Ibanjiha, A Queer Next Door was a bit like introducing myself to this heteronormative society, even though I’ve been active since 2004. When I received an offer to publish my first book, it was the first offer from a major mainstream company and publisher.

As I try to live as a contemporary artist, there have been a few things I’ve had to give up. I realised that if you don’t have a really big sponsor—whether it’s a parent, a family member or someone else—you have to have some kind of fame to make a living. To do that, you have to give up some privacy, because fame ultimately means selling how attractive you are. Whether it was my narrative or a more intimate part of me, I had to distribute it to some extent and become familiar to the public. So I decided to do this with my first book.

It’s meaningful to me that people will be able to connect with my work through this book. And in a way, the things I wrote about in my book—like the problems I had at Seoul National University screening my graduation art project, or traumatic stories about my family—gave me courage. I didn’t know what the outcome would be when I distributed such intimate and personal stories. Even now, I have friends who are trying to write books. When transgender people or other minorities write about themselves, they worry they might end up creating a certain public perception of minorities. But I thought, If just ten people get to read the book, I’ll be grateful. Luckily, the first book did well.

One of the things that gave me confidence was discovering my potential as a writer. I’d previously thought of writing as just a tool to explain my artwork, but I realised that even when I was younger, I used writing as much as drawing as a form of relief and expression. I realised that as a writer I could produce work that could stand on its own and that I could pursue this a little more.

How did the title for your second book come about?

I was commissioned to deliver a lecture titled ‘Why Am I So Hilarious?’ It’s so hard to live in this society as a queer person and a feminist, so I use humour as a survival technique. My friend, who was the organiser, asked me to talk about this.

According to my friend, the idea came from Nietzsche. In his later years he wrote things like ‘Why I Am So Wise’, ‘Why I Am So Clever’… When they saw this, my friend thought of Ibanjiha and came up with ‘Why Am I So Hilarious?’ The publisher must have also chosen this title because it was somewhat sensational and was a title that could only be used by Ibanjiha.

The initial cover of your second book—which depicts the struggles of an ordinary ‘girl next door’ living in an underground apartment—received some backlash and eventually a version with a different cover had to be issued. What was the story behind that?

I think you could say that what I and my readers got from my first book was very different from what commercial publishers understood. I really wanted to show more of who I am, not as a ‘queer next door’ person, but as a human being and a writer. But I think what commercial publishers wanted was a flat icon—something that can be summarised with a few keywords. It was a huge shock.

If you look at the first cover of Why Am I So Hilarious?, you see a poor-looking woman catching a cockroach in a room decorated with some paintings. It’s not just a problem with the image but also how the publisher approached the book cover. The artist who drew this cover is innocent; she’s a heterosexual woman and a Korean living in the United States. The cover art seemed like an attempt to bleach my queerness. Or maybe it was the way the publishing industry wanted to see Ibanjiha and make readers think of Ibanjiha as someone who lives underground, as a harmless girl who catches cockroaches. My humour was just fun content for them.

Ibanjiha’s humour is funnier if you know the queer community, if you understand that world. But maybe people just found my facial expressions and gestures funny, without understanding queer people or the world we live in. In some ways, this was very sad and unpleasant.

I still have so many copies of Why Am I So Hilarious? with the first cover at home and it’s hard to look at them. But on the other hand, I feel like… just wait a little longer and these copies will become history. This really shows the true face of this heteronormative society. And it shows how little they understand queer people and people who understand queer people.

What obstacles do you think queer authors face when they try to get published in South Korea?

Although more and more queer narratives and queer writers are appearing, commercial companies in Korea’s heteronormative society still do not think about queer people as consumers. I feel like there’s a different trend in the West. When I went to the US recently, I found that people were concerned about making money from queer people, so there’s no way they wouldn’t recognise them as consumers. The problem there is that queer festivals have become too commercialised because they’re at the forefront of capitalism, and no one doubts the benefit of sponsoring queer festivals [and marketing themselves to this demographic]. This doesn’t seem to be happening in Korean society.

What was your experience of going on a book tour for Why Am I So Hilarious? like?

From a writer’s perspective, publishing a book feels like putting a message in a glass bottle and floating it into the ocean. Often you don’t know who likes or doesn’t like it. I published my first book in the middle of the pandemic, so I couldn’t really hold offline events. I did the book tour [for the second book] because I realised from broadcasting on YouTube that I had fans all over the country and the world. People would travel to Seoul every time I held an offline event.

