Erotic expression in art and film has long faced censorship and resistance. A new film screening series started in Korea last year aims to challeng...
A poster for "Miari Texas" (2025) by Jang Yun-mi / Courtesy of One More Pink
Erotic expression in art and film has long faced censorship and resistance. A new film screening series started in Korea last year aims to challenge the dominant discourse and break down long-standing taboos.
Held under the name The Love, the screening series was born out of a collaboration between Seoul-based artist Jeon Suhyun from the newly formed One More Pink cineclub collective and visiting Amsterdam-based Korean artist, film curator and organizer Hyeisoo Kim from the Porn Film Festival Amsterdam (PFFA). They held two screenings last year at small venues around Seoul. The third in the series, planned for May 9, is organized by One More Pink and will feature two documentaries about the diverse lives of Korean sex workers.
At the end of last year’s second screening, Jeon and Kim introduced their respective projects to the audience. Kim began by describing her philosophy around erotic films' positive role in bringing people together.
“In my case, I see porn as primarily not just about sex but about showing the relationships between people,” Kim told the audience. “Porn that mistakenly emphasizes penetration has conditioned us to think that’s all it is, but it’s actually about suggesting a kind of intimacy that we can all enjoy. It’s a source of pleasure for all genders and body types.”
Jeon described the gradual process of developing a local porn film festival. “People come and realize that it’s not the existing porn that they’re used to. The strategy for any kind of sex liberation is that we can make it by doing it. Holding screenings, collaborating with related groups, conducting research and challenging people’s long-engrained self-hate. It takes time.”
Jeon Suhyun, left, founder of One More Pink, and Porn Film Festival Amsterdam organizer Hyeisoo Kim, right speak with filmmaker YoonGyeol after a screening of the latter's film "G-Rated" at Indiespace GV, Nov. 29, 2025. Courtesy of One More Pink
Jeon and Kim first met in February last year, when Seoul-based film professor and curator Pip Chodorov coordinated the screening of Jeon’s stop-motion short “Camera and Toe” at the second annual PFFA.
After returning from Amsterdam, Jeon took inspiration from PFFA and formed One More Pink, based on “imagining and experimenting with meeting at the intersection of cinema, sexuality and community” that seeks to “show porno beyond consumerism and as a narrative and practice of telling one’s own story.”
For its first project, One More Pink reached out to Indiespace to collaborate on The Love screening. Since it receives public funding, the theater inevitably placed restrictions on transgender-themed erotic works and banned the word “porn,” which led to some One More Pink members losing interest. Not one to give up easily, Jeon sent a proposal to the PFFA.
“It was purely coincidence,” Kim said. “I had already bought the ticket to come to Korea, and then Suhyun contacted us at PFFA. Her proposal was very sincere. Our whole team was very impressed.”
For Jeon, it was nothing short of a miracle. “My team had left me, and I was searching for filmmakers who could work with me. I lost direction and didn’t know what to do.”
When deciding on a possible title for the screening, Jeon was mostly concerned about fitting the Korean cultural context without explicitly using the word “porn.” Together, they came up with several candidates, ultimately settling on the English title “The Love” as a metaphor and wordplay with the Korean “deoreob,” meaning “dirty.”
“Love by itself is a commercial word that we see everywhere,” Jeon said. “The title fits with us because we are a team who can accept naivete and innocence. Though we didn’t expect people to fully understand it, many people came up afterward and said ‘Please do more dirty screenings.’ So we realized that the title fit really well.”
The words "Sex is disgusting because I'm disgusting" appear on a poster for a collaborative film screening event last year between One More Pink and Porn Film Festival Amsterdam / Courtesy of One More Pink
The flyer for the first The Love screening used an image by Jeon’s artist friend with the phrase “Sex is disgusting because I’m disgusting.” Jeon described it as having shock value that could also resonate with the feeling of self-loathing that women in Korea often internalize in regard to their sexuality. She also pointed to the phrase’s double meaning.
“Someone can be both proud and ashamed of being disgusting,” she said. “I consciously wanted to make people look at themselves and see whether they have elements of being a pervert.”
Meanwhile, Kim’s coworkers in Amsterdam saw it differently. “I shared the phrase with the PFFA team and especially white-bodied people didn’t get it,” she said. “It’s only empowering to a certain group of people. Being considered a ‘prude’ in the Netherlands is actually seen as disgusting, especially by white middle-class women who already experienced sexual liberation from the 1960s and their children who grew up in that environment. Whereas in Korea, girls and women are socially forced to be prude. As a Korean, I feel I belong here because white people in the Netherlands are never going to understand where I’m coming from.”
After diving into the unknown with The Love screening, Jeon was encouraged by the shared interest and existing knowledge from a large number of people at both screenings.
“The most meaningful reactions came from people who had personal experiences that aligned with my interest in starting from sexual expression. Whereas I’ve been looking for people to work with, people came who knew a lot more than I expected and had already moved past the starting point,” Jeon said. “I’ve been thinking about how to work in solidarity with sex work organizations such as Scarlet Cha Cha and related filmmakers, and I was surprised to find that people in the audience were already deeply familiar with and accepting of the project.”
Before moving to Amsterdam, Kim had not approached the topic of pornography in Korea and expected Koreans to have a more conservative reaction to The Love screening.
“When I got the proposal from Suhyun, I thought ‘Wow, she’s really brave.’ While meeting Korean people at various film festivals and generally around Europe, the men especially told me that this is only possible in Europe, not in Korea. They treated me like I was some kind of a slut,” she said. “I was really excited to share about the screening project with anyone I met, but after getting some negative reactions, I became selective about sharing the information. Safety is the most important, so I choose the groups of people with whom I can speak openly about this project.”
