Instinct and nature are sometimes understood as one and the same. The principles of the survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle have long served as the dominant narrative structures of wildlife documentaries. In Butcher's Crossing (1960), the American novelist John Williams (1922–1994) offers a powerful portrayal of nature as it intersects with humanity's animal instincts.

Rejecting the city that refuses to seek "the source of the world," the novel's protagonist ventures into the American West in pursuit of genuine "freedom, goodness, hope, and vitality," joining a buffalo hunting expedition. The detailed descriptions of driving buffalo into valleys and skinning their carcasses in the remote Colorado wilderness lay bare the brutality of human beings without restraint.

As one reads scenes in which the hunters become consumed by killing itself, teetering on the edge of madness, it becomes difficult to deny the ambivalence of simultaneously recoiling from and being drawn toward the irresistible force of slaughter.

At the same time, moments of sudden disaster brought about by abrupt changes in nature remind us that life and death are ultimately determined in an instant by the irrepressible power of the natural world.In an entirely different context, the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon writes in the preface to her travelogue I Do Woman Animal Asia (2019): "The thing we know least is that we are bea sts."

Existing outside hierarchies and systems accumulated over time, becoming "woman," "beast," and "Asia" as beings that willingly "cast anxiety into the world" invites comparison with what Leeje calls "doing painting." Within the aesthetic world constructed by a woman artist living and working in twenty-first-century Korea, instinct, potentiality, and the unconscious operate prior to the logic of rationality and reason.

These become the very material of art as transitional, experiential, and continually shifting emotions. Consequently, Leeje's aesthetic world simultaneously engages the artist's awareness of the rapidly changing era in which she lives, questions concerning the survival of contemporary art, the search for an autonomous artistic language, and the public, critical consciousness she holds as both a woman and a member of a community living here and now.

Leeje's tenth solo exhibition, 《Expectations of Night》 (MMCA Residency Changdong Exhibition Hall, 2024–2025), marks a significant departure from her previous practice in several respects. Looking back over the trajectory of her career, Leeje began working as an artist during the mid-2000s, following the political transition of Korea in the 1990s, the rapid rise and globalization of popular culture, and the widespread emergence of neoliberal values and digital sensibilities.

Shortly after completing graduate school, she made her debut with the solo exhibition 《Our Dazzling Moments》 (2005) at Joheung Gallery. For more than a decade thereafter, she focused primarily on realist figurative paintings of urban landscapes, exploring the expressive possibilities of fluid brushwork and painterly materiality while directing attention toward the hidden subjects embedded within the cityscape.

At the time, Seoul's art scene was shaped by alternative spaces that had emerged in the late 1990s, fostering experimentation beyond institutional frameworks and nurturing self-organized artistic networks. Artists formed communities through shared social and intellectual sensibilities, while emerging artist support programs created conditions that allowed young artists to sustain their practices beyond art school.

Simultaneously, changes in the media environment—such as the widespread adoption of digital cameras and the rise of internet-based democratic movements—encouraged a generation to seek modes of thinking and artistic experimentation distinct from those of their predecessors. Above all, the arrival of the new millennium itself instilled a profoundly ambivalent set of values, both institutionally and subconsciously.

Young artists of the period, suspended between vague optimism about the future and the accelerating consumerism of an increasingly competitive society, found themselves living in a present disconnected from the landscapes that survived only as childhood memories, experiencing both a longing for an intangible future and a nostalgia for a fragmented past.

Leeje's early works contemplate disappearing urban landscapes almost as though they were self-portraits. Unable to fully define who she was, yet searching for ways to recognize a self in constant transformation, her gaze confronts the world directly, while her brush moves with the speed and honesty of a pencil—swift, uncompromising, and intense.