I’ve lived in Seoul all my life, so my understanding of areas outside Seoul is very poor. I have friends from other parts of Korea who came to Seoul for university, and the emotional instability and alienation they experienced were almost the same as if they’d moved to a foreign country. There’s also a reason why queer people tend to live in big cities; it’s partly because of the culture and prejudice in places outside of Seoul. I was really curious about people out there. Even for fans who had already left their hometown, meeting Ibanjiha in their hometown was a different experience. I had many priceless encounters.

The homophobia is different. Hatred has become very sophisticated in Seoul. Homophobes in Seoul have realised that it’s not fun to just turn up at a queer event and make a fuss, so at queer cultural festivals they’ll stage their own event and play the traditional drums to be disruptive. But somewhere like Ulsan (in southeast Korea), there is really a lot of raw hate. People came to my book talk and made such hateful remarks. I feel like, even when it comes to prejudice and hate, there is a cultural gap between the capital and other parts of the country. So I want to go to various regions more in the future.

There was an attempt to block your lecture in Ulsan, leading to a direct confrontation. What happened?

The lecture at Nammok Library in Ulsan had initially been cancelled because there was a protest, but was reinstated thanks to the power of my fans. Then Nammok Library suggested that I give the lecture without mentioning the words “queer”, “homosexuality” or “gender”. It was ridiculous, of course. I didn’t think it was a genuine request; I think it was an attempt to get me to back out. If I were an activist, a politician or an ordinary writer I would have said I couldn’t do it, because that’s such an insulting request. But I said yes because I am Ibanjiha.

Rejecting that request would have been an important action and an important boycott, but then the people living in that area would not have been able to meet Ibanjiha. So when that request was made, I said, “It’s so strange, but I’ll give it a try, I can do it.” That was possible because I am Ibanjiha, and I think that’s where the artist is able to intervene. There is a role for a politician, a role for an artist, a role for an individual citizen, but I think the reason I was able to say yes is precisely because I am a multidisciplinary artist. Of course I felt bad about that request, but inspiration struck me. I thought, I will give you the lecture you think you want. That is why I thought of the lecture title: ‘Creating a Normal Family’.

I thought of people like self-development instructors and life coaches. I feel like they’re just following the values of the status quo in society. They communicate messages like, “There’s nothing wrong with society and you just have to work hard.” I saw how many of those lectures reproduced conservative values. Instructors would even scold mothers: “Why would you raise your child like that?” This lecture boom has been going strong in Korea for a while, and if you look at who gets the microphone, it’s people who serve the conventional social system. So I thought, This time I’m going to show you.

The ‘Creating a Normal Society’ lecture might have been like stand-up comedy to some but to me it was like a play of the absurd. When I gave that lecture, people who knew Ibanjiha laughed so hard. Because it’s crazy that the queer artist Ibanjiha gave a lecture on creating a “normal” family and talked about things like the importance of having a son and how we are going to create a “normal” society. But for people who didn’t know Ibanjiha, they were like, “Let’s see whether this person talks about being queer, homosexuality or gender.” I guess these people thought I wasn’t that bad in the end because I talked sense to them. That’s what I wanted. It’s fun if you know, but those who aren’t in the know just won’t get it. I have no intention of trying to persuade homophobes.

How did ‘Creating a Normal Family’ turn out? I heard it was hilarious.

I mainly talked about how to become ‘normal’ and what ‘normal’ is. I just used a definition that came up when searching on [the online search portal] Naver. Here in Korea there’s a belief that whatever Naver says is correct because it’s such a large site run by a large conglomerate. The entire nation relies on it, even the government.

I got the definition from Naver and explained that, according to Naver, to be normal, you can’t get sick, you can’t get old, you can’t engage in strange sexual acts. I also conveyed the sexist views that self-help instructors usually have. I played the character of a lecturer, a speaker who is a heterosexual married woman with children. I imagined the details of this character and I played her. I joked with the audience, referring to audience members with really short hair as “men” regardless of their actual gender identity.

Of course I was very scared. It was a very scary moment for me as an individual. Not many people showed up at first, but it was later reported to the police that about 300 people were protesting my lecture in front of the library. At the time I thought, Why is this happening to me? But when I actually started the lecture, I was really excited. I knew that I was really born to do this.

