Exhibition view ©Kwanwoo Park

In 2022, the Coreana Museum of Art’s *c-lab 6.0 explores the keyword of co-evolution, seeking possibilities of connection that extend to other beings, social structures, and even technological environments. Presented as part of *c-lab 6.0, Kwanwoo Park’s 《Club Reality》 questions relationships in the process of evolution and their potential.

《Club Reality》 consists of eleven workshops and a three-day event. In May, eleven selected beta testers concealed their real identities and, as fictional personas of their own design, participated in the workshop over eleven weeks. They wrote (fake) daily journals, paired with other participants to form human relationships, danced, drew, and shared meals. They also occasionally confessed secrets, wrote letters to each other, and listened to music together. The event held from July 29 for three days serves as the final episode of the eleven-week workshop, during which participants’ testimonies and workshop records are revealed.


Exhibition view ©Kwanwoo Park

The 《Club Reality》 event follows the same rules as the workshop. Every visitor who enters must, like the beta testers, abandon their own identity and converse and act under a randomly assigned other’s name and personality. These imagined identities are updated in real time; layered realities are continually generated; and participants influence one another’s names. The actual personal information of everyone involved in 《Club Reality》 is not disclosed, and all situations remain permanently unresolved cases. 《Club Reality》 is a metaphor for mutations that inevitably occur within the process of evolution and for the relationships they engender. Can a temporary incident trigger a mutation of identity? As fictional personas, we await audiences who will co-compose these “strange and unfamiliar situations.”


Exhibition view ©Kwanwoo Park

《Club Reality》 is a device created to observe precisely this. It is undoubtedly a form of theater, yet it is constructed so that no one can know what comes next—an uncanny situation. Here, reality is made anew at every moment in real time. The real (reality) perpetually drifts somewhere between true and false, never to be fully captured.

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