Geumhyung Jeong, Making Show 2021 © Busan MoCA
The Busan Museum of Contemporary Art is
presenting the exhibition 《Busan MoCA Performing Arts:
Body, Under Experiment》 through July 19.
Moving beyond the conventional mode of
viewing artworks, the exhibition foregrounds the process by which audiences
directly experience and reconfigure the relationships between the body, the
senses, and technology, transforming the exhibition space into a kind of
“laboratory.”
《Busan MoCA Performing Arts: Body, Under
Experiment》 is, as its title intimates, a narrative
that probes the other body in humanoid form. The bodies addressed here do not
simply denote the corporeal bodies that we know; rather, they encompass somatic
sensation reconstituted from the ground up, hybrids fused with the machinic,
and entirely novel assemblages constructed as the shadow of the human itself,
thereby redrawing the very boundaries of what a body might be.
Hoonida Kim, Fine-Tuning Human Sense 2.0, 2025 © Busan MoCA
The progressive tense embedded in the
phrase under experiment is no mere rhetorical flourish. The exhibition is
partitioned into three discrete laboratories, each illuminated in monthly
succession, opening sequentially one after another.
Divided into three separate experimental
chambers, the exhibition adopts a sequential structure in which each experiment
is activated month by month. The introduction of such temporality positions the
viewer as a witness to the experimental process itself. Entering a newly
illuminated laboratory, one encounters the absent researcher’s traces:
instruments, working tools, unfinished prototypes.
On certain days, one may even happen upon
the very moment when a body is being assembled or a sense recalibrated. Rather
than presenting the exhibition as a finished outcome, the work shares its
ongoing process with the audience.
Byungjun Kwon, Opening Blooming from the center; Golden Flower of Potential, 2025 © Busan MoCA
Of particular note is the premise that, at
the point when all three experiments reach completion, every laboratory goes
dark. This situates the exhibition within a distinctly performative
temporality; the gallery ceases to serve as a site of permanent installation
and is instead transformed into a laboratory where transient and contingent
events unfold.
The first experimental site is Geumhyung
Jeong’s Studio/Storage.
The second experiment is Hoonida Kim’s
Fine-Tuning Training Room.
The third laboratory hosts Byungjun Kwon’s
Robotic Sound Workshop.
Participating Artists:
Geumhyung Jeong, Hoonida Kim, Byungjun Kwon
