South Korean artist, Kim HwaHyun is flying to Liverpool from Seoul to open her solo exhibition and give an artist talk at The Royal Standard in Liverpool.

Kim creates a universe where East and West, past and present, and sacred and secular converge through her signature androgynous male figures.

Rejecting fixed binaries, she embraces hybridity, combining dongyanghwa (traditional East Asian ink and polychrome painting) with the visual language of Japanese shōjo manga from the 1950s onwards and Korean sunjeong manhwa (female-centric comics/graphic novels), which came into their own genre by the late 1980s onwards.

Using historically resonant materials such as agyo binders, hanji (traditional Korean paper), ink, and mineral pigments, She transforms canonical forms into vibrant scenes of charged queer male bodies.

Further information about Kim HwaHyun

Kim places queer male bodies within ink landscapes and calligraphic brushwork associated with the Confucian literati tradition - a realm historically reserved for elite men, she inserts desire and softness into a space once defined by masculine dominance. This act critiques East Asian art history, where male painters depicted male-centric narratives and largely erased women and queer subjects.

Simultaneously, her work confronts the Western tradition of the erotic display of women for a heterosexual male gaze. Kim inverts this dynamic. In her paintings, men become the objects of desire, and women and queer viewers hold visual agency. Her canvases thus challenge both Western and Eastern histories that normalized the dominance of heterosexual cis-male perspectives.

Kim HwaHyun’s work constructs a myth-making, female-centred universe where androgynous queer men occupy the centre stage of a world that once excluded them. Through hybridity, inversion, and a radical re-imagining of Asian visual traditions, she restores women and queer communities to a canon that historically denied their presence - transforming absence into power, and desire into a new form of cultural memory.

Artist’s website

• Venue: The Royal Standard, 5 Mann Street, Liverpool L8 5AF > website

• Opening Reception: 10am - 2pm, Saturday 24th January 2026

• Artist talk: 1 - 2pm, Saturday 24th January 2026

• Exhibition: 10am - 4pm, Monday 26th - Friday 30th January 2026

• Tickets: no entrance charge