obsession with flawless youth and beauty by tracing the sutures of wounds concealed under the name of beauty. In doing so, the audience discovers another layer of emotional resonance that emerges from repression and imperfection.

Ryu Juhang

The phrase “porcelain skin,” commonly used in Korean society, is not merely a compliment to smooth and flawless skin. It is a disciplinary code that defines and simultaneously erases subjectivity, functioning as a social device for evaluating existence through surface.

Ryu Juhang’s Temple of the Surface extends this metaphor to the dimension of landscape. The artist assembles dozens of photographs of mountains and forests surrounding Seoul to construct an overwhelming image of primordial forest, vast enough to disorient the viewer’s sense of direction. Within this dense landscape, traces of human civilization - buildings and roads- appear only faintly, paradoxically emphasizing humanity’s relative smallness within nature. Inserted into this forest, a white porcelain bust symbolizes the “discipline of surface” imposed by civilization through its artificially idealized face. Here, AI does not function as the creator but as a tool for recomposing photographic archives and personal records, a medium of form, akin to a brush or camera. The resulting images are not random outputs but the product of intersecting photographic practice, social context, and accumulated data.

The bust floating above the lush forest transforms the landscape into a kind of temple. Yet it is no longer a sacred space devoted to gods, but rather a modern shrine consecrated to surface and appearance. The face becomes both an object of worship and a commodity sign, exposing a system of desire organized around outward form.

This work does not remain in a moral critique of appearance-centered culture. Instead, it analyzes how such ideals are constructed and circulated through technological mediation and image production systems, tracing the circuits of desire and identification. Through this process, it prompts a critical reflection on the relationship between surface and identity in contemporary society. While the exhibition explores the social obsession with the male body and appearance, this work reveals how that obsession is reproduced through cultural metaphors and surface regulations. Furthermore, by juxtaposing artificial busts with monumental landscapes, it illustrates the tension in which human existence is situated - between nature and civilization, surface and essence.

Līga Spunde

She adds a vital layer to the exhibition. Her project Episodes About Not Knowing – Korean Edition, based on her residency experience in Korea (MMCA Changdong 2024), delicately explores the anxieties surrounding uncertainty and identity. Her recently completed animation, which features a female character, strongly resonates with the exhibition's core themes of bodily obsession and the fragmentation of self-image.

This figure does not simply represent female identity but rather functions as a projection of male desire and anxiety. Within the surveillance-based visual structure that idealized standards of appearance create, she becomes a subversive device. Her compulsive consumption of information and effort to reconstruct her appearance mirror the psychological pressures often experienced by contemporary men.

Spunde's work deftly disrupts gender boundaries and highlights the tension between socially imposed self-representation and personal identity. The complexity of her character - interweaving body, emotion, information consumption, and self-styling - reminds us that Adonis Syndrome is not merely a male issue, but a reflection of broader societal attitudes toward the body in the contemporary age.

Exhibition is supported by: State Culture Capital Foundation, GroGlass
Special thanks to: Sunblanket Foundation, Noewe Foundation