Curing, Shimmering, Together is a two-part performance ritual and communal protest-walk led by Korean diasporic artists Young Sun Han, Young Joon Kwak, and Sungjae Lee—invoking ancestral queer and trans/non-binary intimacy, interdependence, resistance, and insurgent glitter. The collaborative performance unfolds as both a ceremonial activation of Kwak’s exhibition RESISTERHOOD and a public intervention in defiant response to the state’s ongoing attempts to erase trans and queer marginalized histories at the site of the Stonewall Uprising.
The performance opens in the museum gallery with Lee’s slow, reflective movement—casting light across the space in response to Kwak’s Glitter Manifesto. The artists then come together in a shimmering embrace as Han baptizes Kwak and Lee in liquid glitter. Veiled, bound, and visibly transforming as the glitter begins setting on their skin, Han guides the artists through the streets in a slow procession toward the Stonewall National Monument at Christopher Park. Audience members are invited to walk with them—as witnesses, protectors, and chosen family.
As the sun sets and the glitter cures, the artists arrive at the monument—offering a shimmering counter-monument to ongoing erasure, in communion with the Black and Latinx trans femmes who led the Stonewall Uprising. Together, they become a living declaration of queer Korean ancestral healing, power, and visibility—casting shimmer into the night.
This work was made possible, in part, by the Franklin Furnace Fund supported by SHS Foundation and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
