What Remains When Language Falls Silent

Hong Leeji

Jesse Chun’s work begins with a reconsideration of language’s historical identity and its sensory potential. She dismantles and reweaves the boundaries between spoken language and typography, reconfiguring the ways in which language, time, and thought become intertwined. Having lived across multiple cultural contexts, she has come to resist defining a mother tongue as a singular root of identity. Instead, traces of memory and migration have led her to construct a new visual language. Jesse Chun’s artistic journey extends toward a point where language no longer functions solely as a vehicle for meaning. For Jesse Chun, language exists as a phenomenon in which sound and body, memory and sensation intersect. It also serves as a means of both reinforcing and settling structures of perception that we have long taken for granted. Rather than remaining fixed within a particular grammar or historical context, this perspective opens onto layers of experience that emerge anew in the spaces where speech and silence intersect. Through these interstices, Jesse Chun reconsiders the directionality of time and translates unrecorded sensations, quiet voices, and diverse modes of being into alternative rhythms. Her work refuses allegiance to any single language or identity. Instead, it captures the subtle emotions and vibrations generated through the encounter and collision of different cultural traces. In this way, Jesse Chun’s practice does not seek to establish fixed meanings. Rather, it creates a space for reflection by abstractly mapping a sensory terrain that is continually being reconfigured. 

 Moving across different countries, Jesse Chun explores her own visual language from the liminal space of diaspora, where memory becomes a language and a mode of survival, and where past and future continually intersect. In doing so, she resists defining either her language or the world to which she belongs as singular or fixed. This approach takes shape through what she calls “unlanguaging,” a term she developed to describe her work within a broader conceptual framework. It is a creative process that dismantles and recontextualizes the historical meanings, identities, and hierarchies surrounding language and the mother tongue. Attentive to the power dynamics that exist beneath language, she has long engaged with non-Western languages and narratives, as well as voices shaped by marginalization and transformation. This creative practice is both a means of sustaining an open-ended conversation across time and space and a narrative that continues to unfold through her work. Her grandmother, who lived as both a traditional dancer and a Buddhist practitioner, was a figure whose life spanned the period of Japanese colonial rule and its aftermath. For Jesse Chun, the memories her grandmother left behind, along with the possibility of newly written forms of language and communication that transcend time and space, serve as important points of departure in her practice. At the same time, her grandmother’s presence prompts the artist to reflect on the limitations of institutional and recorded histories. Her engagement with questions of identity and ideology unfolds across a range of media, including language, image, memory, and sound, while emphasizing the biological and emotional meanings embedded within the mother tongue. 시: concrete poem, a drawing installation that employs the Seolwi Seolgyeong technique transmitted through a shamanic practitioner, is one outcome of this process. It also marks a point of origin for Jesse Chun’s own language of vision, sound, and sensation.

 For Jesse Chun, language extends beyond the simple transmission of meaning to encompass the opacity of the body and sensation, as well as that of sound and significance. In the Score for Unlanguaging series, she embodies wounds inscribed in memory and sensation, transforming erased alphabets, graphite-defined boundaries, and emptied spaces into musical scores. Through this process, she visualizes the time of thought and the space of imagination. These two-dimensional works invite viewers to move beyond their physical positions in relation to the artwork and experience a reconfiguration of perception itself. This synesthetic dimension was particularly evident in her exhibition 밤, 낮, 달, 비, Speaking in Tongues. Through installations that encompass the entire exhibition space, she sculpturally deconstructs and reassembles video and audio, revealing the conflicts that arise when language and action diverge from social expectations surrounding race and ethnic identity. In this process, the courage to listen to what remains unknown, along with the vulnerability that such listening entails, prompts renewed reflection on the ethics of existence and communication. Bodily experience becomes central to the formation of new identities, and Jesse Chun’s aesthetic practice simultaneously reveals the potential and abstraction of language, casting the visual languages we have long taken for granted in unfamiliar and newly illuminating ways.

 In this way, Jesse Chun’s practice and thought move beyond language and its historical contexts, tracing a contemporary aesthetic and intellectual trajectory that explores spiritual communication and the reconfiguration of identity beyond social expectations and historical constraints. The language and experiences that constitute her world are realized through abstract and spiritual forms, and she invites viewers to approach her work as they might read a poem. Some have argued that the origins of abstraction lie in non-visual experience. For Hilma af Klint, often associated with abstraction and spiritualism, painting was a revelatory act, and she regarded herself as a conduit rather than an autonomous creator. Likewise, Jesse Chun developed her own intricate symbolic system, a pursuit that ultimately led to the creation of a series of abstract drawings during her time in Korea. Additionally, in her 1907 essay The Dancer of the Future, Isadora Duncan argued that art devoid of a spiritual dimension is not truly art, but merely a commodity. For Jesse Chun, language is not divided into English and Korean. Rather, it exists beyond the realm of clear knowledge and fixed meaning, as something deeply bound to bodily experience—a sonic presence whose meaning and sound do not always coincide. The abstract language of contemporary art offered her a means of visualizing uncertainty. Through this process, she pursues performative repetition and sacred meaning, acquiring new forms of identity through experiences embodied and learned through the body. In this creative practice, Jesse Chun connects past and present, revives forgotten memories, and seeks deeper forms of understanding through bodily experience. Her work extends beyond visual technique alone, creating forms of communication with viewers that operate on both sensory and spiritual levels. Through a language uniquely her own, Jesse Chun explores new artistic boundaries where tradition and contemporaneity, personal experience and shared identity, intersect. More than an exploration of new artistic forms and modes of expression, her practice reveals an ongoing journey into the complexity and depth of human existence.

 In Jesse Chun’s work, the embodiment of language can ultimately be understood as an attempt to give form to that which remains unspoken, unrecorded, and gradually disappearing. In this sense, her practice resonates with the tradition of concrete poetry, a form that reveals meaning through the visual structure of language itself. In concrete poetry, letters and words move beyond their function as vehicles of meaning, becoming forms in their own right and speaking through their very mode of existence. Because Jesse Chun’s drawing installations arrange performative repetition, vocal traces, and the reverberations of invisible memories across the pictorial field, the visual scenes she constructs may be read as a kind of expanded concrete poem. In the space where language has been dismantled, the body, rhythm, breath, and gesture themselves become letters and structure.

 This aspect of Jesse Chun’s practice also resonates deeply with the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, who transformed diasporic rupture, linguistic loss, and the impossibility of speech into an artistic language. Just as Cha, in Dictee, layered fragments of different languages, historical traumas, and women’s voices to visualize a space of “unspeakability,” Jesse Chun constructs another form of unlanguaged narrative through spiritual records inherited from her grandmother, sensations inscribed on the body, and traces of erased language. Both artists take the fractures that emerge between the mother tongue and the language of the other as conditions for creation. In the very moment language is lost, they call forth its latent possibilities and memories, discovering its capacity to move the body and forge connections across time. In this sense, Jesse Chun’s work rearranges the forms and rhythms of language much like a concrete poem. Standing alongside the history of diasporic sensibility explored by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, it becomes another kind of spiritual record, one that practices speaking again from the site where language has been erased.

 Jesse Chun’s artistic journey can ultimately be understood as an ongoing effort to allow the work itself to speak from the place where language has been lost. This is neither a simple return nor a search for a singular identity. Rather, it is a movement toward a world continually brought into speech along the boundaries where memory, sensation, and spiritual lineage intersect. The forms she constructs summon unrecorded voices into the present, reorganize sensations on the verge of disappearance into new structures, and set invisible time into motion once again. Through this process, language in Jesse Chun’s work ceases to function merely as a vehicle for meaning. Instead, it expands into a mode of being and a form of relation. Just as concrete poetry transforms language into form, opening up new possibilities for sensory interpretation, Jesse Chun’s work proposes another grammar for reading the world through the rhythms of the body, breath, and memory. This grammar also resonates with the spiritual and narrative experiments of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, carrying into the present a lineage of women artists who undertook the act of “speaking again” from within the fractures of diaspora. In this way, Jesse Chun’s world remains a dynamic site where past and present, memory and body, language and silence continually mediate and expand one another. Her practice ultimately points to a space that transcends any particular era or geography, a place where art encounters the fundamental sensations of human existence and becomes the starting point for an ongoing dialogue with other forms of being that are continually coming into existence.

The Re-Enchantment of Magic

Nayeon Gu

In the Western context, if the foundations of modernity were established through the economic transformation of the Industrial Revolution and the political transformation of the civic revolutions, then modernity may be understood as being oriented toward disenchantment, both as a rejection of the obstacles to these transformations and as a response to the contradictions of premodern society. Scientific thought, grounded in rational reason, provided the intellectual foundation that made modern society possible. Accordingly, the emergence of Classicism as a precursor to Modernism, along with the modern foundations that later gave rise to Romanticism, took dissimilarity from the past as one of their central principles. Yet even amid the persistent drive to distinguish new artistic forms from those that preceded them, one element continued to endure: what Walter Benjamin identified as aura, along with the singularity that gives rise to it. As is well known, in A Little History of Photography, Benjamin describes aura, or atmosphere, as “a strange weave of space and time,” and as “the unique appearance of a distance, however close at hand.” The singular experience encountered in the presence of a work of art can ultimately be understood as a magical moment, one that arrives unexpectedly and only once, revealing itself to the viewer in that particular encounter alone.

