Reenactment of Being

Participating artists: Eun Jae Pil, Kim Dohee, Koo Donghee, Mino Arata, Park Minha

The TOKAS Project is designed to foster international exchange and inspire reflection on diverse themes such as art and society from multicultural perspectives. In commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the exchange between Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) and the partner institutions of Seoul, South Korea, the project welcomes five artists from Japan and South Korea, Eun Jae Pil, Kim Dohee, Koo Donghee, Mino Arata, Park Minha, who have previously participated in the residency program, and who reimagine reality through their own bodily experiences.

Throughout the history of art, people have sought to remove the world before them and the living beings around them from the flow of time, anchoring them in place through painting, sculpture, photography, film, and the moving image, in an attempt to imbue them with immortality. Live arts such as theater, dance, and performance, for their part, have explored ways of summoning real lived experience into the performance space through the performer’s physical actions. This is a dynamic artistic undertaking that deploys the body in the present to evoke life in all its fleeting, unrepeatable immediacy, ceaselessly changing and impossible to grasp an instant later, and to share it with others beyond the bounds of time and place.

Through acts of reenactment that give renewed form in the exhibition space to aspects of life observed by the artists from their differing perspectives, this exhibition invites fresh interpretations grounded in the artists’ sensations and viewpoints in the moment of experience, while shedding new light on what it means to be alive today. Rather than merely transcribing reality or reproducing the past, the artists give flesh to a reality that encompasses their own physical experiences of events, including the memories and emotions associated with them, and apprehend it as something still unfolding in the present. Their practices excavate the many layers accumulated beneath the process of living and invite us to contemplate the complex, uncertain reality of being here and now.
 

Mino Arata wrote the new play Greenhouse / Onsil, drawing on historical research into the Yongsan US military base in Korea and the postwar occupation period. He constructs the greenhouse in which the play is set within the exhibition space and stages the story as an installation.

Kim Dohee presents the series Navel Mountain, which she made molds of peopleʼs navels as a symbol of the origins of human life, with Navel Strike, a sculpture in the form of a bell that extends the navel motif and creates spaces where participants can experience life as a web of connections among countless people.

Faced with the reality that human labor is being replaced by robots and AI, and that human beings become subservient to the hyper-productivity of technology, Park Minha asks what aspects of humanity cannot be reduced to digital data and what it means to be alive, through a moving image work.

Eun Jae Pil seeks to revive in the present the figure of the historical female-role performer Mei Lanfang, who he has studied for years, through a performance embodying Mei’s dance, together with copperplate prints.

Koo Donghee presents a moving image work that explores how our consciousness and senses are subordinated to a hyper-connected information society. The work calls into question the apparent stability of bodily habits and fixed norms shaped by everyday social life.

Organizer: Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture). Cooperations: SeMA Nanji Residency, MMCA Residency. Endorsed by Korean Cultural Center Korean Embassy in Japan.