Daewon Yun (b. 1993) explores how the contemporary body is perceived and how it forms relationships by combining performance with media technologies. Grounded in his interest in “dance” and “action,” Yun has continuously examined shifting concepts of the body and structures of sensation as they are transformed within media environments.
 
His practice primarily encompasses video, interactive works, and performance, through which he translates contemporary phenomena generated by digital media and their underlying emotions into embodied images.

Today, virtual reality, social media, and various online platforms enabled by digital media have made many things possible, transforming our everyday lives in non-contact and non-physical ways. This tendency was further intensified through the global experience of social distancing during the pandemic.
 
Within this context of change, Daewon Yun understands the “body” not as a fixed, singular entity, but as a variable body—one that expands and transforms within virtual space.

From this perspective, the artist explores the boundary between the physical body and the digital body, as well as the shifting attitudes and modes of perception that emerge within it, asking: “Through what do we sense and perceive today, and how do we form relationships?”
 
For example, in his early works, Daewon Yun experimented with movements of the body transformed and expanded into “new forms of corporeality” through the use of digital media. Once converted into digital signals, his body is edited, fragmented, and recomposed in multiple ways, reemerging as an unreal and surreal body that departs from the conventional structure of the physical human form.

In this way, the artist began to dance by fragmenting and reassembling his own body and gestures. The movements generated by this expanded body were all imbued with a sense of the uncanny. The source of this uncanniness lay not in an unfamiliar bodily form, but in the edited gestures themselves.
 
The cause was the simultaneously familiar and strange sensation produced by surreal movements that defy the laws of physics—an effect that became another aura distinctive to Daewon Yun’s dance.

Daewon Yun then began a series of diverse and eccentric investigations to locate this sense of the uncanny. He devised his own rules, edited bodily gestures in various ways according to specific criteria, and meticulously documented the process. Through this experimentation, he discovered that his dance became increasingly uncanny when movements were perfectly symmetrical, perfectly aligned, perfectly repeated countless times, or executed at a perfectly uniform speed.
 
In other words, as human gestures were placed onto numerically calculated coordinate values, a tension emerged between the perfect and the imperfect—producing a peculiar harmony that intensified the uncanny quality of his movement.

After this, Daewon Yun began the ‘Factum Socies’ series, a body of work that imagines the gestures of future humanoids. Rather than assuming a future in which humanoids dominate humanity or gain superior power, the project departs from the premise that these beings instead desire to become human.
 
The first work in the series, Birthday (2020), is a performance that depicts a humanoid imitating and practicing human imperfection. Once powered on, the humanoid reenacts the stages through which a newborn comes to recognize its hands and feet, learns to crawl on all fours, and eventually takes its first steps in bipedal walking.

Meanwhile, in the media installation Connection (2020), created the same year, Yun sought to visualize the movement and speed of relationships formed within online platforms in a physical space. Composed of 25 square floor panels, the work activates when two or more visitors step onto it, triggering LED lights that create a visual effect of mutual connection.
 
These light-based links continuously form and dissolve. Yun understands this rhythm as the speed of relationships that emerge online—easily and rapidly created, only to disperse just as quickly. By translating the dynamics and tempo of online social connections into an offline, spatial experience, the work invites reflection on the dense networks of on- and offline relationships that connect us to countless others in contemporary life.

In his 2024 solo exhibition 《Quite Time》, Yun Daewon further expanded his early investigations into bodily variation through digital editing. The works presented in the exhibition fragment the artist’s own gestures in kaleidoscopic ways or generate visual disorientation through feedback loops.
 
This approach reflects Yun’s deliberate use of digital techniques to focus on gestures imbued with intention and form—such as dance—and on bodies engaged in specific acts. Rather than aiming for mere visual play or spectacle, these works emphasize a performative dimension.
 
Although Yun’s gestures in the works are executed and repeated according to specific rules, the artist intentionally overlays the trembling, unstable body produced in the course of performance through the digital filter. In doing so, he amplifies both the body and its gestures, rendering them more intense and pronounced.

This approach runs counter to traditional performance practices or religious ritual acts, which seek to carry out codified actions with precision by suppressing other sensory elements through heightened concentration. Instead, Yun actively reveals the inner struggle and the hidden underside of performative acts, as if uncovering another kind of truth.
 
The anxiety, confusion, fragmented afterimages, and traces that the artist expresses through his own body are placed within the exhibition to create an extraordinary spatiotemporal condition—a “Quiet Time”—for the viewer, opening up a space in which one can reflect on intimate emotions that are rarely encountered in everyday life.

Meanwhile, in the same year, Yun presented the work Tactile-Transmission (2024) as part of 《G·Artience 2024: Connecting Week》. Through this piece, he sought to translate physical touch into poetic language and to visualize it as images interpreted by AI. The performance Tactile-Transmission begins when one dancer makes physical contact with another; the dancer who receives the touch then articulates the sensation in poetic sentences.
 
For example, the warmth felt when holding someone’s shoulder might be described as “like the soybean paste soup my mother used to make in winter.” Such sentences are then input into an AI system; in this process, the contextual nuances that humans intuitively understand disappear and are instead transformed into images.
 
Through this procedure, the work juxtaposes the differences in sensation and perception between humans and AI. In doing so, it invites reflection on how contemporary digital media environments—including artificial intelligence—are reshaping our senses and our bodies.