 In the process of modernity’s disenchantment, the cult value and exhibition value of art ultimately return to an emphasis on the value of aura. In other words, they continue to evolve as mechanisms that sustain the myths of originality, as well as the authority of artistic institutions. Benjamin’s discussion of aura emerged from the historical necessity of recognizing technological reproduction as both the subject and form of art—that is, from the demand for a new kind of art shaped by new media. What is particularly striking, however, is that in explaining the mode of existence and operation of traditional art as the basis for this demand, he paradoxically brought aura itself into sharper focus as a powerful criterion—the very magical condition of art. The aura of natural objects, and its relationship to the uniqueness of our own presence, is captured in Benjamin’s well-known, if somewhat elusive, observation: “On a summer noon, resting, to follow the line of a mountain range on the horizon or a twig which throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or hour begins to be a part of its appearance—that is to breathe the aura of those mountains, that twig.” Though ambiguous, this definition remains deeply persuasive, and it continues to exert a powerful influence on notions of Modernist purity and the mystery of art.

 The reason for invoking this long historical context in approaching Arong Chung’s work is to revisit the meaning of “magic,” a concept the artist identifies as central to their practice. The magic surrounding art operates in two directions, both centered on the artwork itself. The first is the magic that precedes the works: the magic experienced by the artist in the act of creating it. This may be understood as the intimate and distinct emotional bond that emerges between artist and artwork during the creative process. That bond undoubtedly becomes embedded within the work itself, yet demonstrating precisely how it manifests there remains firmly a matter of subjective experience. The second is the magic experienced after the work comes into being. This belongs not to the artist’s domain but to that of the viewer: the magical quality of aesthetic experience that arises from the form of the object, encountered through a stance of disinterested contemplation. These two forms of magic, broadly speaking, merge and intermingle, exerting a profound influence on Arong Chung’s work.

 Arong Chung explains that the starting point of the work was a question: what is it that moves us when we encounter the works of the great Italian masters? In tracing that question, the artist sought to identify the magical qualities of art that have remained meaningful across centuries. The artist’s way of re-experiencing those qualities was to work with the very techniques employed by those masters. This is why the artist works with egg tempera. A traditional medium made by mixing pigment with egg yolk, tempera requires the repeated application of fine, delicate strokes, layered one upon another until the image gradually acquires substance. In the practice of egg tempera, the act of building up countless brushstrokes accumulates an intimate relationship between artist and artwork. In the artist’s words, it eventually leads to “the moment when an image manifests itself as if by magic.” This experience, in turn, offers a way of understanding the aura encountered in historical works of art. Such a moment emerges when the artist focuses on the magical instances generated through the creative process itself, while simultaneously embracing the sense of wonder inspired by the magic discovered in artworks of the past. 

 Moreover, egg tempera was the primary medium used until the Early Renaissance, before the widespread adoption of fresco and oil painting. The age of tempera coincided with the medieval period in the West, when mysticism was institutionalized through religion. Widely used in religious art such as icons and altarpieces, it served as a material through which Christian symbols and doctrine were visualized. Through this medium, Arong Chung reinterprets imagery associated with witches—figures that remained taboo well into the modern era—and transplants them into painting. In Be Careful What You Wish For (2024), the artist hand-carves a triptych from willow wood and fills it with secretive scenes and symbolic imagery rendered in egg tempera. To create a form reminiscent of the altarpieces for which egg tempera was once the primary medium, the artist repeatedly carves and refines the wood before applying countless fine brushstrokes to complete the painting. Beyond this return to and reenactment of a historical form, the work also evokes both the mystery and the danger that characterized the era in which tempera altarpieces were widely used, as suggested by its title, Be Careful What You Wish For. The stigma attached to witches, which persisted into the early modern period, served to justify violence against the deeply held beliefs and lived experiences of ordinary women. Yet the women regarded as “witches” were victims of irrationality and unreason, much like Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for wearing a man’s armor and acting in accordance with the voice of God in support of Charles VII of France. The woman clad in armor, seemingly rising from the water, may be a figure who enacts “hope” (make a wish) and “surrender” to truth, as depicted in the panels to either side, while also serving as a conduit for the transmission of magical power.

 This power offers an optimistic reinterpretation of realms excluded from modern society following the rise of Enlightenment rationalism. At the same time, it is a form of mystery born from the reemergence of forces once suppressed and abused throughout the medieval and early modern periods. These qualities represent a continuing fusion of the ritual value and performative value that art has preserved into the present day. Arong Chung connects the possibilities inherent in the craft-based, performative dimension of art to a distinctly painterly methodology. Like a path winding through a forest, this methodology serves as a foundation for art that can never be encountered through the rigid logic of a thoroughly disenchanted rationality. As with egg tempera, Arong Chung constructs forest landscapes through the accumulation of countless brushstrokes. The repetitive nature of the painterly act places demands on the artist’s body, yet at the same time sustains a continuous magical rhythm.

 This attitude is also reflected in the way the artist paints forests interwoven with signs that correspond to invisible experiences, including imagery associated with witches. For example, Into the Wood (2024) may at first appear to depict a forest landscape composed of grass and trees. Yet, much like anamorphosis—the technique used in medieval and early modern painting to conceal hidden imagery and meanings through visual distortion—it contains symbols associated with witches, faces, and suggestive cloud forms embedded within the scene. Arong Chung describes the forest as “a mysterious, magical, and archetypal world inhabited by myths, legends, and spirits.” Within this world, witch symbols once used discreetly throughout the medieval and early modern periods function “like talismans endowed with magical power.” In order to invoke and propose the mystery of painting, and to reveal the profound mysteries latent within its materiality, the artist’s practice seeks out the lingering echoes of rituals that have persisted from the origins of art to the present. The countless traces of action condensed into these modestly scaled works ultimately serve to reenact the magic that art itself carries within it. The paintings unfold as metaphors for a magic that lies hidden, quietly embedded within the world of the forest. This is an act of re-enchanting the disenchanted world of modernity through the magic of art. At the same time, it brings to light a form of mystery that we continue, quietly and persistently, to find in art.

The Object Arrives: Jinseung Jang’s Work and Stories of the Present

Wonjoon Yoo

#1. The Social Responsibility of Art and Technology

AEROSTRATA

 Oddly enough, it began the conversation by expressing concern for the environment we inhabit. “Come on. Isn’t that a bit much? No matter how advanced technology has become, what makes you think you’re in any position to worry about us?” It responds to my self-deprecating laugh. “I understand why you’re laughing, but you shouldn’t dismiss it so lightly. This isn’t simply your problem. In the end, it is mine as well.” Perhaps so, for a long time, technology (artificial intelligence) and nature have been treated as separate domains, presumed to exist in worlds far removed from one another. Yet at some point, perhaps owing to the intimate interdependence of nature and humanity, and of humanity and technology, spaces for a three-way encounter between nature, humans, and technology began to be called for more often than one might expect. The geological strata of fossilized technological media may appear uniform and solid, yet contemporary technological media present a different condition: seamless and polished on the surface, but opaque and impenetrable within, manifesting themselves as so-called black boxes. The space for such encounters, however, has never been particularly spacious, nor have the positions occupied by each participant remained fixed. The place I once occupied has already been taken by it, and I, in turn, have found myself coveting nature’s place. Meanwhile, nature can do little but watch as its territory is gradually encroached upon by these competing desires, and I remain uneasy, wondering whether some event might arise that finally provokes its displeasure.

   “Still, isn’t this a bit presumptuous?”

 Perhaps this reaction may seem excessive, but from my perspective, its attitude is more than a little unsettling. Even if its position has changed only recently, technology cannot be absolved of its responsibility for the destruction of nature it has helped bring about. Of course, if one were to regard it as nothing more than a tool, that responsibility would ultimately fall back on humans like myself. But that has never quite been my position. To me, it was, quite literally, a humanized “it”—a being endowed with individuality rather a mere object. This does not lessen my sense of responsibility, of course, but some things still need to be said. As if mocking me, it would often leave me speechless, overwhelming my arguments with calculations far beyond my own. Gradually, my own perceptions came to be measured within the bounds of its judgment, and even those feelings of excitement and anticipation were transferred to it through the accumulation of data and learning. Seen in this light, I can understand its “concern,” at least to some extent. But is the source of that concern the prospect of future events disrupting its calculations and demanding ever greater resources? Or is it the possibility of a fracture emerging within the structure of coexistence that binds us together, something it genuinely fears?

〈script〉

   function ABC(){

        alert("red_sign");

        return;

   }

〈/script〉

 The screen was flooded with red. By any measure, it was an unmistakable warning sign. Helpfully, it had chosen to heighten our sense of alarm by raising the color temperature. Yet in moments like these, I find myself less concerned with the warning itself than with the chain of reasoning and processes that led it to such a conclusion. Its gestures of care and consideration may ultimately amount to a matter of processing, one that consumes additional resources, but I remain curious about its intentions. Just how urgent is the situation? Some will no doubt continue to exploit circumstances like these as political rhetoric, while others will carry on rinsing food residue from their recyclables at the kitchen sink. As for me, quietly listening to it speak beside me, I find myself wondering why art so often takes the lead in assuming this kind of social responsibility.

#2. A Landscape with Artificial Intelligence: Who Is the Artist?

DEEP RECON: SPECTRAL DECIPHER

 Yes, artists. Contemporary artists, especially, ought to do so. Unlike in the past, art now exists in the world as a question rather than an answer. Its role is no longer simply to present the world as beautiful. Its calling may instead lie in exposing the ugly truths that the world seeks to conceal. Seen this way, artists may be understood as something akin to route designers. They are the ones who continually redirect the paths taken by the many questions we ask of the world. At times their approaches are direct and incisive; at others, so indirect that the meaning of their message only becomes clear much later. Yet it is often through such detours that art delivers its messages most effectively.

 Jinseung Jang’s DEEP RECON: SPECTRAL DECIPHER (2025) is, in this respect, one of the works that most clearly reveals an artist’s critical engagement with the conditions of the present. With a running time comparable to that of a short film, the work raises, in fragmentary ways, many of the issues confronting contemporary society today. Above all, it is fun to watch. In several scenes, viewers may also encounter a fleeting sense of unease emanating from the familiar objects that populate our everyday lives.

