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There are moments when states we believe we know well—through frequent encounter or familiarity—begin to slip away. The field of art sometimes transforms what we call the “obvious” into a question imbued with doubt and fear. Particularly amid the turbulence of digital technologies, our sensory understanding of the physical and the immaterial readily falters, and hybrid subjects and situations emerge with increasing prominence through layers of overlap.

As our bodies strive to keep pace with the speed of change, they simultaneously expand and sever the range of sensation. Moreover, the body as a condition that once defined the individual through an independently recognized completeness gradually relinquishes that absolute closure, coming instead to acquire meaning through self-verification as a being entangled in relations.

Here, Daewon Yun’s solo exhibition 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 suspends sensory judgments between the real and the virtual, layers bodies, and replaces the obvious with questions, inviting us into an art space filled with apparitions. Indeed, the space was full of apparitions. Layer upon layer of bodies and shadows, apparitions within screens and mirrors, and between their contacts flowed our welcome to connection.*


 
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Mediated by the corporeal and technological conditions of “contact” and “connection,” Daewon Yun reconstructs the sensory and perceptual conditions that surround our bodies today. Here, “contact” and “connection” extend beyond concepts that merely distinguish physical or technological relations between body and body, human and human, or human and machine. Yun observes a state in which the tactile sensations of actual skin-to-skin contact and encounters within digital sensory realms are not clearly separated but instead coexist in hybrid form.

In the unfamiliar world he unfolds, bodies are placed within a mixture of physical contact and immaterial connection. At the center stands a towering projector, rotating as it converts recorded bodies into light and disperses them. Surrounding it are transparent fabrics, screens, and mirrors arranged in reference to the bagua formation, along with lights in the five cardinal colors, all holding their positions as structural symbols.

We enter a space that is simultaneously artwork and stage. After passing through a suspended time, we encounter four performers. The performers’ bodies and our own continually interact with the world, searching for objects of contact or connection; at times, contact and connection metaphorically substitute for or transform into one another.

At this moment, bodies are prepared as the most fundamental physical elements of subjectivity. Depending on the direction of the rotating projector, recorded bodies accumulate upon fabric and screens, performing chance encounters with physical bodies. Shadows repeatedly disappear and reappear, while bodies reflected in mirrors disperse and spread throughout the space. In this way, bodies there repeatedly sense, contact, and connect.**

Contact without contact, improvised contact, the gaze exchanged between eyes and the projector, the radiating heat of dispersed beings, and our synchronized connection. As performers repeatedly connect and disconnect, contact and drop out, our bodies, faced with their challenges and initiations, break away from possessed finitude and open toward the world. The frameworks surrounding our bodies are reconfigured, giving rise to a slight sense of unfamiliarity and discomfort.

This may stem from anxieties and isolation accompanying the development of digital network technologies; or from the process by which socially and culturally contact-oriented bodies are re-recognized as digital bodies of connection in response to the expansion of new sensory apparatuses; or from the perplexity of bodies that have slipped away from physical environments into the blurred boundary between the real and the virtual.

Within Yun’s invitation, which refuses to confine the body to a purely biological frame, a chain of complex thoughts continues to unfold. Yun confronts as a sensory reality of our time the very transformation of the body—fragmented by digital technologies, dematerialized, and rendered connectable. Through his work, we gradually come to accept that the body is not a fixed entity but a state within relations, a mode of existence as connection. As our bodies become open bodies, we encounter the subsequent scenes, momentarily setting aside tangled reflections and beginning to grope toward the possibility of overcoming individualistic alienation and restoring a sense of community.


 
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At the core of Daewon Yun’s solo exhibition 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 lies “play.” As the title suggests, it is composed through the contact (and connection) of two long-standing communal games: ganggangsullae and tag. The movements Yun devises are not limited to play as a device for evoking childhood sensory memories. His approach to bodily movement does not merely realize an aesthetic of formal motion. As he states, “dance is an act of liberation from primordial anxiety,” and within his practice, the ritualistic potential of socially constructed and perceived movements is expanded.

