0. Preparatory Movement

Welcome (歡迎) to this place. Please take a seat on the chair at the center, or begin by exploring your surroundings. Do you see the light in all four directions? The structures illuminate the space like lighthouses. Let us set aside any tension and begin to move slowly. Along with the rotating mechanical sound, shadows appear, and forms are projected onto bodies. Those forms may be you—or they may not. Welcome to the apparition (幻影).


 
1. 접속 위에 놓인 접촉들

The performers enter while exploring the space. Without clearly defined gestures, they appear in their own rhythms, gazing at one another or drifting apart, at times measuring their distance from the audience. At first, the gaze touches the body and then withdraws; soon fingertips brush past and slip away. As bodies draw closer and move apart, the space itself transforms. Here, relationships are unexpectedly formed and dispersed. These relationships may exist between body and body, or between body and apparition.

Individual contacts become ways of perceiving and sensing the “other” through friction between bodies, gazes, gestures, and distances. Meanwhile, the light/images emitted from the projector are distorted through slowed speeds and overlapping frames, projecting “already-past gestures” onto bodies and generating another time-space.

Images projected onto the body intersect with and deviate from both past actions and movements occurring in the present. Just as misaligned contact functions as a sensory point where one crosses into another’s time, the situation of body/image intersecting with a delayed environment allows the body of the here-and-now to connect with a body dancing in a different time.

Such disturbances of perception are not merely visual confusion, but operations of contact and connection that newly activate the viewer’s own construction of reality. Performers and audience form relationships while suspending contact and connection, slowly exploring how sensations of wandering through space become delayed.


 
2. Connection without Contact, Bonds through Misalignment

The performance then borrows the forms of traditional games—ganggangsullae and tag—to form collective solidarity through rhythms and misalignments generated by group movement. With movements and choreography that are not perfectly synchronized, the performers maintain different speeds and intervals. Centered around the tagger (performer), the paths gradually tighten into spirals, and the audience responds with quickened steps to the performers’ gestures and bodily cues.

Although collective rhythm is never perfectly aligned, individual differences do not hinder connection; rather, they become the very conditions through which togetherness is formed. Speed, interval, and direction shift from moment to moment. While walking and running together, disparate beats coexist. Unsynchronized rhythms function not as imperfections, but as modes that reveal solidarity and contact through being-with.

Furthermore, even as the audience participates, they sense connections forming and dissolving, accepting states of deviation or misalignment within rhythm as they are. Ultimately, communal rhythm emerges not through perfect synchronization, but through a sensory condition in which mutual misalignments become connected.


 
3. Contemporary Anxiety, Suspended Suspense

Daewon Yun focuses on the state between “connection” and “contact.” This is not simply a shift in media environments, but a proposition concerning changes in how we sense and perceive the body today. As the expanded ubiquity of media increasingly virtualizes physical bodily sensation, tendencies toward stitching together reality intensify. In this process, ontological questions arise: how should one define oneself within the boundary between reality and the virtual? What kind of body is one that is mediated through screens? The artist reads these questions as a sensory environment tied to contemporary anxiety.

Contemporary anxiety is far removed from dramatic suspenseful events or clearly defined crises. Rather, anxiety persists through gestures that do not touch, gazes that do not respond. Connection becomes easier; contact grows distant. This sensation—like a moment frozen just before something happens—may be called “suspended suspense.” The moment of crisis has neither begun nor ended, and this delayed, layered condition is precisely the symptom of anxiety we sense today.

Joanna Lowry has described projected images not merely as means of representation, but as media that operate like “symptoms,” eliciting bodily sensation and psychological response in viewers.* Yun’s performance confronts this suspended tension—this delayed state of sensation—through the layering of physical apparatuses.

The rotating projection device disrupts the sequence of screen, body, and image, placing the audience in a space where temporal centers disappear. When images of the “already-past body” intersect with movements unfolding before one’s eyes, the viewer can no longer be certain which reality they are encountering.

This structure generates a new relationship between projected images and actual movement. It turns presentation into representation, and then attempts to reverse that process. Experiencing subtle vibrations between rewound forms of past time and movements of the present, the viewer reconstitutes that vibration as both a form of anxiety and a symptom of sensation.

Within this unstable sensory environment, “connection” returns to physical sensation. The moment projector light touches the body, it functions like heat. That warmth lingers on the skin as a sign of anxiety produced by sensory delay, image overlap, and misalignment between the real and the virtual. Within this heat, subject and object are no longer fixed. The projected form illuminates me while simultaneously gazing back at me; my body overlaps with another’s shadow and becomes blurred.

The moment of contact is not merely an act of touching, but a sensory situation that suspends and inverts the boundary between self and other. Through this inverted sensation, we perceive movement within the form of another, and within the indistinct boundaries of the screen, we come to contact and connect with ourselves.
 

* Joanna Lowry, “Projecting Symptoms,” in Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art, ed. Tamara Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 93–110.

References

• [비평]《강강-술래-잡기》서문
  [Critique]《Circle, Chase, Contact》PREFACE