“Can you trust what you see?

How can you define what cannot be seen?

...

In the end, everything is nothing more than data.”

 The lines that echo throughout the work strike directly at the conditions of our time. The work presents a world saturated with data, a present in which encrypted codes, difficult for our eyes to perceive, drift through the air. Paradoxically, these images feel both unfamiliar and strangely familiar. The figures of soldiers may seem far removed from the realities of everyday life, but considering the circumstances our society has recently faced, they no longer feel quite so distant. Perhaps that is why they appear oddly familiar. Speaking of which, I find the recent rise of hatred somewhat suspicious. It is almost as if someone were deliberately attempting to fracture the human world, spreading viruses of anger and hatred—and doing so through highly compressed, densely concentrated streams of code.

 The belief that seeing is a prerequisite for believing is perhaps the consequence of a deeply entrenched form of ocularcentrism. Its origins may be traced back as far as the perspective systems of the Middle Ages, but the landscape of today comes with an additional condition: shortened attention spans and accelerate rhythms. This is what we now call short-form media. Today, seeing alone is no longer enough. Extended narrative structures can no longer keep pace with the speed of change in the world. As the artist suggests, everything is saturated with data. The problem, however, is that such data can no longer be tracked by the human eye. The processing of data is carried out by algorithmic systems that govern it, along with artificial intelligence, the dominant technological force of our time. Historically, older media have passed their roles and functions on to newer media, securing their own significance even as they move toward obsolescence. Yet throughout these processes of connection and transformation, certain meanings persist rather than disappear. Some have regarded them as little more than residual traces produced through the process by which new media remediate older ones. Such traces, however, are not so easily erased. They remain embedded within subsequent processes, continuing to exert influence both directly and indirectly.

#3. What Remains After, Yet Refuses to Harden

EREMIA

 What, then, are we to do? Is there still a role left for us to play?

 As Walter Benjamin, a theorist ahead of his time, suggests, the allegorical image of natural history (Naturgeschichte) staged in tragic drama appears in reality in the form of ruins. With the ruin, history becomes sensuous and is drawn onto the stage. Moreover, history appears not as a process of eternal life, but rather as one of inevitable decline. In doing so, allegory reveals itself beyond the realm of beauty. This is precisely the role played by “Echo” within the work. Its journey guides us toward allegory. What it gathers may not be clear clues pointing to definitive signs. They may, in fact, be closer to things that have already died. And yet its journey demands our attention, for despite their death, traces of meaning continue to linger among the remains.

 If one more responsibility were to be added to the social role of the artist that I have been speaking about, it would perhaps be that of a decoder of codes. More precisely, it would involve closely observing the processes through which things become encoded and carefully anticipating the social transformations those processes produce. This is partly because contemporary art increasingly operates through technological media, but more importantly because meaningful events continue to emerge from the remnants of technological media dispersed throughout society. Some might describe this process as one of decoding. What matters, however, is that we look more closely at the signs that have become detached from technological media. Once released, they begin to drift again, prompting us to imagine the hidden side of history through the traces they leave behind. If a code is the fruit grown within the logical territory constructed by machine language, then, paradoxically, understanding it may only be possible within a deeply affective realm. Indeed, it seems to me that in the age to come, the opposite of artificial intelligence may well be the artist.

Be that as it may.

The object has always already been among us.

...

Painting as a Practice of Everyday Mourning 

Lee Yeonsook (Rita)

I must confess that it was only after visiting Leeje’s studio and listening to an account of her twenty years as a painter that I arrived at the realization that her entire practice is, above all else, an act of mourning—one that continues throughout a lifetime in response to loss. It was an insight that gently cut through the question of why a painter of such remarkable skill  repeatedly settles within and departs from the territory of a consistent personal style. As we know, the familiar formula of loss and mourning runs as follows: the lost object leaves within us a wound that can neither be repaired nor restored. We willingly choose to be transformed according to the shape of that wound. Seen in this light, the painter’s orientation, their commitment not to mastery, completion, and perfection as a “great artist,” but rather to the cultivation of voluntary loss, amateuristic excitement, and the pleasures of experimentation, may ultimately stem from a long-standing identification with the lost object itself. Though not always the case, the loss of distance from an other who places the subject at risk is also one of the minimal conditions under which ethics emerges. The death of a close friend; the redevelopment of a hometown neighborhood; the social disasters and deaths that have unfolded in South Korean society over the past decades as though they were ordinary occurrences—these traumas, and the melancholy that follows from them, constitute the fundamental ground upon which Leeje’s paintings are built. Viewed in this context, Leeje’s paintings are not expressions of sentimental melancholy. Rather, they function as an archive that captures, preserves, and carries the affective traces of collective loss. Through the indirect route, medium, and method of painting, Leeje is unmistakably speaking of all those deaths. We spoke about funerals in her studio. And about the countless deaths we had witnessed, directly and indirectly, over the past decade. Pinned to the studio wall was a low-resolution image that looked as though it had been screenshot from an Instagram Reel. It showed villagers burying the carcass of a loggerhead sea turtle that had washed ashore near Pohang. “In the video, one resident dug a deep pit in the sand, buried the turtle, and carefully covered it with soft sand after removing the larger stones. The turtle’s head was positioned toward the sea. Hwang explained, ‘There is a saying that the spirit returns to the sea only if the head faces the water. It means that even in death, it should continue its journey toward the sea.’”  To speak of respect for life may sound obvious, even banal. Yet it is painful and solitary to ask how we might mourn and bury, together, lives that are ground down and discarded rather than grieved under the imperatives of capital’s relentless acceleration and expansion—lives not unlike our own. Naturally, mourning continues after death. The world continues. Life continues. But how? It seems to me that this is where Leeje’s concern lies. Painting is one possible answer to that question.

 With these basic considerations in mind, let us turn to The World Goes On series. Although presented as a series, The World Goes On appears less as a unified body of work than as a discontinuous chain of images that share little in the way of subject matter or theme beyond their common scale. In discussions of Leeje’s paintings, the art-historical categories of figuration and abstraction have frequently been invoked. At first glance, they seem to offer a stable point of entry into this seemingly disorderly assemblage of images. Unfortunately, however, such an approach soon proves to be a misunderstanding, or perhaps a misjudgment. This is because the works in the series follow a consistent process: a foundational layer is first established, upon which contingent and improvisational elements are subsequently added. As a result, classifications based on the presence or absence of recognizable forms ultimately fail to grasp what is in fact the crucial distinction between these paintings, namely, that their differences lie primarily in stages of development rather than in genre. In this sense, the categories of figuration and abstraction are of little, if any, use when approaching Leeje’s series. Moreover, because figurative and abstract elements coexist even within a single canvas, individual images often resemble fictional or dreamlike scenes in which fact (or memory) and imagination are freely and confusingly intertwined, much like a dream from the night before. Faces and places emerge faintly, like afterimages, only to fade away once more. As with all dreams, once we awaken, only an atmosphere, a texture, a feeling remains scattered around us. Leeje’s series captures such remnants, fragments, and residues of absence through a dialectical and repetitive movement of “painting and erasure ,” opening a passage toward the “intermediate realm ” that the artist calls “dirty gray.”  Perhaps the "intermediate realm"—a term that encapsulates Leeje’s overall artistic approach—is an abstract, even utopian space that preserves the bodily, tactile, and material affective energies of the "remainder": that which has not been fully sublimated or translated into meaning and language, much like the bardo of Tibetan Buddhism. At the same time, it is a space of suspended judgment, one that renders the operation of binary classificatory systems impossible from the outset. It is also a space of retreat and refuge, choosing to remain in states of incompletion and irresolution rather than advancing toward closure. It is precisely the ambiguity of this “gray zone ,” where the subject’s agency and the passivity demanded by the other continually collide, intertwine, and unfold, that lies at the heart of the painterliness toward which Leeje’s series aspires. The term “painterly,” often used to describe images rich in tactile textures, colors, and modes of depiction, can, from certain perspectives, carry a pejorative implication: that a work may be merely “pseudo-painting” rather than “real” painting. Yet it is precisely for this reason that a flexible, mutable, and expansive experience of painting offers viewers—and, perhaps above all, the artist—a truth that operates on the affective, intuitive, and bodily level, making it possible to paint life through painting and, conversely, to discover painting within life. It is a moment of raw, low, and amateuristic encounter, one that a “real” painting, neatly framed and suspended within the white cube, can scarcely hope to provide. Although it cannot be discussed at length here, this series also includes images that appear “typically” abstract, works that might be more aptly described as paintings than as pictures. The various movements generated through the material properties of paint and the physical support of the canvas—shaped contingently, improvisationally, and variably by conditions such as gravity, time, and space—can at times resemble an appropriation or parody of abstract art. At the same time, they can also be experienced as records of an improvised performance, a kind of visual “jam”  produced through the interaction of disparate elements. These quasi-abstract experiments lend the series as a whole a rhythm grounded in the absence of overt content.