Whereas his earlier works focused on patterning and imaging mechanically derived movements of the body—extending and exhausting the body in the process—《Circle, Chase, Contact》 shifts its focus toward movements that vocalize ritual gestures and collective emotions. It expands emotional rhythmic synchronization of bodies into a ritual performance aimed at the liberation of sensation.

The method Yun proposes—“to experience contact in a way that is unfamiliar yet as familiar as possible, and to feel oneself as part of a community”—is realized through the formats of ganggangsullae and tag. Within the framework of play, movement is not predetermined but decided through improvisation and responsiveness. The movements of performers and participants overlap and intermingle, rearranged within immaterial imagery through the rules of these games, and enter the orbit of repeatedly shared emotional attitudes.

Movements reminiscent of fern-breaking, hand-clapping and foot-stamping, roof-treading, or gatekeeper games go beyond expressions of mere excitement or pleasure. They become ways of constructing relationships—calling someone, catching, touching, fleeing, and gazing—on the opposite side of solitary play. As roles shift and the game transforms, we follow the performers and become subjects who hold hands and run together. In these relational movements, contact becomes the most primal medium of sensation, and brief encounters and eliminations leave behind a desire for new connections.

Ultimately, the communal worldview of Korean tradition unfolded by 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 proves neither grand nor distant. The worldview of community encountered through Yun resembles childhood—meeting friends without firm plans, inventing games on the spot, running and playing until dusk settles, and heading home at a parent’s call, leaving behind an open-ended “See you tomorrow!” Without calculating right and wrong, gain and loss, or relational accounting, we find ourselves liberated to become friends even with those we meet for the first time.

Within that liberation, the rhythmic overlap of the real and the virtual—realized through the coupling of projector movement and digital technology—recedes into a sensory backdrop, while the center of time and space gradually shifts from thematic structures to our bodies. Through 《Circle, Chase, Contact》, Yun reveals the concern that “digital culture unsettles the body and generates unstable sensations,” yet he simultaneously accepts the state of technological media we face as a natural transformation of the sensory environment, exposing the questions that drift along with it.

The art space he constructs presents our bodies not as fixed entities but as variable, relational states. There, we simply run and play, anticipate encounters and tomorrows, and hope. And those invited gradually become the protagonists of play, and the owners of the space. In this way, Yun’s field becomes a sensory laboratory that moves beyond nostalgic aims derived from body and community, toward re-sensing the body and rethinking togetherness under contemporary conditions. It is filled not with critique but with reflection, not with regression but with recovery.
 


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Daewon Yun’s solo exhibition 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 consisted of 19 performance sessions over seven days, along with one artist talk. According to the artist, the project aimed “to expand the boundaries between traditional performance and media art through the characteristics of multidisciplinary art that combines diverse genres and media.”

In this sense, it may be more accurately described as multidisciplinary art, performance, or live art rather than an exhibition. Notably, however, official promotional materials continued to refer to the project as an “exhibition,” producing a subtle tension by deviating from the conventional grammar of solo shows that typically presume single authorship and gallery-centered modes of viewing.

Yun thus assumes multiple roles: artist, planner of a multidisciplinary art project, and designer of the exhibition-viewing experience. Particularly noteworthy is his strategy of designing the conditions for viewers’ sensory immersion through the structure of performance, positioning our bodies and attitudes as interfaces. This constitutes a central strategy and methodology of the project.

In contemporary commercial technologies, the configuration of an interface radically shapes narratives of function and structures of sensation. An interface extends beyond a mere control panel; it is a device that opens possibilities for connection and sustains environments of contact. Yun transposes the concept of the interface into an artistic methodology. In other words, he proposes a new “interface of perception” at the intersection of technology and sensation.

This interface is concretized through performers’ bodies and completed through the audience’s senses. Not only physical bodies, but also the will to sense, the attitude toward immersion, and the state of blending into space—all become interfaces.

While, in technological history, an interface mediates functions between user and system, in Yun’s work it becomes a device and attitudinal frame that induces tension and collaboration between body and sensation, media and perception. Consequently, audiences are placed in multiple states: they may simply watch, participate, gaze, or immerse themselves, operating as beings that tune sensory frequencies. This structure exceeds participatory art, demanding a transformation of sensory attitude itself.

