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Dancing in the Thin Air

​무용한 무용 :  無用한 舞踊

   There are moments when you have to part ways, even if you want to stay together. Each time, I cut up the pieces and put them together. Pages from my old journals, buttons, and scraps of fabric from my favorite clothes become clues to the past.

   After a while, I look at the pieces I've collected and paint the landscape of time that emerges. I divide them into small units of time, cutting them into thin, long strips. Holding these pieces in my hands—each one a specific moment—I fill the screen by crossing the front side, where time is recorded, with the back side, where traces remain. The repetition of a seemingly futile act to create a single scene is an attempt to reveal a personal history made up of the accumulation of moments. I believe this performative labor best shows 'time.'

   Whenever I work, I think of the pirouette movement in ballet, where you stand precariously on one foot and spin rapidly. When I recall an event, I am reminded of both what was captured and what was hidden. I obsessively record, circling around the past in an attempt to recapture what was lost and fill in the blanks. But it's impossible to replay the moment in its entirety. Everything that comes to me now is a thread I've fished out of my swollen fantasies through time. The more I split the landscape and weave thin lines, the more unfamiliar the scene becomes.

   Here, the stories that were hidden, the stories that were revealed, and the stories that were not chosen, perform a repetitive exercise in thin air. The gesture of repetition that grows out of loss seems to be a dance, but it becomes a poignant dance when remembering and mourning are added to it. It is a 'dance without dance.' Missing clues are filled in as new fragments of a long and thin story are woven together. The seemingly erroneous landscape is not a recreation of the past, but a working space in the present. There, I see an incomplete chronology that began with half-hearted records, a dance that danced but did not dance.

 

Copyright © 2024 Wonjin Kim all rights reserved.

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