Installation view of 《No Trace》 (ELEPHANTSPACE, 2022) ©ELEPHANTSPACE

Hyojae Kim’s solo exhibition 《No Trace》 will be held at ELEPHANTSPACE from September 23 to October 5, 2022. This exhibition is organized as an expansion of Kim’s previous work 〈Parkour〉(2021). Once defined simply as “we are training” rather than by name, parkour is a form of movement that constantly escapes fixed definitions. While often represented in media as an extreme sport, parkour is in fact a compositional practice performed without rules or rankings—one that involves responding freely to one's environment through the body. It is also a deeply altruistic “art of movement,” emphasizing the pursuit of wholeness by reaching out to others while discovering one’s own identity through the unification of body and mind.

Hyojae Kim, Parkour, 2021, Single-channael video, color, sound, 33min 21sec ©Hyojae Kim

The narrator of Parkour lives in a world where everything exists only as data, where all things are interconnected and the contemporary notion of the “body” has been eroded. For this narrator, the risks and fears that a parkour practitioner experiences today are perceived as a premonitory sense of freedom from the physical body. They revisit the practice of parkour as a latent potential of possibility realized within themselves.

Approaching this perspective from a future standpoint, 《No Trace》 traces the “unknown movements” of parkour. Set in a fictional world where data from an abandoned and forgotten virtual space has been leaked, the exhibition leads viewers through a form of dark tourism toward the horizon of present existential limitations. As visitors traverse this space through limited interactions and constrained mobility, their bodily awareness is subtly reawakened via a “Yurt”—a dwelling space for parkour practitioners—serving as both a conceptual and spatial medium within the exhibition.

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