Original article in Korean is at this link.

Controversy is growing after a senior design student at Seoul National University produced a work expressing anti-homosexual sentiment. Some criticize it for saying homosexuals should have no rights, while others defend the artists’ right to freedom of expression.

Mr. A, a visual design major, has a piece in the university’s current exhibit of work by students nearing graduation.  The piece is titled “Campaign for the Rights of Heterosexuals”. It consists of works created by Mr. A during the semester, including a stamp for placing sentences questioning homosexuality onto the posters for the school’s homosexual students’ club and a t-shirt with the phrase “children are created by a male father and a female mother”.

The student included a brief essay saying “recent in popular movies, comic books, and novels small steps towards a campaign for positive views of homosexuality has begun to emerge… All life comes from a male and a female, so heterosexuality is proper.”

However, on the 3rd and 4th on Twitter and SNU Life, the internet discussion forum for SNU students, others responded by writing “this work is a human rights violation.” One Twitter user wrote that “this art student is using the pretext of art to impose homophobia.”

The controversy started in October when the homosexual students organization put up posters saying “what’s it like to be gay?” and “what’s it like to be lez?” The sentence “how could your life be created?” then appeared on them. Mr. A said, “I put that sentence on these posters, which made homosexuality look like it was no problem at all. I wanted to show that not everyone agrees.” One professor of visual arts who is participating as a judge said that “because we have freedom of expression there were no restrictions. There was no controversy during the judging.”

However, one member of the homosexual students’ organization wrote on SNU Life that “this goes beyond personal feelings into discrimination against our rights… It is not an acceptable use of one’s freedom of expression to denigrate minorities and deface the means others have used for their expressions to promote one’s own.”

Lee Jong-geol, head of Chingusai, the largest homosexual organization in Korea, said that “according to United Nations charters on human rights, discriminatory expressions causing discrimination, hostility, or violence are not entitled to the protection of the freedom of expression… The freedom of expression is not unrestricted.”

Lee Sun-jong, chair of the arts department at SNU, said that “the professors will decide how to deal with this after viewing the piece and judging whether it presents any ethical or social issue.”