17 September 2026
Muyeong Kim: Pig at Art Sonje Center: nice show. As the press release details, most of the wall-bound work (archival pigment prints hand-colored with pastels on paper) addresses “four kinds of subjects: renovations of Seodaemun Prison (used by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea), a cricket cage discovered in China, South Jeolla Province’s Sorok Hospital (used in the past to isolate Hansen’s disease patients), and a Japanese woman. The four subjects all represent 'places' where different forms of segregation and violence operated in the course of history.”
I didn't learn the context of the imagery until after seeing the show, and I personally didn't need it. For me, the work activated the theater space it was installed in and around with fresh, complex, self-regenerating energy independent of its sociopolitical underpinnings. The rooms blossomed and destabilized. Which is site-specificity done well.
His touch is considered, boldly intervening but light, even on a large scale; my favorite pieces were Bedridden, a miniature pet cricket cage scaled up to a size that could hold a human, and an untitled piece for which he motorized six of the theater's chairs so that they slowly move from folded to open in a seating-ready position over time.
Both are out of one's initial view when entering the space, and both suspend the logics of space, time, weight, and scale in a way that charges the whole theater with possibility—I found myself backstage staring at what appeared to be a spare theater chair turned around to face a dark corner and later, in a hall just outside the door, at a large framed blank white sheet of paper. Was a great feeling to wonder where I had missed both on the checklist.