She subsequently turned her attention to the city's temporary landscapes: motorcycles delivering congratulatory flower wreaths, utility workers repairing telephone poles, street vendors, anonymous pedestrians and crowds, and scenes of redevelopment and reconstruction. With her seventh solo exhibition, 《Halfway Round the Wrist》 (2017), her artistic practice entered a new phase centered on "the body and abstraction."

Although her painterly language had never been unrelated to the body, the increasingly varied thickness of paint and the construction of color and surface through the traces of bodily gesture came to function as attempts to move beyond conventional modes of representation and the traditional boundaries of painting.

More importantly, however, it was during this period that both the subjects of her paintings and the conceptual concerns of her work became increasingly focused on the body of the city, the female body, the laboring body, and the caregiving body. From this point onward, the body emerged as the central narrative, formal language, and political framework of her artistic world.

This exhibition is likely to be remembered as another turning point in Leeje's artistic trajectory. In 《Expectations of Night》 (December 19, 2024 – January 19, 2025, MMCA Residency Changdong Exhibition Hall), the artist constructs the exhibition's narrative through signs and iconography that evoke both large and small-scale disasters, while exploring the radical potential of artistic images to confront the material and technologically dominated conditions of the present through experiments across diverse media.

At the core of this endeavor lies what is commonly understood in art as "the body"—that is, the process of embodiment, through which memories and sensations that remain within the body are excavated and given voice.

This is evident in works such as the painting/mixed-media series that reproduces images inscribed in memory and the unconscious at a consistent scale ('The World Goes On' series); the video The Mind That Paints, in which trained performance collides with unconditioned bodily gestures and textual utterance; the lithographic works The World Goes On: In the Forest I–V, printed from footage documenting the nude performance of a man and a woman in an isolated forest; and the installation River, in which memories of fear and despair embedded in the body are rendered visible.

Yet these works cannot be fully explained through the concept of embodiment as it has been theorized within Western aesthetics alone. This is because they emerge from the fragmented and refracted history of a particular region—in this case, the history of art in Korea and its geopolitical position within East Asia—where artistic practices and their social meanings must be read in relation to one another.

For this reason, the ways in which the imaginative and unconscious imagery, social symbolism, and intellectual structures embedded in the works operate inevitably approach a form of primitivism that can only be understood within a political framework.

Existing outside the civilizational and rational standards established by the cultural hierarchies of Western modernism, differences of race, gender, class, and ethnicity become the material through which new symbols and iconographies emerge—ones that cannot be adequately interpreted through the canonical narratives of art history alone.

Put differently, Korean art, shaped by the intertwined histories of imperial colonialism and rapid modernization, has inevitably developed a complex and demanding aesthetic character. As a result, the boundaries separating popular, subcultural, and high culture have become increasingly indistinct, while Western modes of understanding coexist with Eastern traditions, voluntary Orientalism, and indigenous worldviews through processes of simultaneous appropriation.

Such complexity resists simple application of Western theoretical frameworks, just as it cannot be fully understood solely through social issues or collective unconsciousness. At the same time, the accelerating simultaneity of today's globalized world only intensifies this complexity.

Consequently, works that respond to rapidly changing historical and environmental conditions cannot be regarded either as the inevitable products of a linear historical progression or merely as abstract manifestations of an "ethnographic present." Rather, they must be understood as historical outcomes produced within their own temporalities and specific historical trajectories.

The first work to confront viewers upon entering the exhibition is River (lithograph printed on cotton fabric with mixed coloring, installed on columns, 246 × 1,866 cm, 2023). Suspended across the corridor connecting the two gallery spaces, this large-scale installation recreates a memorial site formed by waves of Post-it notes bearing messages of mourning.

In recent years, whenever Korean society has experienced social tragedies or disasters, similar commemorative spaces have emerged in public locations such as the sites of the incidents themselves or plazas in front of City Hall. Originally categorized as office or stationery supplies, Post-it notes are commonly used by students and office workers as temporary tools for remembering things, intended to remain only for a limited period of time.

