Gemini Kim’s Reflective Run
Yuki Konno
1.
Looking back on the history of running, one might invoke the ideas of escape and flight. When faced with urgency, humans run. While jogging differs in that it is motivated not by an immediate crisis but by a future-oriented concern for one’s well-being, it could be said that “jogging” and “fleeing” ultimately arise from the same impulse. Both share a common purpose—they serve as a kind of warm-up for a better life. Running is a force that moves across places rather than remaining in one. This is not merely a matter of physical location. Running does not begin as running—it is a state sustained by gradually increasing speed from the act of walking. In that sense, running cannot be maintained for as long as walking. When Gemini Kim runs through factories built during the modern era, including those that now remain only as ruins, their figure seems to overlap with the figures of those who once worked there, appearing almost ghostlike. Now that the time of operating and sustaining these factories has passed, these sites, reduced to their shells, have been left abandoned or preserved as objects of contemplation. Those who once “ran” in order to make a living within these factories have long since departed. Yet factories are not the only things that appear in Gemini Kim’s recordings of running. In Daenong Factory Run (2024), scenes of the artist running through factory districts are interwoven with archival materials they have gathered, accompanied by explanatory subtitles. In the video, the artist’s running sustains a momentary sharpening of the resolution of scenes that portray the past. The work foregrounds an encounter between the present and the past, as the artist’s breathing intertwines with images of quiet, sparsely populated neighborhoods.
2.
Before understanding walking as a form of mental leisure, it is worth revisiting the concept of the urban stroller, or flâneur, associated with the poet Charles Baudelaire. According to Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire was not a leisurely wanderer but a vigilant observer . From this perspective, walking is not an expression of ease within the modern metropolis, but an act charged with tension, undertaken as a means of self-preservation. This is precisely where walking and running curiously overlap. When walking functions as a defensive response to the outside world, it resembles the urgency of flight, compelling one to remain grounded in oneself while continually moving elsewhere. In Walking Through Fukushima: Through the Eyes of the Diaspora (2012) by Suh Kyungsik, walking is far from a leisurely pursuit. In this book, walking becomes a resonance of exile shared between the author’s diasporic identity as a Korean born and raised in Japan and those who were forced to evacuate in the aftermath of the nuclear accident that triggered a national disaster. The sense of being unable to belong cultivates a sensibility of running, whether in the metropolis or within the factory. Running persists when one is driven by external forces yet must continue carrying forward one’s own will in order to survive.
3.
What, then, is factory running—the act of keeping a factory in motion? Just as running is oriented toward the future health of the body, factory operation looks toward improvement and development, building the foundations—that is, the infrastructure—upon which modern life depends. The people who keep factories running—established to revitalize local communities and support the national economy—are workers. They run breathlessly in service of production, regardless of ownership or personal possession. On assembly lines, without knowing what part of the whole their labor may ultimately become, they continue their work in silence. In an environment where one feels placed within a vast machine one can scarcely comprehend, and where one does not even know what demands one’s labor is answering , Gemini Kim’s “factory running” seeks to recover the worker’s breath—a moment in which one can remain with oneself. Even from the scenes recorded in the video, it is impossible to know exactly how these now-ruined sites once operated. The perspective offered is at once that of those who live around the factories and that of a curious visitor passing through. When we look at factory districts, whether abandoned as ruins or still standing, what we can most readily grasp is their scale. The scale of a factory is usually perceived through external signs—towering walls, the sound of machinery, and the like. But how often do we imagine the people who were constantly moving to sustain that scale from within? More than that, do we ever stop to think about those who once worked there?
4.
