Installation view of 《New Act: Lysis》 ©Perigee Gallery. Photo: CJY ART STUDIO
Perigee
Gallery presents Perigee Team Project 2025 《New Act:
Lysis》 through February 7. The Perigee Team Project is
an annual program that selects one promising young artist and one curator to
form a new team each year, fostering meaningful exhibitions through genuine
collaboration and mutual understanding.
《New
Act: Lysis》 begins with the hypothesis that a snail can
read. From this premise, the exhibition asks about the possibility of
friendship in a contemporary moment when narratives of relationships are
constantly translated into new languages and structures. Tracing the
differences between sensation and cognition as its pathway, the project calls
forth an imagined being born from the overlap between our movements and
perceptions while reading a book and the actions of a snail feeling its way
across a page.
Installation view of 《New Act: Lysis》 ©Perigee Gallery. Photo: CJY ART STUDIO
The
paths that traverse between letters, the trails of slime, and the gnawed marks
on the paper are set alongside our own performances of moving across a page,
evoking the act of reading. Yet this allegorical imagination reveals a gap from
the outset, since the premise of “reading a book” presupposes standards
constructed through human sensation and cognition.
In
reflecting on this hypothesis, the team project examines the conditions under
which connection can occur by revisiting moments in which human reading and a
snail’s movement intersect on the same page. In other words, it reveals how a
scene that appears to occupy “the same place” immediately calls forth certain
senses while simultaneously excluding others, laying bare the mechanisms of
such selection.
Installation view of 《New Act: Lysis》 ©Perigee Gallery. Photo: CJY ART STUDIO
To this
end, artist Lee Yoonjae presents the sound work APIS (2025),
which organizes the ways uncertainty and difference are experienced as
relations into a temporal structure. Sounds categorized as human, non-human,
and artificial intelligence can be heard simultaneously, yet unfold in a
non-interlocking form that resists synchronization.
Another
work, ENTANGLED READING (2025), begins from the conception
of linking a snail cage kept in the artist’s room to the exhibition space. When
a camera installed in the cage captures the snail’s movements in real time, the
footage is transmitted to a screen in the gallery. As processes of OCR and
translation intervene, sensations and events arising in different spaces become
entangled as a single act of “reading” within this circuit of transformation.
Dialogues,Dialogues, a related publication for 《New Act: Lysis》 ©Perigee Gallery. Photo: CJY ART STUDIO
Finally,
on the bookshelves and tables lie three books in which the time and voices
accumulated throughout the project are gathered. 《New
Act: Lysis》 returns the conditions under which
friendship is formed to a space of questioning, bringing moments of mutual
encounter into the format of the exhibition and sustaining them over time.
Through
conversations between the curator and artists, interviews, a round table where
participants sit together, and the unceasing flow of sound, the exhibition
maintains a state of open-ended inquiry rather than arriving at a conclusion.
Even when each other’s language fails to reach a center, the meaning of
friendship continues to be renewed along its edges.
Participants: Lee
Yoonjae (Artist), Han Joo-ok (Curator)