Memorial spaces composed of Post-it notes—an extension of online comment culture into physical space—represent a new cultural phenomenon in which spontaneous and voluntary empathy and participation are combined with the immediacy and ritualistic character of on-site acts of remembrance.

Unlike the protest posters or banners of previous generations, today's Post-it notes function as lightweight and flexible "mobile media," becoming "ballots" from which institutional procedures have been omitted. At the same time, the countless emotional messages left by anonymous individuals wrap themselves around the collective body of society and history like a layer of skin, allowing many people to remember a particular moment in their own ways.

While the work adopts the form of preserving and enclosing the time and space once created by these accumulations of Post-it notes, the texts written on each note have become illegible, as though soaked by water and blurred away. In doing so, the work relocates itself from literal representation into the realm of mediated image.

This transformed image draws together signs that drift across multiple boundaries: between media and the analogue, past and present, presence and absence, death and life. A culture of participation born through mobile media becomes translated into physical acts performed on-site, while a temporary memorial space from the past is reconstructed as an artwork existing in the present.

Although the erased texts emphasize the absence of their original authors, the printed images of absence simultaneously become a kind of apparatus for revealing invisible death—much like the early belief that photography possessed the magical ability to capture the soul.

Nowhere in either its title or visual appearance does River explicitly refer to Itaewon. Yet our thoughts inevitably travel there, to that place and that moment.

This is likely because the Itaewon crowd crush (2022) became the event most visibly marked by the widespread use of Post-it memorials expressing mourning and consolation, while the waves of notes that once covered the walls of the narrow alley immediately beyond Exit 1 of Itaewon Station continue to resonate within the work's physical form.

Looking back at the extraordinary outpouring of words of comfort that emerged in Itaewon, one might conclude that they arose precisely because they were accompanied by an equally intense wave of condemnation and hatred. Itaewon has long been represented within Korean society as a space of "the outsider"—a district shaped by the presence of the U.S. military base, by multicultural exchange, and by queer communities and various subcultures.

The Halloween celebrations that flourished there trace their origins to ancient Celtic festivals honoring the dead and spirits. As this tradition migrated to North America, it developed its own symbols and customs before eventually arriving in Korea, where it took root as a new form of popular culture that outwardly resembled North American Halloween festivities.

At the same time, however, the celebration became entangled with generational divides, cultural gaps, and competing economic logics. On one side, Halloween in Korea has often been narrowly dismissed as either an expression of cultural imperialism or a capitalist novelty consumed by immature young people seeking mere transgression.

On the other, it has long been embraced and enjoyed as a hybrid cultural festival where everyone from elementary school students to adults participates freely. The Itaewon disaster ultimately revealed the inability of everyday society to prepare for circumstances that were already unfolding, regardless of differing understandings of this emerging cultural phenomenon.

It also exposed regressive reactions that implied hierarchies of mourning, expanding into political distortions and an immature sense of community. Most strikingly, at memorial ceremonies where death ought to have been remembered through the force of physical presence, the absence of memorial tablets or portrait photographs transformed every victim into an anonymous non-presence. Such an omission can only be understood as an attitude that renders particular deaths into the deaths of others.

In this way, the narrative of the exhibition begins from specific social events, the deaths entangled with them, and an attempt or impulse to trace the boundary between death and life. What River represents is not the political positions or interests surrounding the event, but the shared sensibility through which the emotions triggered by the event operated socially.

In Cultural Politics of Emotion (2023), affect economy scholar Sara Ahmed theorizes the ways in which emotions such as fear, pain, hatred, terror, disgust, and shame operate in relation to their linguistic articulation and the phenomena of the body. She analyzes how emotions do not remain merely as personal possessions or states, but are converted into affective value, become signs, and operate like capital.

Just as capital functions under neoliberalism, emotions responding to particular events or situations render power structures, dominant ideologies, and histories invisible, while reorganizing individuals and groups connected solely through feeling, thereby becoming central to the cultural politics that regulate citizenship.

