Are You Korean? is a multidisciplinary exhibition exploring belonging across Korean and Korean American identity. The exhibition explores a wider conversation of how belonging is shaped through migration and immigrant descent, adoption, gender/sexuality, mixed-race identity, language, memory, family, and cultural displacement.
Rather than treating Korean identity as fixed, inherited, or easily defined, Are You Korean? asks who gets to feel fully Korean, who has been made to feel outside of Korean culture, and how art can create space for more expansive forms of recognition. The exhibition brings together artists whose practices reflect diverse Korean narratives across geography, generation, sexuality, race, and lived experience.
At its heart, the project is about gathering the many ways Korean identity is lived: by adopted, immigrant and second-generation, mixed-race, women and queer Koreans and Korean Americans navigating the liminal space between cultures. Through contemporary art, public programming, food, performance, and community gathering, the exhibition seeks to challenge exclusion and discrimination both within Korean culture and in the broader American context.
Hosted at PDR-1 Arts Warehouse in San Francisco, Are You Korean? creates a public space for Korean and Korean American artists and audiences to come together around belonging, complexity, and shared cultural imagination. Following Grand Opening event (August 22, 2026), 6 artists talks will be held that explore these questions of self-identity and belonging within the larger Korean narrative.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Michelle Favin is a mixed-race Korean American painter based in California. Working with natural pigments, oil, and ink, she builds layered paintings that hold time, memory, intuition, and the search for selfhood.
Helen Kim is an artist whose work is guided by drawing, painting, construction, color, shape, and line. Influenced by her background in architecture, she translates memory, emotion, and lived experience into abstract visual form.
Sung Jae Lee is a Seoul-born artist working across performance, installation, text, and video. His practice centers queer Asian visibility, desire, and the ways Asian queerness has often been rendered invisible or misread in Western culture.
Hannah Lee is a Brooklyn-based painter whose work captures intimate, dreamlike scenes of everyday life. Her paintings often hold moments of emotional suspension, memory, domestic space, and the quiet atmosphere of lived experience.
Joanne Lee is a San Francisco-based artist working with dyed Hanji, traditional Korean paper. Her practice connects material memory, Korean artistic traditions, and contemporary abstraction, with work shown internationally across Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Europe, and the United States.
Jun Yang is a queer Korean artist based in San Francisco whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, soft sculpture, ceramics, and installation. Their work explores queer embodiment, cultural displacement, healing, and the creation of safety, softness, and community.
ORGANIZATION TEAM
Christopher Chung (정종환), Founder, PDR-1 Arts Warehouse
Urban planner by training and a building contractor by profession. Since returning to his native San Francisco, Chris has been applying his personal passion for the arts and 20+ years of project-based, international development experience towards launching PDR-1. PDR-1 leverages arts and cultural production towards broader urban activation and renewal in underutilized urban industrial communities. Chris is a graduate of MIT (City Planning)
Mushi Wooseong James, Creative Director, Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Conceptual artist and cultural organizer whose work explores identity, diaspora, and liminal states of belonging through conceptual art and social practice.
MORE ABOUT PDR-1 ARTS WAREHOUSE
PDR-1 Arts Warehouse is a 5,000-square-foot gallery and production space located in San Francisco's Bayview district. Operating within the city’s Production, Distribution and Repair (PDR) zoning, the space supports artists, makers, and creative entrepreneurs working across disciplines.
The Bayview location carries particular resonance within the history of Korean migration in San Francisco and the United States. Korean immigrant communities have often developed within historically African-American neighborhoods and urban industrial districts, creating complex and layered histories of proximity, cultural exchange, and shared urban space.
Hosting Are You Korean? in Bayview acknowledges these histories while creating new opportunities for cultural dialogue.
The project also echoes transformations through arts and culture as seen in other Seoul neighborhoods such as Seongsu-dong (성수동), where former industrial districts have evolved into vibrant hubs for art, culture, and creative production.