Though many audience members were enthusiastic, some had less positive reactions. One woman had been a victim of a spycam crime and wondered how a project like One More Pink could advocate for the decriminalization of porn. An adult film actress maintained that reform of the industry in Korea was an impossible goal. While the PFFA works to subvert the mainstream male-dominated, commercial world of erotic film, Kim found that the Korean feminist movement is still largely resistant to any kind of work related to the sex industry.
“[Local poet and activist] Heeum told me that the majority of women in Korea who call themselves feminists are really against sex work and sexually engaged content,” she said. “After she spoke at the Indiespace screening, she noticed that a friend who was in attendance shared about the sex work part in her Instagram story with the comment ‘it’s fun but I disagree.’ We didn’t receive this kind of feedback directly, but people express it in indirect ways. They see women as victims of the sex industry, with no other possibility. And many of them are also anti-trans.”
In contrast with Amsterdam, where sex work is legal and institutionalized with a world-famous red light district, Korea has had the Special Law on Sex Trade that has criminalized the buying and selling of sex since 2004. While Jeon and Kim have both participated in art projects and other forms in solidarity with sex worker communities in Yongjugol and Miari Texas, two Korean red-light districts, the underground nature of the industry sets limitations on including their narratives in Korean art and film.
“In Amsterdam, sex workers are very closely involved with PFFA,” Kim said. “We platform them on our stages and they like to present themselves. They are very proud and not afraid of being censored or judged. But in Korea, it’s life-threatening for sex workers to be on a stage. They also struggle with poverty. So I’m very careful about asking them to be involved in any kind of art projects, especially since we can’t really pay them for survival. And as outside artists, we are not part of the affected community so we must take great care in how we present them.”
Closed brothels, right, await demolition in the 2025 documentary "Miari Texas" directed by Jang Yun-mi. Courtesy of Jang Yun-mi
Kim also described an internalized self-judgment from associating with sex workers.
“When I uploaded my visit to Miari Texas in my Instagram story, a Korean male friend messaged to ask me what I was up to these days and whether I was working for the sex industry,” she said. “He literally said ‘Amsterdam has ruined you.’ I realized coming back this time that I still have a deep fear of being judged. Even though I’m in solidarity with sex workers and working for a porn film festival, whenever I get these kinds of hateful comments, that affects me a lot. Maybe Korean men are more honest [laughing]. But some are also patronizing.”
Though they weren’t able to have a full porn film festival at Indiespace, Jeon was grateful for the first chance to hold such a screening, followed by the connection with Space Cell. For Kim, it was the first time watching such works in a large theater.
“I like watching porn on a big screen. Our screen in Amsterdam is tiny, so Indiespace was my first time watching it on the big screen. I liked it a lot.”
A poster for "Mamasang: Remember Me This Way" (2005) by Ilhran Kim and Hye-young Cho / Courtesy of One More Pink
Mindful of local limitations and the risk of being reported, One More Pink makes sure it restricts entry to minors, checks ID cards and bans the audience from filming. They also emphasize the screenings as artistic, rather than explicitly pornographic or commercial. Going forward, Jeon plans to build a structure for the collective that engages more people through screenings and other events, as well as diverse collaborations.
“It’s not a problem that we can solve right away, but I think that One More Pink can go beyond seminars and study groups to actively make films together with the sex worker community,” she said. “I’m trying to reconnect with [previous collective members] and meet other people who are interested in this porn film festival because we don’t really have the same kind of limitations anymore. [However], since we can't get government support for our screenings, we need to create an income model. So these days, I’m finding some YouTubers who work in the sex industry to learn from their experiences. I also want to do an open call for filmmakers and artists in Korea.”
As for further international collaboration, Kim hopes to make use of her position as a film programmer to showcase more Korean artists. Jeon is also interested in a retrospective program of works by Jan Soldat, a well-known erotic filmmaker whose “Cemetery Walk” appeared in The Love screening.
During her several-week visit to Seoul, Kim also led a related small-scale “Post-Porn Politics” seminar at the New Woman workshop space in Sinchon, in which students were assigned to make their own pornographic films as homework. With her previous experience teaching such a course at an art academy in the Netherlands, Kim was excited to collaborate with the New Woman community in Korea. Jeon was impressed by her fellow seminar participants.
A poster for the upcoming The Love screenings on May 9, featuring "Mamasang: Remember Me This Way" (2005) by Ilhran Kim and Hye-young Cho and "Miari Texas" (2025) by Jang Yun-mi / Courtesy of One More Pink
“People are so brave and craving to make their own porn,” Jeon said. “Even I’m afraid as a One More Pink curator, but they just went for it. From the seminar, there is a weekly theme and all the films are different. I wonder if this can continue in Korea after this, instead of just ending. There is a youth sex educator who has a lot of concerns about this in relation to porno.”
The upcoming One More Pink screening starts at 5:30 p.m. May 9 with “Mamasang: Remember Me This Way” (2005) by Ilhran Kim and Hye-young Cho, followed by “Miari Texas” (2025) by Jang Yun-mi at 7 p.m. There are 30 tickets, which cost 8,000 won per film. After the screening, there will be a Q&A session with Jang. Follow @onemorepink_ on Instagram for more information.
Anastasia Traynin is a writer, editor, translator and teacher based in Seoul.