In this process, Ahmed refers to Freud’s unconscious emotions, suggesting that what is repressed from consciousness is not a “feeling” such as an affective impulse, but a provisionally connected “thought,” and that psychoanalysis therefore implies that the movement of social emotions involves a process of association.

Thus, “feeling” moves diachronically between past and present across various processes of signification among different individuals, sliding between forms and reawakening histories of the past, while through this very sliding, a particular object comes to be accepted as the cause of an emotion. The various emotions experienced or shared through the Itaewon disaster can be considered in light of such an affective economy.

Since the cause of the disaster was clearly human negligence, and the victims were young and fragile lives, the Itaewon disaster naturally became linked to the Sewol Ferry disaster (2014). The object of emotion circulated both synchronically and diachronically, leading to the accumulation of affective value.

The emotions of those who participated in this affective economy, including through Post-it memorials, expanded into greater affective value less through the Post-it notes themselves or the messages written on them than through their circulation and movement online, drawing in the memories and provisional thoughts of many people.

Following Freud, Ahmed adds Lacan’s discussion, which posits the “subject” of emotions and thoughts as the unique site of absence and loss. In the affective economy accumulated over time, the “subject” (citizen or nation) exists less as a substantive entity than as a point of intersection, and the (common) unconscious refers to a state in which the relations among subject, object, sign, and other have not been materialized.

In this context, our emotions repeatedly materialize as the “surface” of a collective in which psyche, society, and object are not clearly separated. Statements made by particular groups participating in protests, news footage reporting those statements, and the chain reaction of illustrations and memes that satirize them in turn strengthen affective impulses while weakening thought and analysis.

In this work, then, the erased or concealed letters within the Post-it notes may be an attempt to confront the materialized surface of this affective economy, while at the same time withdrawing the common emotions without a “subject” that had operated and accumulated like capital.

The “body of emotion” represented by the work summons feelings with which we could not help but automatically empathize, yet the unreadable letters simultaneously press pause on those feelings and make us confront the material itself.

These tightly opposed ambivalent positions lead us toward the space beyond the event, the era beyond the space, and the universal human condition of death beyond the era, prompting us to consider what this means in the contemporary moment and what it means for art to address such a subject.

In her artist’s note, Leeje writes that she focused on “excavating and visualizing the sensations and memories that remain within the body.” For an artist who has long explored the theme of the “body,” the body encompasses multiple bodies: the body represented on the surface, the body living through an era, the body that remembers the past, and the body that performs the act of painting.

In his well-known work Phenomenology of Perception (1955), Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains experientiality connected to one’s own bodily space in opposition to Cartesian and Kantian thought, which perceive objects through the perception of space. He writes that in our experience of our own body, experience is merely an outer layer, or interface, and that through the process in which bodily “being” beneath objective space is joined together, the body comes to find primordial space.

In Leeje’s artistic world, the body, in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, concerns the “experiencing body.” Women artists within the canon of art history have commonly projected gender, sexuality, politics, and allegories of their time through the body. However, the body as an artistic image emerging from the geopolitical context of Korea is formed within a far more complex framework, and therefore inevitably demands an equally multilayered reading.

One might think, for instance, of the early performance works of the artist Lee Bul. These are critical works in which the artist’s awareness of the representation of women, the male gaze, and questions of power and ideology is realized through the performativity of performance.

Preserved only through photographs and video documentation, these works evoke memories related to violent incidents of state power within the historical context of the 1980s, stand in opposition to mythic signifiers and conventional texts of femininity, and enact a politics of the body that satirizes Korea’s modernization project, which had internalized Orientalism.

If we connect the social conditions that produced those performative bodies of the past with Leeje’s bodies, we may consider the female body as a similar political field. Of course, in this exhibition, Leeje’s body extends beyond the female body to encompass broader categories, including bodies of diverse genders and the body as a metaphor for physical and psychological trauma. Yet most of the works do not outwardly represent a complete body.

