21 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 became destabilized.
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 (yet it appears to float despite its implied weight), 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 (longer than my visit).
Both are out of one's initial view when entering the theater, and both suspend sensorial logics in a way that charges the space with possibility—at one point 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, I spent a while in front of a large framed blank off-white sheet of paper. Was a great feeling wondering where I had missed both on the checklist.