Installation view of 《Frankie》 © N/A

The Story of Frankie — Frankie was a friend that only I could see. My friends did not believe in Frankie’s existence and often passed straight through him. Frankie was afraid of my friends. At times, Frankie followed me to class, made strange noises, or tripped me when I was about to kick a ball, getting in the way of making new friends. On a lonely birthday, I blew out the candles and wished for Frankie to disappear. I told Frankie to find a child who believed in him. I said I no longer believed. I wished for him to be gone.

I acted as if he did not exist. When I stopped looking at Frankie, he gradually became translucent. At some point, I could no longer hear anything, and he slowly disappeared from my field of vision. In other words, Frankie never existed in the first place—because he was never real to begin with.


Installation view of 《Frankie》 © N/A

When I began imagining scenes whose physical causes were known yet unclear, and whose remaining traces were insufficient to prove the phenomena, I encountered stories of Frankie circulating online. What are these beings? What should we call them? Beings that are with us, that can be sensed, yet cannot quite be explained through language—beings as blanks, blanks themselves, question marks. At the end of these question marks, we found ourselves wanting to talk about these beings.

Yuja Kim begins from personal experiences of nightmares, capturing traces left on the body after sleep and changes in the temperature of objects. Visualizing discomfort arising both inside and outside the body, her work actively draws on tactile imagery engraved in the places where blanks have passed, rendering vibrations within stillness through photography. For Kim, nightmares are sites that contain a sense of inversion. Objects triggered by the sensation of nightmares hint at the possibility of transforming into beings that carry both chilling tension and latent warmth.


Installation view of 《Frankie》 © N/A

Jungyeon Park focuses on two functions of action cameras: waterproofing and night vision. Action cameras, capable of capturing images anywhere by overcoming water and darkness, resemble the gaze of Odysseus, the mythic explorer. Yet images that infiltrate invisible spaces instead evoke the strangeness concealed within visibility. What we encounter in images that dismantle the unseen world are apparitions and ghosts that come to visit us.

Youngju Hong seizes upon losses that occur in processes of sensory perception. Images clinging to text encroach upon—and simultaneously summon—the empty place of beings that slip between names and gazes. Beings unable to borrow a body from a name speak briefly, like a single rupture heard in the quiet of sleep. Transparent movements linger near the ear, attempting a transition into a state that can be sensed.

ORB unfolds individual investigations into blanks that wander through the inside and outside of the body, leaving unexpected traces. Rather than clarifying the ambiguity of blanks or forcing them into a single phenomenon, the three artists observe the afterimages of blanks as they freely traverse bodily interior and exterior. In forms that cannot be grasped, blanks circle us and brush past. These fleeting encounters are the only language through which we connect with blanks—murmurs that hint at the possibility of other beings and other worlds.

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