이반지하 Ibanjiha

이반지하는 가부장제, 퀴어성, 젠더와 매체 경계를 가지고 놀며 작업하는 다학제 예술가이다. 2004년부터 퀴어적 존재이자 현대 미술가로서의 불안정한 삶의 조건을 바탕으로, 한 분야에만 몰두하는 사치를 부리지 않고 다양한 매체와 플랫폼을 오가며 예술 활동을 해왔다. 한국 퀴어 페미니스트 커뮤니티에 뿌리를 둔 “생존자 유머”를 비롯, 기존의 젠더 이분법적 질서 위에 아무렇지 않게 퀴어적 공간을 열어 내는 작업들을 통해 독자적인 퀴어 미학을 발전시켜왔다. ‘이반지하’는 퀴어의 한국말 ‘이반’과 작가의 위태로운 삶과 작업 공간이었던 ‘반지하’를 결합하여 지은 이름이다.

Ibanjiha is a multidisciplinary artist who plays alongside patriarchy, gender boundaries, and queerness through various mediums, such as drawing, animation, singer-songwriting, performing, broadcasting, writing, manifesting, and humor. To the gender minorities, queer allies, and feminist activists in South Korea, however, Ibanjiha is much more than an artist—they are a queer living legend and a larger-than-life personality; a household name, a veritable celebrity, and a symbol of creative modes of queer survival and building community in the staunchly heteronormative society. Ibanjiha, a compound term wedding queer (Iban 이반) and underground apartment (Banjiha 반지하) in Korean, is at once the site where the artist dwells and the mode of living characterized by a lifetime of artmaking in precarity. An everyday life facing the dangers of flooding, fungus, lack of privacy and safety, the vulnerability of living is integral to the multimodal artmaking practice, genre, and persona that is Ibanjiha. By their own art of indeterminating and blurring boundaries, Ibanjiha has persistently developed their own queer aesthetics characterized by the creation of a new site from within the rigid binary gender system, opening up an unexpected queer universe in the most provocative and unprecedented ways.