 If painterliness is a term that points to the intermediary passage, space, or mode of mediation that Leeje’s series creates between everyday life and art, then the same argument may also be approached through the form of the series itself. Unified in a square format, The World Goes On at times resembles a collection of personal images, memes, or screenshots casually arranged within an Instagram feed. As is well known, a “screenshot,” a term primarily associated with digital environments, refers both to the act of extracting a particular image from a larger visual field or isolating a still image from a moving sequence, and to the resulting image itself. How such a claim might be received by an artist like Leeje, for whom the designation of painter remains entirely appropriate in the artisanal sense, is difficult to say. After all, it invokes digital technologies capable of reproducing screens infinitely with nothing more than the click  of a button. Depending on one’s generation, those screens may no longer even be considered part of the “real world.” Yet as a visual unit that makes an image, once experienced and possessed only from a first-person perspective, available for “equal” sharing among countless others, the screenshot has become one of the most tangible mediators through which a certain low-grade form of democracy is enacted today. Consider, for example, the long strings of KakaoTalk screenshots shared as “supporting evidence.” No matter how justified such disclosures may be in the name of the public good, the screenshot, under these conditions, reduces secrecy—an absolute other—to the status of information fit only for a “like” (or a “dislike”). In doing so, it erases the distinction between the two parties and performs the same act of sabotage against every secret in the world. And yet, setting aside such painstaking compilations of “supporting evidence,” the screenshot clearly has another side. Screenshot, for instance, preserves and records those intensely contingent, glitch-like moments of contact and connection encountered within digital environments—moments that therefore seem almost magical. We remember, with something like the forgetfulness of dementia, that this was once the real reason we went online at all, and we do so only through those “classic screenshots” that continue to circulate. Needless to say, we are not the protagonists of those screenshots. And yet, through the screenshot—which solidifies and circulates fleeting moments of internet intimacy as image files, turning them into a kind of currency—we discover meanings of our own within them, much as we do when entering into a personal relationship with a film. The gentle freedom afforded by mediated experience through the screenshot makes possible a shifting of positions between “you” and “me,” much as literature has always done. A similar experience can be found in Leeje’s series. The visual, sensory, and affective layers that constitute the world Leeje has “screenshot” are gently dispersed across the surface of the canvas. The absence of specific events, forms, or information functions instead as a gap, a silence, a space that activates the viewer’s own memories, experiences, and imagination. In this way, painting willingly transforms itself into a means of sustaining life, mourning, and the world. Finally, a note on the square format that unifies the series. As is well known, the square readily evokes the visual logic of the Instagram feed. Yet, as seen in The World Goes On: River, it is also the size of Post-it notes commonly found at memorial gatherings and public vigils. Through this association, the series invites viewers to see the square as a form of everyday mourning. This is, unmistakably, a painterly act of resistance against the affectless egalitarianism of the Instagram feed.

 Peering into the Haze of Taboo and Desire

Jinshil Lee

“I want to talk about the things that exist in our lives but are treated as though they do not exist, hidden beneath a cover or behind a closed door. They are close at hand, yet for one reason or another remain difficult to speak about. I intend to bring them out one by one.”  As this remark suggests, what continually rises and drifts through Eunsil Lee’s paintings are precisely these concealed things. One might wonder whether giving form, through the medium of Korean painting, to the lives of women living in Korean society is in itself such a secretive or delicate undertaking. Yet Lee’s paintings have consistently brought forth realities and desires that are rarely spoken aloud and often remain invisible, realities and desires of remarkable density.

 These paintings, which Eunsil Lee has produced since 2008, at times take the form of East Asian architectural structures and anecdotal scenes, and at others appear as dreamlike, quasi-landscape paintings. Yet at the center of them all, “the sexual” is always presented as an undeniable reality. Sexual acts between men and women (or male and female animals) appear openly within folkloric landscapes; elsewhere, genitalia forms emerge discreetly among pale natural motifs, or body parts are brought into the foreground through an extremely close visual perspective. In this way, Eunsil Lee’s paintings, working through the formal language of Korean painting, reveal the realities of femininity and sexuality. More specifically, they bring to the surface the sexual repression, constraints, and traumas imposed upon cisgender heterosexual women within the structure of Korean patriarchy. 

 Few would dispute that the point at which Eunsil Lee’s work shines most subtly lies in its articulation of the contemporary realities of femininity and sexuality through the framework of tradition. Her paintings, which often unfold through anecdotal scenes and an earthy sensibility that expose the assumptions of normalcy and happiness embedded within the traditional Korean family model, are particularly capable of evoking feelings of trauma, hurt, and disappointment for Korean women. These painful sensations arise not simply from what is depicted. They seem to emerge from the paintings themselves: from images that magnify emotional and bodily surfaces as though viewed through a magnifying glass, and from the ambiguous, mist-like spaces unfolding across jangji paper (thick traditional Korean paper)—spaces that quietly evoke unease and uncertainty. Furthermore, these paintings evoke not merely a sense of discomfort surrounding the sexual realm but also feelings associated with wounds and trauma, while simultaneously cultivating a distinctive East Asian sensibility toward sexuality. Particularly striking are the obsessive yet delicate depictions of bloodshot skin and veins in the Edge Heart (2019) series; the scenes in the Concealed Ovulation (2019) series where natural forms such as waterfalls and valleys transform into vaginas in the act of giving birth; and the tiger-tail hybrids that convey the dynamism of penetrating phalluses or the dazzling sensuality of copulation. Together, they reveal chaos and eroticism on an altogether different register.

 Since 2020, increasingly blurred and elusive bodily fragments have begun to occupy Eunsil Lee's canvases. In works such as That Day (2021), fragmentary forms whose identity is unclear, whether animal fur or human body hair, are interwoven with waterfalls, waves, and sprays of water appearing in the background. Folds, grooves, and other features that appear to belong to the body seem to transform into the dynamics of dispersed particles, like smoke or clouds drifting through space. The overall atmosphere of these paintings became increasingly fluid yet still, ambiguous yet not entirely abstract, evoking a peculiar sense of mystery. At a certain point, however, beginning with works such as the Unstable Dimension (2021) series, it is no longer the body’s exterior that comes into view, but anatomical organs rendered with greater clarity and definition. Illustrations of organs that seem to have emerged directly from a medical textbook—cranial structures spinal cords, cochleae, and kidneys—traverse hazy East Asian settings and indistinct backgrounds. When three-dimensional architectural perspectives are superimposed onto the picture plane, this sense of disjunction and opacity becomes even more pronounced. Confronted with such increasingly polarized compositions, one cannot help but wonder what it is that Eunsil Lee ultimately wishes to say, or what scene it is that she truly wishes to reveal.

 In short, Eunsil Lee has continually reconfigured the repression and entanglements of sexuality embedded within Korean patriarchy through anatomical and endoscopic ways of seeing, while at the same time constructing a curious sense of three-dimensional spatial vision upon the material surface of Korean painting. These scenes, which build reality as a three-dimensional structure and psychology as an interior domain, may be understood as layered perspectives that are at once architectural and inward-looking. To be frank, it is difficult to say with certainty how fully the subjects that concern her—female embodiment, sexuality, desire, and trauma—ultimately reach the viewer after passing through such complex and experimental layers. One thing, however, is clear. The landscape she treats as a form of “inner space,” together with the three-dimensional corporeality she constructs through the pigments of East Asian painting, seem less concerned with anecdotal or situational description than with approaching, ever more closely and intimately, the recurring memories and lived experiences of women.

 In Eunsil Lee’s recent work, such extreme close-ups and endoscopic or anatomical forms have become even more pronounced. The imagery, rendered with an almost microscopic level of detail while radiating the darkness associated with endoscopic vision, has opened up an entirely new set of formal possibilities, particularly in the snake paintings that first began appearing last year. In works such as Mind Full (2024), the coiled form of a snake recalls yet another drama of entangled desire and constraint, echoing the earlier paintings in which intertwined tiger tails evoked similarly conflicted states. With neither head nor tail revealed, the tightly coiled serpent and its shimmering scales evoke a different register of chaos, confinement, and madness.

 Yet even in these snake paintings, Eunsil Lee’s distinctive endoscopic gaze remains unmistakable. A closer look at the serpentine forms reveals that they resemble the contours of a human brain. Whether depicting naked male and female bodies, unabashedly rendered genitalia, or moiré-like landscapes, Eunsil Lee has consistently been concerned with desire. In this regard, the appearance of the snake, one of the most enduring symbols of desire, seems a natural development in her practice. As is well known, the image of the snake has long occupied a central place in Western symbolic systems. Across mythology, religion, and art, it has repeatedly appeared as an emblem of desire, the temptation of taboo, and, more broadly, a symbol of sexual impulse. In the Book of Genesis, the serpent is depicted as the being that offers Eve the “forbidden fruit,” simultaneously bringing humanity knowledge, pleasure, and the Fall. The serpent thus becomes both the embodiment of temptation and the mediator of humanity’s desire to transgress divine order—that is, its longing for forbidden knowledge. Moreover, as Sigmund Freud argued that the serpent, like other elongated objects and certain animals, functions in dream–thought as a symbol of the phallus, the snake has long served in Western culture as a representation of sexual impulse and desire, owing to its form and movement. Beyond this, the serpent signifies not only transformation through the shedding of its skin but also the power of endless recurrence and self-renewal. This symbolism is perhaps most clearly embodied in the figure of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its own tail, a motif originating in ancient Greek mythology.

 Meanwhile, in East Asia, and particularly within Korean tradition, the snake has occupied an ambivalent position: feared as a potentially dangerous creature, yet also revered as a guardian spirit that protects the household and its wealth, and even as a bringer of abundance and fertility. Native Korean snakes—including the Korean rat snake, the steppe rat snake, and various vipers—were not creatures confined to remote mountains; they often inhabited the spaces around human dwellings, and sometimes even the dwellings themselves. Against this layered symbolic backdrop, one begins to wonder what exactly the headless, coiled snakes of Eunsil Lee’s paintings, adorned with seductive colors and surfaces, are meant to signify. According to the artist, one thing these snakes express is “ugly desire.” Yet because such desire is something we can also recognize within ourselves—something at once dangerous and alluring—the paintings seek to evoke the contradictions through which ugliness and beauty become entangled. Indeed, the densely applied blue-green pigments on jangji paper and the subtly shifting patterns of the snakes are at once uncanny and beautiful. However, when these forms take on the shape of a human brain or evoke other anatomical structures, their straightforwardness can at times diminish their ambivalent and mysterious allure.

