She longs to be a mother. So she makes erotic art.
Published: 19 Aug. 2025, 07:00
Updated: 19 Aug. 2025, 15:10
-
- LEE JIAN
- [email protected]
Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI
![Artist Tzusoo's agar-and-moss sculpture "Agarmon" is on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul, through Feb. 1, 2026. [MMCA]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/5fa94ce0-ddea-4f08-a8d8-0f98e329d7e9.jpg)
Artist Tzusoo's agar-and-moss sculpture "Agarmon" is on display at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul, through Feb. 1, 2026. [MMCA]
Artist Tzusoo’s works are way too cool to be in a museum.
Take her live sculpture installation, “Agarmon,” for instance — a moist, phallic creature made of agar, a derivative of seaweed and moss, born out of condensed sexual energy that did not culminate in fertilization and childbirth.
“I, personally, just enjoy erotic things,” Tzusoo told the Korea JoongAng Daily, with a light smile, at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) on Thursday.
Based in Seoul and Berlin, Tzusoo is a popular name in the ultramodern digital art world for her work in both online and physical forms, whose social context and aesthetic have resonated with a young and international fan base, including 14,400 followers on Instagram. Tzusoo — her pen name, given by her father, an allusion to the bright and clear qualities of a stream in the fall — studied printmaking and art at Korea’s representative art school, Hongik University, and also holds a diploma in Fine Art from the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, in Germany, where she currently lectures on digital art. She also heads music video studio, Princess Computer and has produced videos for veteran singer Cho Yong-pil’s “Feeling of You” (2024), Lil Cherry’s “Vitamin B” (2020) and Saay’s “Omega” (2020).
Tzusoo's key works include “Aimy’s Melancholy” (2021-2024), a series revealing the private, human side of a virtual avatar that resists stereotypical depictions of digital women, reflecting the artist’s desire to break cycles of prejudice online. She's also known for “Dalle’s Aimy” (2022-2024), a series of AI-generated images questioning artist identity in the internet age.
Now, the 33-year-old multimedia artist has a new project: a solo exhibition at the MMCA's public plaza in Jongno District, central Seoul, which opened on Aug. 1. Tzusoo, the youngest creative to hold a solo show in MMCA Seoul to date, is this year’s spotlight artist for the MMCA x LG OLED project series, the first edition of a collaboration with LG Electronics that invites one artist to explore digital art.
![Artist Tzusoo's solo exhibition "Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul's Seoul Box in Jongno District, central Seoul [MMCA]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/7a90e2e1-9640-42d0-a0c4-69f365600bf2.jpg)
Artist Tzusoo's solo exhibition "Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition" at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul's Seoul Box in Jongno District, central Seoul [MMCA]
“Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition,” featuring one “Agarmon” sculpture and two video installations, has a full fictional universe behind it. The pieces abstractly depict a world long hidden from humans that has begun, unintentionally, to appear, like a beta version of an unfinished game.
The exhibit immerses audiences in Tzusoo’s world with silky, hypnotic music and playful Agarmon-like creatures on two large screens, with the original Agarmon in a water-filled incubator at the center. Sensual yet unprovocative, it mixes philosophical depth with cheeky B-grade humor — a taste of Tzusoo.
Underlying the scene is the artist's yearning to become a mother in a reality where she feels she cannot.
![Artist Tzusoo poses with "Agarmon" displayed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul. [MMCA]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/3ea8195d-c41d-4c62-bffc-c2d070db95b9.jpg)
Artist Tzusoo poses with "Agarmon" displayed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Jongno District, central Seoul. [MMCA]
“Before Agarmon, I mainly worked digitally, but when I turned 30, my body began to break down from long hours in front of the computer,” Tzusoo said.
“As a woman, I became acutely aware of the limited window for childbirth. No matter how much I dreamed of freedom in the digital realm, my body has limits. That realization hit me strongly.”
In this visualized flow of sexual entropy, she makes creation and care possible without physically giving birth.
"I felt a subtle rupture between the screen world and myself, and I wanted to touch physical materials,” she said. Agarmon was created from that impulse.
