Suhwa Kim, Screengraphy, 2021 (Mullae Art Factory Gallery M3) @ Suhwa Kim

Suhwa Kim works across theaters, outdoor environments, and screens as a choreographer and performer. Her choreographic practice engages with the body in social and cultural contexts and explores the sensory events that emerge at the intersection of the body and media.

She has choreographed works including Pixelance(2022), Screengraphy(2021), and Threshold(2020), and performed in projects such as Son Naye’s Experiment of Form(2020) and Leimay Foundation’s Correspondences(2019). She has been selected for the Wanju Cultural Foundation Artist Residency (2020), the Benext Multidisciplinary Art Program at Mullae Art Factory (2021), and Austria’s Art Space Stift Millstatt Festival and Residency (2022). She studied Communication (Journalism and Broadcasting) at Sogang University and Choreography at the Korea National University of Arts.

When only the eyes of a living body slip into a space of reproduced images, where does that body exist—here, or in some other world? From the conscious and unconscious act of gazing in daily life to perception mediated by industrial technologies such as VR, AR, and mixed reality, our vision constantly questions the position of our own existence.

The technological drive to separate sight from the multisensory body seems to extend the modernist approach dividing the self into body and mind and fragmenting perception into five senses. A three-dimensional body collapses into a two-dimensional form within a camera frame, and an n-dimensional real world is reconstructed as a three-dimensional patchwork of 2D representations within virtual reality. Perhaps visual-centered technologies are not expanding our world but guiding us into an “N-1” dimension.

As of March 2022, one unchanging truth remains: our feet are still grounded here. In a time when digital spaces—where placelessness and spatiality coexist—and media-based representations deeply permeate everyday life, what should the body be looking at, and where must it be positioned? Can the body be liberated from the fissures between media and representation—and must it be? What should such liberation aim for, so that it does not remain mere ornamentation? Even when spatial perception fractures and bodily senses fail to synchronize, can we still recognize that the body is here? Is such recognition a shared memory?

The term ‘Screengraphy ‘combines “screen”—which encompasses reproduced representations and images emerging from imagination—and “choreography”—the act of composing time and space. The performance Screengraphy(2021) reflects on the presence of the body and space in situations where the body encounters media such as cameras, Zoom video conferencing, and virtual reality. It examines the body as a hesitant object caught in the dilemma of lacking shared sensory experience, despite the subject’s intention to communicate and form connections within an agreed-upon virtual space.

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