Gemini Kim speaks not only about the constrained lives of the workers who once labored here, but also about the will to recover one’s own breath, to remain with oneself, and thereby break free from forms of oppression. In factories, where workers are expected to fulfill their roles while suppressing their individuality, Gemini Kim’s running reclaims freedom from external constraints, performing a gesture of liberation. Their work does more than invite us to imagine the lives of factory workers in the past. “Factory running” suggests the possibility of belonging to oneself even while being bound to the factory, of finding a sense of belonging through oneself rather than through the institution. Put differently, it conveys the possibility of escape. In this sense, the work recalls what Eric Hoffer paradoxically suggested from his experience as a dockworker: “To be bound to oneself, even to one’s own happiness, is unhealthy .” It also resonates with Erich Fromm’s argument that, after being released from traditional forms of social solidarity, individuals in capitalist society become isolated . Against this condition, Gemini Kim’s work suggests that people retain the freedom to run, the freedom to break away. Through the ideas of Hoffer and Fromm, one is reminded of Sandro Mezzadra’s analysis, which locates in workers the potential for fundamental transformation. Mezzadra finds the seeds of political struggle in forms of labor that are multinational, mobile, and provisionally assembled . Running is an act through which movement itself becomes a force within the body. The sense of fullness that arises from the bodily awareness that one generates the force circulating within oneself becomes a force directed outward, a force that carries one elsewhere. Factory running depends upon the oppressive forms of running demanded of workers. Yet workers, while compelled to follow the roles assigned to them within the factory, are also—and always have been—capable of performing another kind of running: a running that escapes those very constraints.
5.
If running offers the displaced and the factory worker an opportunity to recover the self, then the factory becomes a site where the direction of forces toward development and progress is drawn. Drawing on the notion of the ligne de fuite, or “line of flight,” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization, introduced in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), is described by Gary Genosko as having both positive and negative effects in lived reality . Factory running, or factory operation, is at once transversal and disciplinary. In Right to Escape (2006), Sandro Mezzadra discusses migrant labor alongside forced labor and deportation in colonial contexts, examining the relationship between workers’ mobility and systems of control . In this sense, the factory is a site marked by dualities—operation and oppression, development and regulation. Through “factory running” Gemini Kim brings attention to the histories embedded in factories. Factory running, that is, the histories of establishment and operation, is often overlooked despite its entanglement with histories of colonization and frontier expansion, receiving far less attention than war memorial sites or major social events. Few people, for example, know the history of a rayon factory that moved from Saga Prefecture, Japan, to Namyangju, Korea, and then to Dandong, China, as explored in Rayon Factory Run (2023), or the history of Yongsan Industrial Complex (2022), which examines an industrial district that existed during the 1970s . If there is a reason Gemini Kim runs through factories that once functioned as strongholds of colonial industry or engines of postwar national development, it is not only to uncover the lives of workers embedded in those sites. It is also to make visible, from the perspective of the present, the movements, transformations, rises, and declines that have unfolded between past and present, and between urban centers and their peripheries, often extending to distant places beyond them.
6.
This, in turn, points toward another sensibility available to those living in the modern city. “The pleasure that comes from running today can only be enjoyed when moving through a developed city without much thought.” This confessional subtitle appears as the artist’s concluding remark in Rayon Factory Run spoken while reflecting on the lives of the workers who once labored in the now-abandoned factory. Factories, as infrastructure, have become so familiar that they permeate our lives even as their identities remain largely unknown to us. In this sense, the feeling described by Simone Weil is shared not only by factory workers but also by those who live beyond the factory gates. The sensation of “being placed within a vast machine I cannot fully understand” belongs not only to the fragmented experience of factory labor but also to the lived experience of people residing in factory districts. We may not know exactly what it is, yet there remains an overwhelming presence that sustains the community. As time passes, Gemini Kim runs through former factory sites, layering pain and pleasure onto the act of running. The pressure to maintain speed echoes the demands of an assembly line, yet the artist’s concentrated running transforms a sense of estrangement from oneself into a voluntary gesture of flight. Reflective running is not easily visible in everyday life. As the video unfolds, “thoughtless movement” becomes filled with thought. If the routines of public transit, walking, and jogging make it difficult for us to think about history, then perhaps, like Gemini Kim, we must run through it step by step, one site at a time.
Yuki Konno (Art Critic)
Yuki Konno is a writer who observes and critiques art exhibitions in both Korea and Japan. He has curated exhibitions such as After 10.12 (Audio Visual Pavilion, 2018), With Korean and Eastern Painting (Gallery TOWED, FINCH ARTS, Jungganjijeom II, 2022), and Drift Ice (AVP lab, 2025), and has participated in numerous others through co-curation and collaborative projects. He is a co-organizer of Padograph, a bilingual platform that shares exhibition information between Korea and Japan. In 2019, he received the Second Prize in the GRAVITY EFFECT Criticism Contest.