Furthermore, in the 2025 performance Circle, Chase, Contact (2025), Daewon Yun focuses on the state that lies between “connection” and “contact.” This inquiry does not simply stem from changes in media environments, but from a deeper question about a shift in how we sense, perceive, and understand the “body” today.
 
As the expanded ubiquity of media increasingly virtualizes physical bodily sensations and forges ever more intricate seams between reality and the virtual, ontological questions arise: “How do we define ourselves within the boundary between the real and the virtual?” and “What kind of body emerges when mediated through screens?” Yun reads these questions as part of the contemporary sensory environment and collective anxiety.

The performance Circle, Chase, Contact experiments with “contact,” “connection,” and forms of communality within this unstable sensory environment. The work unfolds in two scenes, the first of which takes the children’s game of tag as its central motif.
 
The performers move according to a rule in which the shifting roles of chaser and chased are triggered by “touch.” Here, individual moments of contact become a means of recognizing and sensing the “other” through bodies meeting bodies, gazes, gestures, and perceptions of distance.
 
Meanwhile, the light and images projected onto the space are distorted through slowed motion and overlapping frames. These appear on the performers’ bodies as “gestures already passed,” projecting past movements onto the present and generating another time–space altogether.

The images projected onto the bodies intersect with and slip out of sync with past gestures and movements unfolding in the present. Just as misaligned contact functions as a sensory point where one crosses into another’s time, the body in the here-and-now connects, within this condition of bodies and images intersecting a delayed environment, to a dancing body that exists in a different temporality.
 
Such disruptions of perception are not merely moments of visual confusion; they operate as acts of contact and connection that newly activate the viewer’s own construction of reality. Performers and audience members alike linger in the interval between contact and connection, forming relationships while slowly exploring how the sensation of moving through space becomes delayed and transformed.

Meanwhile, the second performance, which appropriates Ganggangsullae, a traditional Korean folk dance, invites audience participation to generate a sense of a temporarily formed community. By holding hands and lightly walking in a single direction to draw a circle, participants come together to form a fleeting moment of shared solidarity.
 
Although everyone remains connected and moves in the same direction, different tempos coexist simultaneously. Rather than signaling imperfection, these uncoordinated rhythms function as a way of revealing the tactile nature of solidarity inherent in “being-together.”
 
Furthermore, even as they participate, audience members sense the connections of contact and connection breaking and reforming, and come to accept states of drifting out of rhythm or falling out of sync as they are. Through this experience, the work allows participants to realize that communal rhythm is not constituted by perfect synchronization, but emerges from a sensory field in which each person’s misalignment becomes a point of connection.

In this way, Daewon Yun’s practice has consistently explored a range of physical and non-physical movements centered on the body. Through this process, the artist engages with the rapidly changing conditions of the digital age, modes of forming relationships within them, and the bodily senses that respond to and are transformed by these environments. Yun’s work ultimately poses ontological questions about our contemporary attitudes toward the body and the ways in which we perceive and understand it today.

 ”Through works in which ‘being together’ and ‘not being together’ coexist, I continue to contemplate the possibilities of the body situated at the boundary between the real and the virtual.”    (Daewon Yun, from the interview for 2025 ARKO DAY)

Daewon Yun earned a B.F.A. in Korean Painting from the College of Fine Arts at Kyunghee University and completed an M.F.A. in Sculpture at the same institution. His solo exhibitions include 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 (TINC, Seoul, 2025), 《Quite Time》 (GIMYE, Seoul, 2024), and 《4 and one-half, knuckle》 (Art Space Hanchigak, Pyeongtaek, 2021).
 
He has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, including 《LOGBOOK : Layered Memorie》 (Pier Contemporary, Seoul, 2025), 《Resonant Chamber》 (Art Space Hyeong, Seoul, 2025), 《G·Artience 2024: Connecting Week》 (DCC Grand Ballroom, Daejeon, 2024), Gwangju Media Art Festival 2023 《Breathing Light》 (Gwangju Media Art Platform, Gwangju, 2023), 《Self-Contradiction》 (PLACE MAK1, Seoul, 2021), and 《Push & Art》 (Gangdong Arts Center, Seoul, 2020).
 
Yun gained recognition through his participation in ‘2025 ARKO Day,’ and in 2018, he was selected as an artist for the 20th Danwon Art Festival.

References

• 윤대원, Daewon Yun (Artist Website)
• 2025 아르코데이, 아티스트 라운지: 작가 윤대원 (2025 ARKO DAY, Artist Lounge: Artist Daewon Yun)
• 아트허브, [전시 개요] 협업공간_한치각 – 4와 2분의 1마디 (Arthub, [Exhibition Overview] Art Space Hanchigak – 4 and one-half, knuckle)
• 강동문화재단, [인터뷰] PUSH & ART (Gangdong Foundation for Arts & Culture, [Interview] PUSH & ART)
• GIMYE, [서문] Quite Time (GIMYE, [Preface] Quite Time)
• 윕뉴스, 윤대원 작가, 인간의 촉각과 AI의 감각을 병치하다, 2025.01.24
• TINC, [서문] 강강-술래-잡기 (TINC, [Preface] Circle, Chase, Contact)