!["The Eight Spirits of Flesh" [MMCA]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/a965ba1c-ab0e-4750-9a9b-8006e7b873d1.jpg)
"The Eight Spirits of Flesh" [MMCA]
“The Eight Spirits of Flesh,” displayed on two tall screens, depicts two of Tzusoo’s eight spirits: Tae, the spirit of illness, covered in scars, and Gan, with three heads representing normalcy, queerness and femininity. Only normalcy appears complete; the others are distorted.
Through them, Tzusoo explores societal norms and biases around female sexuality in her MMCA exhibit.
“Women are so often reduced to a binary — either idealized as saintly maternal figures or sexualized images,” she said. “I see those aspects as inseparable, not mutually exclusive.”
!["The Eight Spirits of Flesh" [MMCA]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/cece9aa8-beb1-45ef-b088-5e0d4afe6c6f.jpg)
"The Eight Spirits of Flesh" [MMCA]
Notably absent from the MMCA exhibition is AI. Tzusoo's “Aimy’s Melancholy” and "Dalle Aimy" are both digitally made, using tech to reinterpret the virtual space that the artist loves and inhabits just as much as the physical world. "Agarmon," fully physical, is a reversal from her usual process.
“I’ve always been frustrated by how women, sexual minorities or people with disabilities were portrayed in a very limited and discriminatory way [online],” she said. “Both games and art are forms of fantasy — they are like a special gift that allows human beings to transcend our limitations. But I disliked how, even within those spaces of imagination, discrimination and prejudice kept being reproduced.”
The pivot from AI, though, is intentional.
!["The Review" (2021) part of "Aimy's Melancholy" series [TZUSOO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/710b9d12-a1ed-442d-a4cb-5aef4fe015d0.jpg)
"The Review" (2021) part of "Aimy's Melancholy" series [TZUSOO]
“My early AI works stand out because they were created with early models that produced uncanny images humans could never have imagined,” she said. “As AI advanced, systems learned what people like, generating uniform, polished, conventionally beautiful images, which no longer interest me.”
!["Dalle's Aimy" (2022) [LEEJUNGWOOSTUDIO/ TZUSOO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/7fc82ff3-72a8-40e6-818f-a1e0eb86bdbc.jpg)
"Dalle's Aimy" (2022) [LEEJUNGWOOSTUDIO/ TZUSOO]
This move toward making her digital language tangible now finds its stage at the MMCA, a space she sees as uniquely suited to introducing audiences to new images and ideas.
She has had to tweak and edit a few things to fit the public setting of the museum: The name of the exhibition, as well as some of the images in "The Eight Spirits of Flesh" video installation, were initially more overtly sexual. But she was still surprised that the MMCA, and the Korean art scene as a whole, was so progressive.
“Museums carry a kind of peculiar privilege — people think, ‘Because this is art, I should at least try to engage with it,’” she said. “That special quality allows museums to open audiences to subjects, images or stories they might normally resist in everyday life. Simply by being in the museum, people are more willing to open themselves up and think in directions they've never considered before.”
The audiences, too, have changed. “Korean museum goers are actually more open than ever,” she said. “The pace in Korea is something no one else can match, with so many novel works and young museumgoers. I always dreamed of showing my works in institutions like this, but I never imagined that my own artistic language would be accepted so quickly.”
![Close up of the moss sewn into the agar of an "Agarmon" [TZUSOO]](https://koreaseafood.online/data/photo/2025/08/19/37d49d39-cea5-465d-92ff-30b1a4ccb7bf.jpg)
Close up of the moss sewn into the agar of an "Agarmon" [TZUSOO]
Despite the irreverent, sometimes cheeky quality of her work, Tzusoo firmly believes in the value of institutions. Her ultimate dream is to represent Korea at the Venice Biennale.
“Nothing else in life excites me as much as art,” she said. “I consider myself a fan of art before being an artist.”
She has also accumulated her own considerable fan base, with whom she actively engages on social media.
“For me, it’s almost unbelievable — an incredible kind of joy — that there are people, even a small community, who genuinely like my work,” she said. “As an artist, I simply create what I want to create. My guiding principle is that I am the first audience. So when someone responds to it, that gives me tremendous strength.”
“Agarmon Encyclopedia: Leaked Edition” runs through Feb. 1, 2026.
BY LEE JIAN [[email protected]]
with the Korea JoongAng Daily
To write comments, please log in to one of the accounts.
Standards Board Policy (0/250자)