In River, as well as in the ‘The World Goes On’ series (oil on canvas with lithographic printed parts, 130 × 130 cm each, 2024), the various bodies and metaphors of the body suggest vulnerable, severed, erased bodies, or fragments thereof: a car crushed in an accident; a pile of ownerless shoes evoking the landscape of “disaster”; Limbo, in which a man and woman lie in opposite directions with only their heads touching; a woman looking out toward a moonlit riverside, which ironically also becomes a satire of the current political situation; the outline of a dining scene; a laborer obscured by bundles piled high on a handcart; the feet and ankles of women seated together; and mountain ridges roughly finished and lacking clear contours.

These present only parts rather than wholes. A series of “situations” from which concrete subjects have been erased reveal distinctive perspectives through omitted or absent bodies, repeatedly forming invisible connections and separations.

Ultimately, through the colorless image of a crushed car behind a blood-red ground, and the blue flowers blooming—or withering—in front of it, we come to understand that all of these are images of a state of so-called “shock.” Technically, the colors and combinations encountered successively in these flat works are all unfamiliar and intense.

They are far from realistic representation and seem to have been chosen primarily for the dramatic effects of light and darkness. Departing from the “intermediate colors” the artist has long used, a palette centered on primary and complementary colors fills the canvases completely through movements of symmetry and overlap.

Some images render the central subject in black and white, while filling the area around or over it with fields of color, at times making them appear like negative images from X-ray film. It is as though an X-ray were being cast over a traumatized world, allowing us to examine closely the inner circumstances invisible to the eye.

This exhibition, however, places greater emphasis on the manifestation of being than on tracing the causal relationships of specific events. It gestures toward a more primordial subjectivity, approaching social critique through emancipatory expression.

The many images that evoke bodily experience function not merely as surfaces through which meaning is accessed, but as temporary subjects and passages opening outward toward the world around them.

One such example is The World Goes On: In the Forest I–V (lithograph printed on cotton fabric with mixed coloring, each 130 × 130 cm, 2024), a newly conceived work that appropriates Min Joung-Ki's In the Forest (1986). Across five panels unfolds an unidentified forest landscape—or, more precisely, a rocky cliff face upon which a naked man and woman spread their bodies, feeling their way forward with both hands and feet.

Their movement through the narrow crevices of the unstable rock wall—almost crawling rather than walking—appears at once desperate and ritualistic. Images transferred in black ink are overlaid with translucent red pigments, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of dream imagery or faded photographs.

To create the work, Leeje first collaborated in workshops with a collective of contemporary dance practitioners to study bodily movement. She then directed nude performances by male and female performers on the slopes of Bukhansan in Seoul, producing the video [Title] (2024).

The World Goes On: In the Forest I–V subsequently emerged as an intermediate image between photography and painting: panoramic stills extracted from the completed video were lithographically printed across five lengths of cotton fabric before being reworked by hand with paint.

The work resonates with the realist critical consciousness of Korean art history through its exploration of the naked body as the site of an authentic relationship between liberated individuals and the forest understood as isolated wilderness. In an essay published in 2004, art critic Choi Min (1944–2019) interpreted Min Joung-Ki's In the Forest as an allegory of the oppressive military dictatorship of the early 1980s.

He argued that although painting is conventionally understood as a spatial medium, the work discovered a new pictorial grammar by experimenting with temporality through the internal relationship between space and time, much like narrative structures in literature. In doing so, it functioned as both an icon and a symbol of trauma and healing inscribed within the collective unconscious of its historical moment.

Min Joung-Ki's In the Forest consists of ten lithographs based on photographs of a man and woman moving through an unnamed forest according to the artist's direction. First presented in his second solo exhibition, 《Spring of Seoul》 (1986), the work focuses not on clearly defined motives or destinations but on movement itself, as human beings are cast into the wilderness of the forest.