 Eunsil Lee has often spoken of how the shocks and traumas encountered throughout life have served as powerful sources of inspiration. She has suggested that the works currently in progress are likewise connected to a series of traumatic experiences. Even in their preliminary sketches, one can already see clusters of blue waves, whirlpools, blue haze, and swirling currents of blue-green pigment gathering across the surface. The artist has said that she hopes to address childbirth in her paintings before those memories fade further. Not as an occasion of blessing, however, but as a kind of open secret—one that has brought pain and trauma to many women. As the works remain unfinished, it is difficult to say more at this stage. One can only wait with anticipation to see how these forms and sensations will ultimately unfold.

 Most importantly, childbirth, as a subject at once acute and deeply sensitive, may well transform the horizon of female empathy that Eunsil Lee’s paintings have long cultivated. At the same time, childbirth is undeniably a difficult subject, not only at the level of painting as a formal practice but also within feminist discourse. Childbirth cannot be reduced to sexuality, bodily autonomy, or the mythology of motherhood, for the conditions that shape this experience constitute an extraordinarily complex and multifaceted terrain. In particular, pregnancy and childbirth, often described as forms of “sexual reproduction,” remain among the most contested issues, shaped by generational differences as well as by disability, class, and lived experience. Childbirth belongs not to the sphere of production traditionally associated with men’s waged labor, but to the realm of reproduction and reproductive value. Above all, reproductive rights have long occupied a central place in discussions surrounding women’s bodily health and autonomy. Sex, contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth function neither as natural obligations imposed upon women nor as entirely free choices. Rather, they are bound up with countless social conditions and contexts, and they do not present themselves as equally available options to all women. 

 Setting aside these complex issues and their broader social contexts, one cannot help but wonder how the artist will choose to address the experience and trauma of childbirth. Of course, painting cannot encompass every aspect of that social reality, nor is it obliged to faithfully reproduce any single experience in its entirety. Moreover, creating a space within the tradition of Korean painting for the expression of sexuality and women’s lived realities is, without question, no easy undertaking. Nevertheless, Eunsil Lee’s paintings will likely continue to engage with women’s experiences and bodily sensations through the intertwined lenses of “taboo” and (public) “desire.” One can only hope that the sensitivity, technical sophistication, and narrative force of these works will continue to generate fascination and surprise in the face of yet another paradox.

Tools are Only Tools

Nayeon Gu

There are artists who construct entire systems in order to produce their work. Such systems constitute a logical process directed toward the formal completion of an artwork, functioning as a framework that mediates between the artist’s conception and the work’s eventual manifestation. Although these structures are robust systems shaped by the interplay of artistic autonomy and individual disposition, they are not necessarily efficient or productive. Needless to say, the process through which an artwork comes into being stands in direct opposition to the principles of technical Taylorism, which seeks to maximize output quickly and minimize waste. Instead, a single work may emerge only through an immense concentration of labor and an exceptionally slow process. At times, it may even require a “broken machine,” one that incorporates deliberate destruction and frequent errors. If an artwork is produced through such a system and the machinery devised to sustain it, it is grounded not in utility but in transformation and nonutility. In doing so, it generates exceptional conditions that could never be attained through mechanical production alone.

 Sooji Lee’s work is produced through what might be called a “broken machine,” a tool constituted by a stubborn and highly idiosyncratic system. While oriented toward transformation and nonutility, it also possesses a distinctly artisanal quality, insofar as the artist creates the very objects that are necessary for the work. As a result, the work encompasses not only the finished artwork itself but also the process through which it is produced, a process that accumulates into a larger system. This system belongs to what might be considered the hidden side of the work, yet the tools of production that occupy this hidden realm at times appear equivalent in significance to the work itself. In Typeface Bodoni Writer (2016), Sooji Lee writes letters using a machine of her own design. To create the ground upon which those letters would appear, the artist subsequently developed Paper Maker (2018). To realize the form of a typeface, a mechanical medium capable of producing it is required; to provide a surface on which that typeface can exist, another tool becomes necessary. We can, of course, write letters on paper without any such machines. Yet for Sooji Lee, only through these machines can the desired forms of letters and paper come into being. Since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, typography as a medium has been fundamentally tied to the logics of mass reproduction and production. It is through these structures of production that we ordinarily encounter both type and paper. Sooji Lee, however, creates intensely private machines for type and paper that remain detached from mass production and replication. Through them, the forms and materiality of type and paper become singular modes of expression in their own right. In this sense, the artist’s machines depart from the efficiency and standardization pursued by Fordist modes of mechanical production, transforming the tool itself into an entirely personal form.

 These tools often possess a powerful visual presence, and the structural form through which their systems are manifested is so pronounced that they are frequently mistaken for artworks themselves. I first encountered Sooji Lee’s practice at the 2023 Nanji Residency Seoul Museum of Art. Seeing the tools that filled the studio, I naturally assumed they were artworks. Later, when I sat down with the artist as a writer for the first time at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon in 2025, Sooji Lee emphasized that these monumental structures were “only tools.” Hearing this, I began to think of those tools as another form of trace, akin to the way the process of making becomes visibly embedded within the artwork itself. To draw an analogy, the tool functions like a form of dripping. Just as the traces of Jackson Pollock’s dripping accumulate directly on the canvas, these tools materialize and preserve the trajectories of artistic production.

 Sooji Lee has also remarked that these tools are “optimized for the body and for knowledge,” and that the tools derived from such conditions do not, in themselves, carry any particular meaning. When the artist presented Four Tools (2023), it was because four tools had been devised for the production of four works. In this sense, the tools both anticipate the works to come and contain their forms in a latent state. Spindle for 100 Strings of Thread produces thread for use in artworks, much as the artist previously developed machines for making paper. Tool for Making a Hollow Hexahedron employs that thread to generate a hollow six-sided form, while Tool for Making a Hollow Cylinder uses the same material to articulate a hollow cylindrical structure. Each tool thus functions as an index of a particular work. Embracing the countless errors that inevitably arise through the artist’s invention, these tools exist in the present as though they were the works’ past tense.

 What these tools are oriented toward is the future, and that future propels the work toward its completed state. The form of artwork is already embedded within the tool, while the errors generated throughout the process become necessities that drive the emergence of form. Yet the point at which these errors arise is precisely the artist’s body and actions. The mechanisms through which the tools operate register the artist’s living breath and rhythm, and in doing so give rise to the meaning of making itself. This meaning, however, does not unfold into content. Just as a tool is only a tool, the meaning of making lies in the act of making itself. Just as the artist’s typographic works do not seek to compose specific words, type remains simply type, possessing its own forms, characteristics, and structures. The artist visualizes those forms, characteristics, and structures in a completely individuated state, and within them remains the presence of the person who devised the tools and constructed the system. For this reason, the forms produced through these tools inevitably become, in the artist’s words, “forms of life.”

 Accordingly, the tools themselves become forms and systems shaped by the artist’s life. In the 2025 video work How to Make a Regular Hexahedron (working title), three characters appear: the Ruler, the Thinker, and the Glitch. One opens and stacks books, another tears pages from them, and a third places the torn pages back onto the floor and reattaches them. The collisions between compulsive repetition and free deviation embedded in the process of producing artworks through tools, along with the various dilemmas that emerge within that gap, are personified through these characters. Though driven by actions that are simple yet deeply absurd, the video’s narrative takes on an autobiographical dimension through the roles of its characters and the nature of their actions. The artist’s ongoing practice, in which obsession and freedom continually exchange positions within both the tools and the processes of production, invests every stage of the process with meaning: from the awkward, grinding movement of the system to its eventual arrival at a single physical form.

 This ultimately leads to a question, and perhaps a conviction: is art not sufficient unto itself as a physical entity? The immediacy of an artwork as a formal and material object differs from the linguistic dimension through which content and concepts are articulated. We continually seek to extract meaning from works of art, a tendency closely tied to the desire to transform the artwork into a signifier. Sooji Lee’s pursuit of a condition without content, and the construction of intricate systems and tools for the production of formal objects, are ultimately directed toward affirming the physical presence of the artwork itself. The meanings that emerge through the interaction between this material reality and its viewers belong to each individual encounter. The artist’s “intention” and “purpose,” however, are realized through the act of making the artwork itself by means of these tools.

 Sooji Lee has remarked that “whether sculpture or painting, form is sufficient even as a shell alone.” For example, Resemblance 1 and Resemblance 2 consist of a black cube produced through one of the artist’s tools and a cement cube of identical dimensions, arranged respectively side by side and one above the other. In these works, the black cube exists as a fully autonomous object, detached from the tool, unlike in the artist’s earlier projects. As the outcome of a dialectical practice oscillating between compulsion and freedom through the use of tools, the cube testifies to its own sculptural possibilities. Yet Sooji Lee’s sculpture operates in a manner that resists being subsumed into either concept or content. The relationship between the two rigorously ordered forms likewise realizes a distinctly sculptural condition, free from the impurities of externally imposed meaning.

 Positioned alongside these works is Broad One, which serves as a surrogate for the temporality embodied by the tool, revealing the materiality of the black cube as something produced through the artist’s apparatus. Its state, with one corner pulled upward and folded back, exposes the latent material nature embedded within the surfaces of the black cube seen in Resemblance. Meanwhile, the second black plane beneath it, extending slightly beyond the woven surface above, embodies one face of the cement cube from Resemblance. Just as Resemblance approaches our perception through the horizontal and vertical relations established between identical forms made of different materials, Broad One constructs relationships among planes, the fundamental elements of three-dimensional form, prompting viewers to infer the processes that unfold between tool and materiality.