I think the lecture in Ulsan provided a very good introduction to what Ibanjiha does. It was thanks to the people who opposed the lecture, in a way, that my solo exhibition was held there. It’s really interesting, because as a contemporary artist, you have to exhibit at a gallery or a museum, but that becomes your career and becomes the subject of criticism. For me, exhibitions are held in libraries, in that moment where Ibanjiha exists.

It’s similar to when I get my fans to call me “father” or “daddy”. I enjoy moments like that. I love the moments when fans call me “father” and break the norm. When I’m just walking down the street, someone suddenly calls me “father”. I’m so happy to hear it. And the people around us are like, Something doesn’t fit, the person being called “father” doesn’t seem that old, nor does he look like a so-called man. It’s a strange situation, but these two people are so happy to see each other. I always say that moment is the moment when ‘normal’ society collapses. So when does Ibanjiha’s performance start? It starts now.

The inability to distinguish between life and art is my art. It’s also my vulnerability. At the same time, this is how we are opening up a queer space. Not in a specific space like an exhibition hall, but at this very moment. In this way, the audience is also present in this work of art.

Your fans created the website ibanjiha.com as a gift to you. When I looked at the history of Ibanjiha’s activities listed on the website, there were so many performances for various minorities in society. What is it like to be a queer performance artist in Korea, or Asia more broadly?

It’s very fun, very funny, very difficult. The more active you are, the more society shows you its true face. What I mean when I say it’s really fun is that all the contradictions society shows me are fun to me. I am a person who gets ideas from boundaries and oppression. It’s different from saying that those things are good, but the cracks and clumsiness they demonstrate are interesting and fun to me. Of course, it’s also painful and difficult. But it’s not that difficult when I’m doing my work. It’s the process of distributing my art that is difficult. You have to dance with some real enemies.

You’ve recently expanded your scope of activity into North America. Is there a plan to reach out to minority communities in Asia?

I welcome expanding my reach overseas to any country. I want to do this so much. But the proposals started from Western countries.

There’s also something called a monopoly on information. What I’ve felt every time I work on an international project—even though I don’t do it often—is that it would be nice if Asian countries could be more connected or if non-Western countries could communicate a little more with each other. Basically, the language issue is really big. Not everyone can speak English, but we have to speak some English to be able to communicate among ourselves. For example, if you want to interact with a Thai person, you [both] need to speak English, not Thai. What this means is that there’s already a structure in place where Asians can’t communicate with each other unless we go through the language of a Western power. Who can deny the power of English in Asia? I feel a bit sad about that. This is why I wish my two books could be translated quickly, but they inevitably have to be translated into English first to have a ripple effect after that. It’s a bit unfortunate that it feels like something has to be formed in the West for it to be recognised.

If I get a residency or something, I end up putting out work that I think foreigners will understand about Korea. So, in Western countries, I don’t put things that are too difficult for them to understand in my applications [for funding or support]. For example, in the work I drew last year—‘Staying in South Korea’—I drew the Sewol ferry survivors and Itaewon casualties, but talking about the sinking of the Sewol ferry [in April 2014, claiming the lives of majority of the passengers and crew, including around 250 high school students] is too difficult to do in English. We Koreans know about the Sewol ferry disaster but it’s very contextual and difficult to explain to foreigners that those who died were victims of state violence. Because of that, I just ended up referring to social minorities or something like that [when talking to foreigners about my work]. And the narrative was somewhat erased in that way, because I was trying to do it in someone else’s language.

Why do you think people are so enthusiastic about Ibanjiha’s use of humour?

I was doing a book talk about Elliot Page’s Page Boy with a Korean transgender man not long ago. They said, “Many Koreans still think that being a homosexual or being transgender is a disease,” and I said, “Honestly, I still do.” It was a joke, and its meaning depends on the listener. Someone might think that it was a hateful comment; on the other hand, while homosexuality is not a mental illness, there are many cases where homosexuals develop mental illness from living in this society. A single word or sentence can have multiple connotations, so each person decides on the boundaries of humour. I don’t want to live as a queer person serving heterosexual people. That’s number one.

It’s true that my humour pushes the boundaries, but I think the audience chooses what their boundaries are and what they laugh at. Some might find it funny, some don’t find it funny, some think it’s crossing the line. My talent is knowing how to massage these things by going back and forth over the line. My eternal dance partner is mainstream, ‘normal’ society. And when it comes to this ‘boundary dance’, I’m irreplaceable.

• Tags: Free to read, Ibanjiha, Issue 35, Seulki Lee, South Korea