Busan MoCA Performing Arts_Body, Under Experiment

Period

Thursday, April 30, 2026 ~ Sunday, July 19, 2026

Venue

Gallery 4, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art(F1)

Artists

Geumhyung Jeong, Hoonida Kim, Byungjun Kwon

Media

Performance, video, installation, sound art

Curator

Sosul Kim

내용

MoCA Busan Performing Arts: Body, Under Experiment

A single light flickers to life in the darkness. A laboratory unveils itself. On the workbench lie disassembled anatomical models, mechanical components, an inscrutable tangle of wires. The researcher remains absent. Alone, you step into this space that someone has only momentarily vacated.

MoCA Busan Performing Arts: Body, Under Experiment is, as its title intimates, a narrative that probes the other body in humanoid form. The bodies addressed here do not simply denote the corporeal bodies that we know; rather, they encompass somatic sensation reconstituted from the ground up, hybrids fused with the machinic, and entirely novel assemblages constructed as the shadow of the human itself, thereby redrawing the very boundaries of what a body might be. The progressive tense embedded in the phrase under experiment is no mere rhetorical flourish. The exhibition is partitioned into three discrete laboratories, each illuminated in monthly succession, opening sequentially one after another.

Divided into three separate experimental chambers, the exhibition adopts a sequential structure in which each experiment is activated month by month. The introduction of such temporality positions the viewer as a witness to the experimental process itself. Entering a newly illuminated laboratory, one encounters the absent researcher’s traces: instruments, working tools, unfinished prototypes. On certain days, one may even happen upon the very moment when a body is being assembled or a sense recalibrated. Rather than presenting the exhibition as a finished outcome, the work shares its ongoing process with the audience.

Of particular note is the premise that, at the point when all three experiments reach completion, every laboratory goes dark. This situates the exhibition within a distinctly performative temporality; the gallery ceases to serve as a site of permanent installation and is instead transformed into a laboratory where transient and contingent events unfold.

The first experimental site is Geumhyung Jeong’s Studio/Storage.

The second experiment is Hoonida Kim’s Fine-Tuning Training Room.

The third laboratory hosts Byungjun Kwon’s Robotic Sound Workshop.

Such an arrangement is evocative of what Hal Foster has theorized as the archival impulse, an act of reconstituting past, present, and future that approaches the artwork not as a completed object but as a field perpetually reconstituted through its own fragments.