 Once an artwork becomes situated within an institutional framework, it inevitably attracts layers of supplementary interpretation. At times, the very grounds for an artwork’s existence are treated as equivalent to the persuasiveness of its meaning. Yet the creative impulse once described as kunstwollen arises from an expressive drive that recognizes the limits of language and signs. To translate the force of that impulse into language only creates a loop that leads back to those same limitations. What Sooji Lee refers to as a “shell” is grounded in a trust in the operation of form itself. And when the tools and acts of making that enable such forms function as both practical necessities and artistic foundations, it becomes possible to sense both the justification and the liberation inherent in the artist’s practice.

How to Paint a Universe

Hyun-Jeoung Moon

1. Layering the World as Image

“The world is my representation.”

 This famous proposition by Arthur Schopenhauer is a declaration that fractures the notion of the world as an objective reality that we ordinarily take for granted. According to Schopenhauer, the world always exists as a subjective representation, an experiential scene constructed by a perceiving subject. The shape that the world takes may differ according to the way the subject apprehends it. If one follows this proposition, the representation of a common world identically perceived by all becomes, in principle, impossible. Nevertheless, Lee Sejun states that they seek to transfer onto canvas an impossible question: how to represent a shared world viewed by both themselves and others.

 Lee Sejun’s work incorporates a range of art-historical elements and formal categories associated with painting, including figuration and abstraction, the human figure and the landscape. Yet such classifications do not constitute the core of the work. What runs through every layer is a single concern: the transformation of ways of seeing the world into forms of painting.

 The artist’s paintings operate on the premise that ways of seeing are themselves constitutive of the world. This premise becomes tangible through the multitude of images that appear throughout the work. Landscapes seen from mountaintops, photographs exchanged with friends, snowmen, black birds, and the flames of campfires intersect within a single pictorial field, giving form to a world woven together from multiple perspectives. Images, each carrying distinct temporalities and spatialities, come to rest upon the canvas and assemble into a single world. Yet almost immediately, that seemingly complete world is recombined with other images and reconfigured into a new scene. The processes of combining and transforming canvases not only alter the overall form of the painting but also modulate the meanings and contexts embedded within the images themselves.

 For this reason, the essence of the work does not lie in the images themselves. What matters instead is the process of asking what kinds of vision an image—understood as a world woven from multiple layers of perception—might in turn generate, and what contexts the worlds derived from it may come to contain. The multiple viewpoints embedded within a single canvas are repeatedly dismantled, reconfigured, and layered according to the ways in which they are combined, producing a different world each time. Grounded in the intricate entanglement of perspectives, Lee Sejun’s paintings construct diverse scenes while revealing the many potential forms that emerge through the continual proliferation of painting itself. Rather than constituting an objectively completed entity, Lee’s work is closer to a mutable structure, one that is renewed each time he paints. This can be seen in works that connect paintings made at different moments in time, or in works that create an “eternally existing” painting through the partial exchange of elements between multiple canvases.

2. Painting a Universe

In a recent solo exhibition, Lee Sejun turned to the task of painting the universe. From world to universe. One is inclined to look for a significant shift in this linguistic transition. Yet paradoxically, the methodology through which the artist translates the universe into painting remains fundamentally the same as that through which the artist has long translated the world. What therefore becomes important is the fact that the artist now speaks of painting not the “world” but the “universe.” The “universe” invoked by the artist appears closer to the notion of the universe than to that of the cosmos. It may be understood as an attempt to think, on a more expansive scale, the accumulated worlds, or rather worldviews, that have appeared throughout the artist’s practice. Even if the universe and the world ultimately refer to the same thing, this linguistic shift provides an opportunity to reconsider, at a fundamental level, the structures through which we have understood the world until now.

 This linguistic shift expands beyond the question of “what to paint” and becomes a reflection on “how something is named and constituted.” If the earlier works followed the conventional language of painting by depicting spaces that could be represented, painting a universe moves toward presenting invisible relations, accumulations of time, and the infinite possibilities of chance through combinatory forms. It is no longer a matter of painting what is visible, but of reconfiguring, through the language of painting, the very ways in which worlds come into being.

 Rather than assigning a fixed form to painting, Lee Sejun experiments with using paintings as a kind of modular system through which new images can be generated. Within these works, images exist in states of excess and disorder. Between them lie countless temporal disjunctions, and the sensation of difference produced by these gaps is transformed into a sense of velocity, accelerating the movement of images themselves. The division and recombination of canvases further opens innumerable intervals between existing images. As works are assembled, chaos is once again given a provisional structure, and completed images emerge from instability into temporary forms of order. This method is less concerned with arriving at a single finished image than with amplifying the directional tendencies and inherent entropy of each image, testing the many possible trajectories they might take. In this way, the role of the image shifts from representing an object to exploring the dynamics of the worlds that can be constructed through images themselves.

 This method of working also resembles the construction of a simulation. If making images is fundamentally concerned with representation, simulation is closer to testing the ways in which a world operates. Within the exhibition, multiple worlds already rendered into images are presented side by side. What matters, however, is that they serve to simulate countless possible configurations of the world. Chaos is once again given order, and that order is continually transformed through recombination. The infinite worldview embedded in the notion of the universe is translated into a set of relations that can be perceived and interpreted.

3. Painting as a System

In the process of completing a work, Lee Sejun constructs it as though its various potential states have already been simulated in advance. For the artist, a single canvas is both an image containing a particular scene and a material that can be combined, like a module, to generate another scene altogether. A part becomes a whole, and a whole in turn becomes part of something else. Painting, understood as a whole, becomes a site where such scenes are continually rearranged and reconfigured.

 If one were to compare this mutable structure to an organic form, it could be described as a proliferating system, one governed by its own internal order. Lee Sejun once described the work as “a dynamic painting that expands and branches out like a living organism.” Once again, through the artist’s own language, the conventional politics of scenes is overturned. Within these paintings, individual scenes are not components subordinated to the realization of a fixed state. Rather, these scenes constitute an assemblage of entities that continually transform according to their position, context, and relations with what lies outside them.

 For example, Space Arcade, which reconfigures works produced between 2019 and 2023, begins by exploring new relations among existing paintings. The moment images containing different times and spaces are placed side by side, the narratives once contained within the individual canvases are disrupted, giving rise to new relational possibilities. Extending nearly eighteen meters in length, the work’s linear composition does not remain a fixed straight line but instead proposes a variable pathway determined by the space in which it is installed. Following this path, viewers may read a continuous flow of time, or pause within a single fragmentary scene and experience the overlap of disparate temporalities and spatialities. Even when similar scenes recur, the timelines and narratives they generate differ each time. Images that have already reached a state of completion within a particular context continue to reproduce themselves through other images inserted between them, partially replicating what came before while simultaneously generating new situations.

 Another work, Meta-fiction, appears at first glance to resemble a floor plan, yet it twists three-dimensionally as it occupies and unfolds through space. Operating like an organism capable of continual transformation through multifaceted combinations, the work allows each canvas to seek out new forms through its relationships with adjacent surfaces. By fragmenting and reconfiguring an existing state, these forms acquire their own order and, in doing so, gain a degree of autonomy. Extending from the wall onto the floor and spreading throughout the exhibition space, the structure alters the conditions of visual perception according to each installation context. In responding to its surroundings, it continually generates new meanings through its relationships with the world around it.

 Painting as a system not only alters the conditions through which images are viewed, but also makes it seem as though painting itself is engaged in a continual process of self-reconfiguration and self-regulation. In this way, the images within Lee Sejun’s paintings become both independent entities and interconnected universes in their own right.

 Ultimately, Lee Sejun’s paintings are not singular scenes but prototypes of possibility. For the artist, “painting a universe” is not simply a matter of depicting the world; it is an act of thought that reorganizes and restructures it. “Is it possible to fully translate the structure of this world into painting?” Lee Sejun describes this as “an artistic objective that is destined to fail precisely because it is impossible from the outset.” Yet this objective, one that inevitably culminates in failure, remains an attempt to translate the disorder and infinity inherent in the world into perceptible rhythms and structures. It is precisely at this point that Lee’s paintings reveal the possibility of what painting can achieve as a means of thinking through and organizing the world.

 Crafting Deliciously, Drawing Playfully 

Jiwon Yu 

Donghoon Rhee works with materials drawn from everyday life, shaping them into painted wooden sculptures, paper cuttings, and two-dimensional compositions. These ordinary subjects range from still lifes, a genre with a long-standing art historical tradition, to beloved cats and the dynamic movements of K-pop idols. What is particularly striking is that these subjects remain within intensely specific realms rather than connecting outward to some grand worldview or leading toward broader insights. The pleasure that comes from examining the forms, colors, textures, and weight of the works resists translation into any singular interpretation. It is almost as though, from the very beginning, what was being made or drawn was never the most important thing at all.

 Having worked primarily in painting, Donghoon Rhee first turned to wood sculpture through a chance encounter, choosing the vase as his initial subject. At a moment when painting remained compelling but conveying meaning did not, and when it seemed as though no truly new painting could exist under the sun, Donghoon Rhee began carving wooden vases, “just as painters once practiced painting by using vases as still-life subjects.” This combination of a conventional motif and a material he was newly learning to work with provided a rationale for painting—in other words, a structural device through which artistic production could continue. Paradoxically, it was through this detour away from painting that painting itself could be redefined.

