Which Is Why We Invent

The Sunpride Foundation engages in collecting and holding exhibitions under the mission of contributing to coexistence and equality for all people, including sexual minorities (LGBTQ+).
This international exhibition, co-organized with the Foundation, explores contemporary questions surrounding gender and sexuality through works from the Foundation’s collection, loans from artists, and newly commissioned pieces.

The fifth edition of Sunpride Foundation's Spectrosynthesis series takes Japan's social and cultural context as a point of departure, bringing artists across generations and geographies into dialogue. Drawing on the collections of Sunpride Foundation and MOT, alongside commissions, loans, and archival materials, it marks the first time the series has engaged with a co-presenting institution's own collection.
The exhibition takes its title from Dumb Type's performance S/N (1994), created amid the AIDS crisis. The work questioned the systems through which identity, gender, sexuality, and illness are classified, while seeking other possibilities for communication and collective life. Building on these concerns, Which Is Why We Invent examines how artists respond to the tension between social norms and the lives those norms seek to regulate. Across painting, moving image, photography, sculpture, installation, and performance, the works challenge established representations of bodies and desire, bring overlooked histories, especially in the Japanese context, into view, and examine how gender and sexuality are shaped through relations of nationhood, race, and class.
Here, “invention” names the ongoing work of giving form to ways of being and relating that existing frameworks cannot adequately accommodate. Rather than proposing an escape from social constraints, the exhibition considers how artistic practices work through, contest, and transform them. Performance and activism, as well as independent publishing and informal channels of communication, emerge as means of sharing knowledge, articulating experience, and sustaining collective life.

Participating Artists

Akira the Hustler, Bhenji Ra, Bhupen Khakhar, Cole Lu, Dumb Type, Ellen Pau, Endo Mai & Momose Aya, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Ito Tari, Jakkai Siributr, Jean Barth, Ming Wong, Mori Eiki, Otsuka Takashi, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Shimada Yoshiko & BuBu de la Madeleine, Shu Lea Cheang, Sin Wai Kin, siren eun young jung × KIRARA, Sung Hwan Kim, Takata Fuyuhiko, Trevor Yeung, Wu Tsang, Xiyadie, and others.

About Sunpride Foundation

Sunpride Foundation was launched in 2014 with the mission to embrace and promote the rich creative history of LGBTQ+ community. The foundation aims to foster a stronger, healthier and more equitable world for LGBTQ+ people and their allies; and to encourage and inspire a generation of young artists to take action and create positive changes to the LGBTQ+ experience by exhibiting and preserving art that speaks to the society at large.

The exhibition follows the Spectrosynthesis series’ in Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2017), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Bangkok (2019 – 2020), Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong (2022 – 2023), and Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2026).