Whereas Min Joung-Ki's In the Forest presents a sequence of a man and woman advancing toward the viewer, Leeje instead adopts the position of an observer watching performers who appear entirely unaware of being seen. While Min builds tonal depth through dense linear drawing, Leeje's images are constructed from tiny halftone dots produced through the chemical interaction of light and shadow, accumulating like digital pixels to reveal their forms. 

Leeje recalls that when she first encountered In the Forest early in her career, it remained vividly lodged in her memory because it departed from the conventional figurative realism associated with Minjung art and instead depicted a surreal time and space. Her attachment to—and influence from—In the Forest as an art historical symbol can be understood less through superficial visual resemblance than through the very process by which images are formed.

Indeed, the media experiments undertaken throughout this exhibition constitute an attempt to overturn and reconfigure the very concept of painting, long regarded as the privileged medium of fine art. The square formats, suggestive of the screens through which media permeates everyday life; the images extracted from performance documentation; and the printing techniques that evoke the mass production of artworks as objects all reveal Leeje's pursuit of new formal languages.

In this respect, her experiments can be understood as a contemporary counterpart to Min Joung-Ki's own investigations into barbershop paintings, photomontage, and printmaking before relocating to Yangpyeong—experiments through which he explored a machine-mediated visuality that challenged painterly representations of humanity.

Leeje's practice similarly embodies an open and emancipatory attitude toward a society increasingly governed by materiality and technology. In Leeje's work, the traces of bodies observed through the camera replace forms constructed through brush and paint.

These traces foreground not only the object once desired by the technologically reproducible image of photography, but also a defining characteristic of contemporary art: that physical labor is predicated upon intellectual labor, while simultaneously emphasizing the artist's position as producer.

In his writings on the emergence of photography, Walter Benjamin describes modern humanity's desire to draw objects ever closer through mechanical reproduction. Unlike aura, which manifests as a singular phenomenon bound to a particular time and place, photography brings its subject spatially and psychologically closer, reproducing surfaces in order to hold them near the viewer while projecting the desire to know—and ultimately to possess—them.

The images Leeje produces function, in a context very different from that of Min Joung-Ki's historical moment, as signs and healing figures of what Judith Butler has described as "precarious life." At the same time, they stage the presence of life itself while projecting a chain of desires fundamentally separated from—and unfulfilled by—the present.

Every sign sustaining urban existence has disappeared. In its place emerges the surreal spacetime of forests and naked bodies, dreaming of an unknown liberation. As mechanically reproduced images, these works strip away the conventional shell that has long adhered to representations of the female body and the nude in painting.

Rather than preserving traditional artistic aura or concealed symbolic meaning, they instead generate anonymous phenomena and imagined spacetimes. Through the mechanism of reproduction—which has, in many respects, become more familiar than painting itself for contemporary viewers—the audience occupies the position of observer, encountering bodily movement as "a kind of collective technological construct" transferred from the realm of aesthetic experience into that of the social.

Death in River collides with life in The World Goes On: In the Forest I–V, leading in turn to yet another encounter with death in The Mind That Paints (two-channel video, color, sound, text, 20 min. 38 sec., 2024). Within a space enclosed by blank white walls, more than ten teenagers are given time to express themselves freely, without rules or restrictions.

They fill the long walls with charcoal drawings—faces of cartoon characters and adolescent inscriptions such as "freedom," "I love you," and "Chelsea champions"—only to repeatedly smear them away with their hands. Sharing the same space, two dancers continue a sequence of trained movements, crouching on the floor as they press together their heads, feet, and hands, repeatedly overlapping and connecting their bodies.

The hands, feet, and bodies of everyone gathered in the space become stained with charcoal soot, and the more their movements accumulate, the darker the space itself becomes. The video documenting this entire process is overlaid with subtitled text that traces the experiential boundary between life and death:

"It was then that my body began to rise. As I swung my tense arms up and down, air filled my thin coat. Buoyed lightly, the sorrow trembling beneath my suspended feet circled with a buzzing sound before disappearing toward the square."