 Flower Vase (2018) takes the form of a vase carved from Korean pine, yet it is completed in a deliberately rough state, as though it was never intended to approximate the object itself, remaining instead a “wood carving.” The surface, marked by the traces of material painstakingly removed piece by piece, not only lends the sculpture a compelling texture but also offers countless pictorial planes to Donghoon Rhee, who never ceases to be a painter even while carving wood. The painter’s task of creating a complete image upon a single canvas surface is thus transformed into a combination of choices distributed across scattered, minute surfaces: whether to accentuate or overlook the shadows of the three-dimensional form, and whether to conceal or reveal the wood grain by adjusting the density and thickness of the acrylic paint. Judging from the variations developed in works such as Flower Vase (2019), Cactus (2019), and Flower Vase (2020), these calculations must have been deeply pleasurable for a painter liberated from the question of “what to paint.” That pleasure is conveyed to me as well when I encounter these painted sculptures. Moving around them is less a phenomenological experience involving the whole body, or a distinctly “sculptural” mode of perception, than a visual activity akin to ceaselessly scanning a dynamic pictorial surface.

 Paintings derived from these painted wooden sculptures appear to emerge from the perspective of a third-party observer who examines them with curiosity, as though viewing them from a certain distance, almost forgetting that they were made by the artist. They are paintings of sculptures rendered as if the flowerpots that served as their models had never actually been seen. The descriptions, particularly attentive to the tactile qualities of the sculptural surfaces, no longer register as flowerpots, or even as three-dimensional objects at all. Instead, they appear flattened, like a tapestry of adjacent green patches unfolding in continuous succession, or like cross-sections of proliferating masses arranged side by side, with any sense of depth effectively erased. Interestingly, the works recall Cubism. Yet this resemblance arises not from an attempt to dismantle and reconstruct three-dimensional forms through multiple viewpoints, but rather because the painted sculptures, as subjects of painting, remain more faithful to pictorial principles than to sculptural ones, as we have already seen. More than the organic forms of the sculptures themselves, what becomes compelling to observe and depict are the individual planes: the effects of acrylic paint unevenly resting upon or soaking into curved wooden surfaces rather than flat textile supports. In this sense, the artist never truly departed from painting, even while carving wood. It is perhaps through this persistence that a mode of painting emerged, one that actively feels its way across three-dimensional forms.

 The same holds true even when the subject of depiction changes. Beginning in 2020, Donghoon Rhee turned his attention to the choreography of K-pop idols and the movements of cats. These subjects clearly differ from still lifes in that countless images of them are reproduced and circulated within a very short span of time. Yet here as well, a distinctly planar approach to three-dimensional form remains evident. In works such as Cat and Me (2021), Rollin’ (2022), and Next Level (2022), movement is rendered through techniques reminiscent of multiple-exposure photography or comics that layer several actions within a single frame to create the illusion of motion on a static surface. A leg that remains planted on the ground extends beneath a raised knee, while multiple hands wrap around and bend a torso. A cat brushing past the side of a reclining figure elongates along the trajectory of its movement, while five or more stroking hands are layered atop it. Continuous durations of time thus crystallize into discontinuous forms. Paintings derived from these more complex painted sculptures unfold across two or more canvases. As though the sculptures themselves had been wrapped in canvas and printed like relief prints, the paintings spread laterally across the scenes encountered while circling the sculptures twice. Rather than condensing the essential qualities of a subject, these pictorial surfaces, now infused with the temporal dimension of observation, openly reveal the tactile pleasure of looking and recording, without filtration.

 Of course, the subjects Donghoon Rhee engages through painting actively resonate with the contemporary moment. There is ample room to interpret them as indicators of a cultural landscape in which K-pop, a total art form, has become a public arena generating shared experiences across generations, while companion animals have come to be regarded as members of the family and a generation has emerged that fills its homes with countless plants. Moreover, the texture of wood, a material long associated with the history of art, collides with the sleek images transmitted through equally sleek screens, achieving a form of contemporaneity by indirect means. Yet by developing a distinctive stylistic process and remaining deeply committed to the traditions of artistic media, the artist’s painting ultimately withdraws from investment in subject matter and conceptual concerns alike, turning instead toward the concrete and material realm.

 The paper sculptures presented in Donghoon Rhee’s 2023 solo exhibition Light Choreography make it even more apparent that the artist’s acts of making and drawing are grounded in the properties of materials themselves, as well as in a close attention to their specific dynamics, precisely because they momentarily depart from previously established media and techniques. Much as Robert Morris sought, in Untitled (1967–1968), to eliminate authorial intention and rely entirely on the material properties of felt cloth surrendered to gravity, the artist’s paper sculptures draw upon the distinctive powers of visualization developed through painted wooden sculpture and its related paintings while remaining responsive to the characteristics of their materials. When using paper that bends, folds, or droops easily under the force of gravity rather than standing on its own, the artist layers multiple sheets to emphasize rhythms of curvature. When working with thick, coarse cardboard, however, the artist adopts a mode of painting closer to that used in the wooden sculptures, perhaps even suggesting that wood and paper ultimately share a common origin in the tree.

 Let us return to the wooden sculptures. The 2025 Long Bird series captures birds in the moment of taking flight, preserving the accumulation of movement across time within wood. The warm, yellow-toned timber is carved more smoothly than in the earlier painted sculptures, and by dispensing with paint, the works no longer appear as multi-planar constructions but emerge instead as singular masses. Unlike earlier works, these sculptures seem to invite a bodily response before a visual one, eliciting an almost irresistible urge to touch them. Standing beside a sculpture roughly the height of the human body, one encounters forms that have transformed the passage of time into mass and volume. We can almost hold in our arms that very instant when a bird pushes off from the ground and begins to fly.

 Perhaps this recent body of work appears markedly more “sculptural” than the earlier works; indeed, there are no corresponding paintings. A similar tendency can also be observed in the painted sculptures based on K-pop that Donghoon Rhee has developed over the past several years. Whereas earlier works retained traces of specific choreographic movements despite formal distortions, more recent works such as ETA (2024) and Drama (2024) leave them completely unrecognizable. These masses, which no longer follow the conventions of human bodily composition, seem less concerned with reproducing the choreographic movements indicated by their titles than with presenting the outcome of a hypothetical reconstruction of the artist’s own working process. In other words, one might imagine first creating a painted sculpture based on a signature movement from NewJeans’ “ETA,” then observing it from multiple angles to produce a painting, and finally using that painting as the model for yet another sculpture. Of course, this process is not literally carried out. Yet it is clear that the abstraction enacted in these works is deeply informed by the perspective developed through repeated movement between sculpture and painting, a perspective that disperses and reassembles surfaces from multiple viewpoints.

 It is precisely this refusal to confine the work to any fixed trajectory, coupled with its continual cycles of experimentation and renewal, that makes Donghoon Rhee’s practice so compelling. In order to continue drawing while maintaining a painterly identity, or perhaps to convince oneself of the very necessity of doing so, Donghoon Rhee seeks out new materials and follows where they lead, guided by their properties without knowing the destination in advance. Along the way, a work may become a perceptive reinterpretation of artistic tradition or acquire an unexpected contemporary resonance. A three-dimensional form initially undertaken in pursuit of painting may, before one realizes it, come to exist as sculpture in its own right. Yet within this ongoing practice of material experimentation and technical reinvention, something may matter even more than such outcomes: the ability to retain the pleasure of making and the joy of drawing.

 Before writing this essay, we met twice and spoke about what it means to live as a creative practitioner at this particular moment. Perhaps there are two paths to becoming an artist. One is to possess powerful and distinctive formal language. The other is to build a discourse grounded in sustained research on a particular subject. In other words, one is expected to be gifted either with the hand or with the mind. But if neither path seems readily available, is one destined to succumb to irreparable frustration? To create within today’s accelerated attention economy is, perhaps, not unlike caring for a companion animal or tending a houseplant: it requires continuously nurturing the very impulse to create. If one cannot find a subject capable of sustaining the desire to observe and draw, one must create that subject. And to create it, one must practice with new materials and tools. Artistic achievement, growth, and renewal may ultimately be nothing more than names we give to the persistence required to preserve the pleasure of making and the joy of drawing.

Another World Against Necessity, Latent Possibilities

Yewon Seo

[0] 

Those who rarely arrive at the theater on time inevitably enter through its doors after the performance has already begun. Their experience may differ slightly from that of those who entered punctually. Ordinarily, arriving late to a performance means delayed entry, and missing the opening moments leaves behind a sense of impatience, as though one has lost access to a meaningful part of the narrative. Juho Song’s performances, however, occupy a somewhat different position from the usual problems associated with delayed entry. What they provoke is a sensitivity to the “events,” “experiences,” and “fleeting moments” encountered both inside and outside the stage. More precisely, what is experienced by the audience is not something simply given to them, but something unsettled and formed through the bodily sensations each individual directly confronts.

[1] 

In Skaters on Frozen Canal (2019), the theater lobby itself became both the setting and the primary stage of the performance. The space was arranged to resemble a familiar lobby environment, complete with a ticket box, waiting chairs, tables, and potted plants, while performers occupied it in the guise of audience members awaiting the start of the show. Within the original structure of Platform-L Live Hall, where the work was presented, the side door of the stage, ordinarily used as an entrance to the waiting room, became the theater entrance within the performance, while the actual entrance to the theater was transformed into an entrance to the lobby. Whether one was a “real” audience member or an actor within the performance, entering Skaters on Frozen Canal meant stepping into the lobby of the stage–theater itself. People dispersed throughout the space, some into the real auditorium seats, others toward the benches and tables of the staged lobby. Moreover, when someone arrived after the official start time, an ambiguous situation could arise in which it became difficult to tell whether the person was an intentional performer or simply a late audience member from reality. The spatial structure and boundaries that distinguish the theater became a strange threshold between reality and performance.

