Middle-aged Yeong-gyeong and Su-hwan meet at the wedding party of a common friend. She passes out drunk, and he carries her home on his back. Soon this becomes a daily ritual, as the two broken beings – one’s spirit consumed by alcohol and the other’s body sapped by arthritis – begin to find strength and solace in each other. Their gentle, platonic bond – outside society, outside history – offers a chance at salvation, but is severely stressed by Yeong-gyeong’s repeated relapses.

Lee Ji-sang's Yellow Flower dramatizes the erogenous encounters of a group of Asian men and women, who explore the limits of their own sexuality by participating in deviant, perverse, and bizarre coital acts with one another. Like Nagisa Oshima's In the Realm of the Senses and Ryu Murakami's Tokyo Decadence, Yellow Flower helped to obliterate the censorship of sexual content in motion pictures, throughout Asia.