Sara Ahmed examines the frequent appearance of the word "disgust" in American discourse following the September 11 attacks, analyzing various forms of textual expression through Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. She argues that, through metonymic contact between object and sign, disgust comes to appear as though it were an objective property.

Simultaneously, by traversing the boundaries of the body and reversing the relation between inside and outside, disgust operates much like abjection, in which boundaries themselves become substituted by objects, thereby producing shifts in relations of power. Here, disgust is displaced onto the quality of stickiness or viscosity.

Signs such as hate speech become sticky through repetition: they cling, adhere, and generate chains of association within society, causing the bodies that become objects of disgust to circulate as signs that themselves acquire this adhesive quality. During this circulation, such signs take on an ambivalent value.

On the one hand, they explain the bodily operations of trauma; on the other, they point toward an unconscious and compulsive desire to return to the traumatic state itself. The bodies blackened by charcoal reveal movements that become ever freer. In doing so, they present an intriguing model of emotional circulation detached from disgust itself, quietly composing a small social landscape.

The title of the exhibition, 《Expectations of Night》, resonates in an intriguing way with the conceptual framework of the 9th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, held in 2016. The biennale's curatorial statement began by asking "how unwanted inheritances—war, disaster, poverty—might be transformed into expectations for the future."

Nearly a decade later, both that biennale and Leeje's solo exhibition recall our present reality as the premise for posing fundamental questions about the place and value of art in a historical moment when phenomena such as globalization, mass media, consumer society, and the alienation they produce increasingly seem beyond intervention or resistance.

John Berger (1926–2017) addressed similar questions through the unpublished writings of Max Raphael, the Polish-born scholar who worked in Europe and New York during the early twentieth century yet remained largely overlooked in his lifetime. Raphael proposed that art constitutes "an equation and interaction between three factors: the artist, the world, and the means of expression."

Artistic value, he argued, lies in the act manifested through the artwork itself—an act that provokes universal doubt not only toward what is natural but also toward what is social within the given world. What, then, is the relationship between art and the existential experience of life and death encountered only under extreme conditions such as war or disaster, situations beyond human control?

Is it a community of affect connected through sensation and emotion? Or merely a circuit of feeling produced through sticky signs? How might the chain of thought operating beneath emotion itself be interpreted? The signs of death presented throughout this exhibition are striking precisely because they do not immediately evoke grief or mourning.

Instead, they feel strange, unsettling, and difficult to approach. They compel us to uncover what we would rather conceal or leave buried. To borrow Sara Ahmed's terminology, they recall what is "disgusting," forcing us to witness it once more and generating the conditions for public speech.

At the same time, they recall the very forms of communication through which countless events in contemporary society circulate across the internet and social media, infiltrating everyday life and compelling us to share "feelings of disgust" through cycles of compulsive repetition.

By more actively exposing and acknowledging the absence of a concrete subject, the exhibition calls simultaneously for a shared responsibility toward social death and for the liberation of contemporary life caught within the inescapable circulation of the affective economy. Merleau-Ponty argues that the operations of meaning generated by our own bodies and those of others are never fixed or simple.

They remain ongoing and indeterminate even within the consciousness of the dying, so that perception itself ultimately becomes the "speaking subject." Thought, therefore, must always be understood as preceding us—automatically projected, strangely operative everywhere as though at home—defined above all by its own autonomy.

Perhaps this exhibition proposes art as a means of recognizing oneself as the subject who refuses to turn away from an ever-changing world and instead confronts and evaluates it. In doing so, it presents art as a landscape embodying the creative power of its potential audiences—past, present, and future alike.

References

• [비평] 몸의 기억술
  [Critique] The Mnemonics of the Body