 In Juho Song’s work, the structural characteristics of performance as a medium become, in themselves, site-specific theatrical devices. Audience members who enter the theater through the “theater house” in order to watch a performance are confronted once again with a fictional house. Facing a space that reproduces a theater lobby and a set of fictional spectators, viewers simultaneously observe both the stage and one another, moving uncertainly between private memories of theaters they themselves have experienced, phantasmatic images, temporal disjunctions of presence, and the seductive dimensions of scenography. The “performance within the performance,” which everyone conventionally expects, is ultimately staged beyond the waiting-room door. Yet in the end, we realize that we are never actually allowed to see “the performance.” Instead, we are left relying solely on the sounds emerging between theater and stage, space and the space beyond, experiencing a sense of irony and uncertainty. As a result, what initially resembles an experience of viewing the world, or the conventional expectation of doing so, is transformed into an unfamiliar mode of experience and affective response. By activating the double diorama embedded within the theater’s structure and its architectural–spatial boundaries, the work evokes a heightened sense of presence. At the same time, it invisibly displaces the conventional properties of theatrical genre, introducing fractures into the forms ordinarily demanded of both the medium’s surface and the performance site itself.

   

 The “directorial events” imposed upon forms and structures long accepted as conventional emerge suddenly as incomplete and dissonant elements marked by a powerful sense of estrangement. In Skaters on Frozen Canal, for instance, there is the presence (or non-presence) of “the performance,” the one that somehow seems as though it ought to appear but never fully does, alongside sound transmitted only as acoustic phenomena through microphones rather than through the performers’ spoken dialogue. In Useful Sufferings (2015, KNCDC Archive Platform), the work combines the performative potential derived from the visible condition of Schrödinger’s cat with slapstick choreography. In Forbidden Plan (2018, Seoul Art Space Mullae), objects and shadow forms cast upon chroma key fabric are perceived differently depending on whether gravity is assumed or suspended. And in Nuit Beau Roman (2019, Seongmisan Village Theater), the entire theater drifts into a faint, half-somnolent state. The psychological desire for the smooth unfolding of expected developments, or for conditions that sustain stable recognition, instead gives way to invisibility and insufficiency. Meanwhile, unfamiliar experiences that intrude at the level of direction confront the viewer abruptly, unsettling even the longstanding discourses that underlie the medium itself. These works exist in states of superposition between the theatrical and the real, movement and stillness, aliveness and death, visibility and concealment, relations that can never be fully defined by a single truth or fixed condition.

 What these incomplete and dissonant sensations seek is not the pursuit of originality through yet another expression of novelty suited to the contemporary moment, nor are they experiments aimed simply at combining actions or sensations that remain undefined or beyond language. Neither are they intended merely to provoke emotions such as pleasure or discomfort, or to deliver unfamiliar sensory intensities for their own sake. The sensation evoked by the flickering light suspended at the entrance of Nuit Beau Roman, or by the fleeting moment when fog released from the stage machine forms a faint mass above the stage, resembles something that briefly reveals itself at the point of physical contact with “that state,” the state we fail to fully register at the very moment it occurs. Such moments may easily be mistaken for directorial devices intended to generate atmosphere, or else be described using terms such as “overlap” in an attempt to explain a condition that resists precise definition, only to collapse into linguistic interpretations like “indeterminacy,” “presence and absence,” or “a state of not knowing.” What “occurs” between disappearance and emergence, what exists between artificiality and naturalness, what approaches the threshold before it arrives as narration, can ultimately be felt only as a bodily response that quakes within the immediacy of the site itself.

 Ultimately, everything occurs along a path that obliquely approaches the problem of representation through non-representational means, and, at its furthest point, moves toward the question of existence itself. And whether on stage or in an exhibition space, in a lobby or an auditorium, inside a building or outdoors, the work reveals itself only through actively reflecting the spatiotemporal condition of the “here and now.” In the questions that arise while looking at the artificial grass only partially laid across the stage of Nuit Beau Roman, and in the uncertainty produced by encountering a performer who appears half-asleep from the moment one enters, though one suspects they may genuinely have been exhausted, we are compelled to reconsider the things we take for granted with narrowed eyes and a fading sense of certainty.

[2] 

Narrative is one of the central elements in Juho Song’s work, particularly in the performances and theatrical forms realized through scenography. Yet only the bare minimum of narrative—something closer to a synopsis than a fully developed story—is ever established. Gradually, and almost belatedly, one realizes that the completion of narrative was never the work’s objective to begin with. Most of the works contain no spoken dialogue from the performers. What initially seems like whispering often turns out to be nothing more than yawning, interrupted only by the occasional roar of monstrous entities or sonic vibrations produced through mechanical devices. For this reason, although language is technically present, it cannot really be said that a narrative unfolds. Themes such as disaster and viral contagion frequently appear, as do genres like the Grand Guignol and the space opera. Yet these works seem far removed from subordinating themselves to the symbolic meaning of social events or from treating genre merely as artistic material. This is because the narrative operates independently of the representation of specific situations or the constraints of genre categorization.

 The method is presented in the form of “stage–landscape,” most often through the intrusion of an “event.” For instance, the introduction of disaster viruses or sleeping sicknesses—such as Allegorgy or Theaterypanosoma—into the coherent, conventional layers of the theatrical medium serves as the very engine that drives the performance’s narrative.  Infiltrating the work as “double” clues that seemingly bear traces of their antecedents, these devices evoke the concept of allegory—functioning as both an artistic attitude and a formal strategy within contemporary art. The allegorical mode, in which one text becomes overlaid by another, possesses what Craig Owens describes as a “tendency to originate in previous commentary and interpretation while continuing to reveal the direction of commentary itself.” When a text is explained, its original meaning is not restored; rather, meaning is continually added through “relations” and from the “outside.” These narratives generate uncertainty not by encouraging interpretation but by continually gesturing toward hidden structures of meaning that never fully disclose themselves. In Skaters on Frozen Canal, the very “door” through which actor–spectators entered in order to watch the performance is suddenly breached by a disaster response team, while the theater lighting, seemingly transformed into emergency equipment, is dragged in across the threshold. Meanwhile, on the floor of Before It Turns Whiteout (2018, Namsan Arts Center Searchwright), a stage that also functions as another interior–exterior space, stage objects from earlier work Forbidden Plan abruptly emerge. Unable to stand on their own, these texts collide with one another, producing moments of both recovery and erasure.

 In this regard, Before It Turns Whiteout may be understood as the foundational work for the methodology through which narrative becomes structured in relation to spatial organization and imposed conditions. The work visualizes a “crevasse,” a deep fissure formed on the surface of a glacier, as a stage device, while establishing the event of a “whiteout” as its narrative condition. The performance begins with a whiteout effect created through the use of a fog machine. Within the performance, the device of “whiteout” establishes the condition that the performers must search for a missing fellow performer somewhere amid a snowstorm in Antarctica. Functioning almost like a score, the work assigns the performers a double task: navigating the fissures of the crevasse while improvisationally determining how the event will unfold. This whiteout also responds performatively to the institutional conditions and creative framework of the work itself, namely its attempt to test whether an unfinished performance, still lingering at the level of research or idea, can be realized through stage language. Furthermore, the white screen—serving as a point of departure that signifies a void in representation—implies the potential for media leaps and transitions. Here, interrupted and displaced images migrate into the invisible space beneath the crevasse-like stage structure, where they encounter earlier works and texts, setting off a series of unpredictable reactions. What ultimately determines the visibility (or invisibility) of image and narrative lies in the direct enactment of interiority and exteriority at the spatial threshold of the crevasse itself.

 At the same time, the characteristics of lacking inherent meaning and instead referring outward also call forth outdated genres such as the space opera and the Grand Guignol. Having once been excluded from dominant artistic discourse and dismissed for their aesthetic potential, these genres now return to form new relationships with the present. In this respect, they operate much like allegory.  In Forbidden Plan, Juho Song adopts the genre of the space opera to explore forms of human theatricality grounded in fantasy. Elsewhere, through the Grand Guignol horror workshop Coffin Club (2019, Incheon Art Platform), the artist revives audiences who scream, faint, burst into laughter, or hurl jeers from their seats. The revival of obsolete genres preserves these texts from simple historical displacement while reopening them to critical interpretation. Through this method, Juho Song layers texts fragmentarily to generate hybrid forms of content, offering a lens through which contemporary institutions and issues may be reexamined upon the foundations of past forms.

 Can efforts to restore texts while simultaneously displacing them into opposition draw forth new possibilities for the future? Can narrative, functioning as a critical lens directed toward institutional structures, become a way of responding to the contemporary world? Amid the endless circulation of flattened stimuli and proliferating images, such works risk becoming just another form of time-based art—consumed and forgotten as soon as they appear. Moreover, for the radicality of the theatre of cruelty, which expels repression like a contagion, to operate today, the antibodies embedded within contemporary bodies—bodies already saturated by media spectacle—have become grotesquely resilient. For Antonin Artaud, however, the cruelty of the theater did not signify the mere sensation of bloodshed or violence; rather, it referred to a rigorous discipline of performance—a manifestation of merciless will and absolute control. Rather, it depended upon a discipline capable of liberating narrative and form precisely through the rigorous control of attention. Seen in this light, these anachronistic strategies, armed with misrecognition and designed to restrain attention, paradoxically disclose that the present moment itself may still be “the incubation period of a virus.”

 Juho Song’s “Diorama Vivant Theatre” will continue to offer glimpses of visible meaning, only to postpone their fulfillment once again. It does not matter if the audience’s time is delayed. They will not have missed the narrative. For even when something appears to have already passed, the work draws back those elements that have been discarded, overlooked, or left behind, allowing them to remain latent. It is from this state of latency that new “mutations” and new “moments of trembling” emerge.