The State of Dreaming

The series explores drag queens in Seoul's most active queer scene. It portrays the act of identity creation as a tool for liberation, rejecting photographic practices that depict drag queens in binary opposition to the societies they live in.

The State of Dreaming unfolds as a sensitive and layered investigation into the lives of local drag queens in Itaewon, the vibrant core of Seoul’s queer scene. Rather than merely documenting a subculture, the project constructs a liminal space where dreaming and identity overlap, challenging the boundary between lived reality and performative dimension. Photography becomes a poetic device capable of holding ambiguity, desire, and transformation, while avoiding any sociological reduction or spectacle of otherness. Through an intimate and suspended visual language, the series suggests that the creation of identity is not only an aesthetic gesture but also a practice of survival and liberation. In this sense, the work resists a binary reading that positions drag queens in opposition to the dominant society, proposing instead a relational vision in which theatre, magic, and everyday life coexist as possible forms of existence.