SAD BOOK: Overwrite

Artists: Rhona Byrne, Chan Sook Choi, Florian Dombois, Minkyu Hwang, Ahram Kwon, Lorna Simpson.

Sorrow is personal. It is also shared. And it can be rewritten. It settles in fragments of time and in moments left unspoken, until it meets society and history and becomes part of the reality we hold in common. An exhibition can be where that rewriting begins.

SAD BOOK: Overwrite is a project by The Great Commission, a Seoul-based curatorial collective that has produced dozens of projects over nearly a decade with museums, theatres and universities, including the Seoul Museum of Art and ARKO Art Center. TGC treats the exhibition as a live field, its form born of the same necessity as its meaning. With SAD BOOK, a play becomes an exhibition, the exhibition a week-long festival, and a reading a gathering. Visitors cross a park, a house for artists, and the Seoul City Wall with body and senses, and the histories held there meet their own: encounter becomes encouragement, and encouragement becomes strength.

Curator and researcher Zoe Chun builds the exhibition around SAD BOOK, the five-act Lesedrama she has written since 2015 from time spent with people living in fragile circumstances. Its guide is SA, a non-human figure still learning to listen, who receives what others leave unsaid. Visitors listen to the play on headphones, read by performer Kyu Chan Hwang, and linger in the Reading Room: a room for one book, and the folded time of the lives within it.

Overwrite is Chun’s curatorial method. Six artists write over the play, and the play in turn changes what their works mean; every earlier layer remains legible. For the week, ARKO Artist House becomes a Kunsthaus, where art is made, read, and performed as much as presented.

Rhona Byrne answers the fourth act with Water Path, sculptures made from fabrics in transition, including cotton shredded for recycling by SECO Co., Ltd. and end-of-life sails from OneSails GBR. Moving Threshold opens the week in Marronnier Park, followed by Water Path workshops.

Chan Sook Choi listens for what testimony leaves unsaid. Myitkyina (2020), in its Seoul premiere, gives voice to Korean women held as Japanese military “comfort women” in Myitkyina, Burma, none of whom ever came forward. It extends into a participatory project with people who have made new lives in Seoul after leaving North Korea.

Florian Dombois writes on a kite for the first time. Triple Instrument (Seoul) rims the opening of a Korean shield kite with mirror, a gateway between worlds, and carries the epigraph of SAD BOOK, Simone Weil’s “Affliction is not a wall that shuts us in, but a door that opens onto the realm of truth.”

Minkyu Hwang presents two films: PULSE (2025), a first-person documentary of family grief, and the new SA (2026), a speculative documentary searching for hope beyond it.

Ahram Kwon’s Hunting, Gathering, Sampling is a gathering ground that excavates what technology’s standards erase and what the mystique of AI conceals, alongside the lives gathered in SAD BOOK.

Lorna Simpson’s Cloudscape (2004), now at Punta della Dogana, Venice, comes to Seoul: a lone figure whistles as fog engulfs him; his body disappears, and the tune goes on.

The house and the city transform, at once exhibition and journey. The hidden archives of real lives are written into a play; the artists write over it; and each visitor, meeting their own sorrow there, is written over in turn, carried toward a resilience held in common.

Seoul is the first full edition of SAD BOOK, developed through trials including a collective reading in a Zurich wind tunnel. Research screenings follow at the University of Art and Design Linz. Each presentation adds a layer, and TGC invites partners to write the next.

Curated by Zoe Chun / Produced by The Great Commission / Co-organised by ARKO Artist House / Supported by Arts Council Korea / Rhona Byrne’s participation supported by Culture Ireland.