Before the performance begins, a twenty-minute period of suspended time symbolically reveals the preparatory structure of this attitude. Before performers’ bodies appear, the central projector, transparent fabrics and screens arranged in bagua formation, mirrors, and five-colored lights occupy the status of the artwork itself, prior to becoming a stage.

These material objects function as omens of the scene to come, as sensory warm-ups, and as intervals between pre-connection sensation and imminent contact. Here, Yun’s work expands beyond media performance into the design of a sensory environment. Audiences prepare themselves as a potential community, readying their attitudes for immersion. This silence becomes a key to understanding the structural rhythm and spatial sense of the ensuing performance.

The performance unfolds in two parts. In Part I, the movements of four performers appear fragmented among images and shadows projected onto fabric, screens, and mirrors. Amid excessive visual information and heterogeneous temporalities, audiences abandon single-point perception, turning their heads, moving between scenes, adjusting flows, and reconstructing coordinates of sensation. Sensation here is no longer natural but an effort that must be continually perceived and tuned. While this information-rich structure may at times induce unstable immersion or stalled movement, its intent becomes clear as Part II begins.

In Part II, audience movement is incorporated into the stage, revealing retrospectively that the earlier stillness and gaps were conditions of sensory preparation. No longer peripheral others, audiences become subjects of sensation within the structure, experiencing how their bodies generate meaning through processes of contact and elimination. The forms of ganggangsullae and tag symbolically realize this structure of sensory connection. Holding performers’ hands, running together, searching, gazing, and fleeing, audiences retrain patterns of sensation.

In tag, subjects exchange positions through contact, while ganggangsullae invokes collective emotion through repetition. Toward the end, all participants—who had been playing both separately and together—join hands, forming a single rotating circle. The four performers, once challengers and initiators, quietly exit one by one. There is no longer any need to read cues or follow others. The communal play now sustains itself autonomously through the audience’s bodies.

This scene is not a simple reenactment of play, but a strategy that reverses the immaterial interactions emphasized by technological media into bodily affect. The performance thus becomes not a question of “how to represent community,” but an experiment in attitude asking “how community can be sensed.”

This experiment extends into the collaborative process itself. The movement designer, sound designer, and four performers are not merely collaborators; they participate in the artist talk alongside Yun as equal contributors. Notably, the sound designer collected non-contact sounds generated by the resonance of a gayageum with wind, and after each rehearsal and meeting, participants shared their sensations and progress through a collaborative web page. This functioned not as simple online connection but as a structure of contact without contact, synchronizing attitudes and rendering each performance a unique sensory event through improvisation and repetition.

Within a ritual structure that repeats yet never remains identical, Yun explores the rhythms of sensation generated by multidisciplinary art, seeking to invent new modes of connection between body and technology, community and attitude. The sensory structure he designs lingers with us even after the viewing ends—not merely as an afterimage or memory, but as a question of how we might continue to keep our bodies open in everyday life. Thus, art sometimes quietly activates an attitude no one demanded, gently inclining our bodies toward others.
 


* The ambivalent term “apparition/welcome” (환영) is borrowed from the introduction of the exhibition preface written by Jihee Yun.
** Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers sensation to be a moment-by-moment “re-creation and re-composition of the world.” The art space Yun unfolds reveals the expressive capacity of the body, and his conception of art may be understood as the encounter between subject and world, and the process of recreating and recomposing the world beyond that encounter. Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “artistic expression gives what it expresses an existence in itself, arranging such self-existing entities within nature as objects accessible to all of us” also comes to mind. Yun translates contemporary conditions of perception and existence derived from corporeal and technological circumstances into the keywords of contact and connection, arranging even himself—following Merleau-Ponty—as an object accessible to all within nature. Through this, we are positioned to grasp ourselves as one aspect of existence within the field of encounter between subject and world, and within the process of recreating and recomposing the world. See Nam-In Lee, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception (Paju: Hangilsa, 2013).

References

• [리뷰] 《강강-술래-잡기》 REVIEW
  [Review] 《Circle, Chase, Contact》 REVIEW