When she falls in love with a handsome minor, a South Korean housewife finds herself at the center of a sexual scandal and hounded by hungry tabloid journalists. She vows to cut him out of her life but then he reaches the age of legal consent.

TV Producer Kang Min enters Spider Forest for a documentary. He enters a cabin and discovers two brutally murdered bodies. One is his girlfriend Hwang Soo-Young and the other is his colleague Choi Jong-Pil. Kang Min also senses someone watching him and runs after that person into to the forest. He's soon knocked unconscious. When he awakens again he continues his chase into a tunnel. Kang Min is then struck by a speeding car.

Mute Hee-Jin is working as a clerk in a fishing resort in the Korean wilderness; selling baits, food and occasionally her body to the fishing tourists. One day she falls in love with Hyun-Shik, who is on the run from the police, and rescues him with a fish hook when he tries to commit suicide.

In the spring of 1999, a group of old friends gather to celebrate their 20 year reunion. Among the group is Yeong-ho, a cold, unhappy man, whose demeanor puts a damper on the festivities. The seriousness of Yeong-ho's depression becomes apparent when he climbs a railroad bridge and looks like he might jump. At this crucial moment, memories of seven crucial episodes from Yeong-ho's past flood his mind.

In a vast desert area somewhere at the border between Mongolia and China, Hungai lives together with his wife and child. Dutifully, Hungai plants little trees in the desert. After his wife embarks on a long trip to a hospital in the capital Ulaanbaatar to have their sick son examined, Hungai starts to drink out of loneliness. One day, a North Korean fugitive and her son ask for shelter in his home.

Film director Hyun encounters a mysterious woman and asks her to be his muse. Intrigued with his daring proposal, she accepts. Soon she invites him to her villa in the country to give him some isolated space to write his screenplay. But her masochistic acts slowly consume his desire and longing. He bears escalating humiliation and pain that are inflicted on him for the sake of being with her and ultimately signs over his life to her as her slave.

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.