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〈PungJeong.Gak (風情.刻) Janganpyeong〉, Site-specific performance, Janganpyeong Auto Parts Market, Seoul, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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As a dancer and choreographer, SONG Joowon wondered how her ‘dance films’ would be seen from the perspective of ‘visual arts.’ At first, I was uncertain whether I would be able to provide an answer to that question. For starters, I am not an advocate of strictly delineating the boundaries between choreography, film, and visual art. Moreover, I did not think I was in a position to represent the general perspective of ‘visual art.’ However, I too grew curious about the answer to that question. After all, visual art has actively incorporated bodily movements to expand its horizons and discourse. Videography, in particular, has documented the body from its inception, refining the language thereof over the years. However, the interpretation of bodily movement in visual art is distinctively different from that of performing arts. Even now, the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performance arts’ are distinctly and respectively reserved for different uses in visual art and performing arts. Although holding a raw perspective, as my approach is to reach performing arts as if it were ‘performance’ or footage, that is why I decided to take a look at the PungJeong.Gak series created by the artist and her 11 Dance Project team.

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〈I am a Lion〉, Single-channel video, HD color, Stereo sound, 10min 47sec, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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The artist characterized PungJeong.Gak as an ‘urban space dance project’ or ‘site-specific performance program.’ She also explained that the project includes research on specific locations, performance, exhibition, and screening. Indeed, the project took place mainly in urban spaces set to disappear with ongoing renovation projects, such as antiquated hanok (traditional Korean housing), alleyways, musical instrument shops, and recently a neighborhood filled with automobile parts stores soon to be demolished. Sometimes the project would find its way into the typical heterotopia of established institutions such as art museums and libraries. Although the concept of ‘site-specificity’ has meant many things in visual art, it was mostly applied to art that seeks to overcome physical rigidity and spatial exclusiveness typical of post-modernist art. Meanwhile, in performance art, variability has become somewhat of a fundamental virtue while the departure from a physical stage is no longer so eccentric. Why, then, has the artist decided to apply the concept of site-specificity on performing arts now? I would venture a guess that she was not motivated by an impact from conventional art or the desire to create such an impact. In fact, her performers mostly engage in repetitive movements that would appear natural in such urban settings, reminiscent of children playing in the neighborhood or lovers physically displaying their affection. Sometimes the dancers’movements felt completely out of place, evoking imaginations of entirely different stories. Therefore the site-specificity that the project strives for appears to be closer to a broader cultural medium discussed by Miwon KWON, as opposed to addressing the issue of medium flexibility. In other words, the project is an attempt to “recompose site-specificity into a cultural medium on the broader social, economic, and political processes that comprise urban life and urban space.”
Even if the artist’s work is to be understood under such a broader context, questions still remain, particularly as the car parts commercial strip in Janganpyeong, the venue for 11 Dance Project’s latest performance, is associated with Seoul’s urban renewal project. Seoul’s urban renewal project has been facing criticism that it indiscriminately removes the memories and lives ingrained in old neighborhoods, not unlike previous urban development initiatives. How, then, does the performance function ‘within’ the logic of urban development as it conveys a sense of affectionate longing for movements and memories fading away with time? The frequently appearing retro outfits may be beautiful, but is such beauty a recognition of the disappearance of the old as an immutable fact while also romanticizing such extinction of the times gone by? Do artists have no choice but to helplessly, albeit fondly, watch bureaucracy unilaterally delete the memories of a city? If the context of a location can also serve as a key ingredient of performance alongside the dancers’ movements, music, and costume, it would be fair to question the validity of the sentiment evoked by the dancers’ movements at said locations. Furthermore, considering how often city-sponsored art has been accused of abusing site-specificity, I cannot help but keep wondering whether her performance should have taken a more acute approach in addressing this issue.

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Exhibition view of 《As Reflection Does Not Reflect on Its Own Reflection》 2019, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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So far, 11 pieces have been created as part of the PungJeong.Gak series. These works have been dubbed and screened as ‘dance film.’ Of note, the series demonstrates a wide spectrum of deliberations over how to capture the performance into footage as the project has been taking place over an extensive period, a rare feat for works of similar nature. In the first film, the camera is relatively stationary, with the occasional wobble hinting that the camera was hand-held. While the movements creating geometric shapes atop the dirt yard of a hanok compound certainly evoke images of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s famous performance at MoMA, the footage lacks any bird’s-eye shots that would highlight the geometric shapes but instead only features scenes captured at the horizontal viewpoint of the typical spectator. The sound also includes the ambient noises of the site, overlaid with a guitar performance. It appears that she was more interested in capturing footage that is true to the actual performance rather than entertaining the notion of a ‘dance film’ when she produced the first film. However, starting with the second film shot in Itaewon, aerial views of the scenes begin to appear, turning the footage into a two-channel video. The ending shot of the second work captures the performers at the building entrance as if they were perfectly flushed along the edges of the rectangular screen frame. Although the second film still appears closer to a video log of the performance due to its minimal camera movement and the inclusion of ambient noise, it does offer shots taken from multiple angles and thereby presents scenes that a physically present audience member would not be able to see in one sitting. While the third film shot at Seoul Metropolitan Library retains the stationary camera and ambient sound, the fourth film is drastically different. The ambient noise is gone, while the camera persistently follows the performance down narrow alleys. Sometimes the camera seems to glance over the dancers as if they were ordinary pedestrians. At the end of the film, the cameraman who has been shooting the performance even appears in front of the lens. The level of dynamic camerawork is not the only thing that changes in the fourth film. While the preceding films focused the camera on the dancers’ movement against the venue as the backdrop, the fourth film occasionally highlights the surrounding space as the main feature while the performers’ bodies are used to further accentuate the space. This is likely thanks to the freer movement of the camera’s framing. Shot at the Nakwon Musical Instrument Arcade, the sixth film features an aerial view of multiple stories of the buildings, with a performer on each floor. Such camerawork adds another dimension to the location, a shift from the twodimensional approach in previous films. The camera serves to package such complex shots of different spaces into a single story.

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Performance view of 《As Reflection Does Not Reflect on Its Own Reflection》, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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In addition to the increasingly dynamic camerawork and the changes in spatial structure, text begins to play larger roles in the following films of the PungJeong.Gak series. By the fourth film (Alley Reading), the project already includes narrative mechanisms. The fourth film introduces characters that could be construed as ‘protagonists’ who clearly have a ‘story’ to tell. Most of the scenes include choreography that alludes to events that would have taken place at such locations, evoking the viewer’s imagination. However, the eighth film shot in Cheongpa-dong (PungJeong.Gak The Neighborhood with the Green Hill) and the ninth film shot at the Donuimun Museum Village (PungJeong.Gak Real Town) introduce types of text that are entirely different, with their function not restricted to serving a narrative purpose. At Donuimun Museum Village, the film tries to question how distant the space has grown from actual life by using eerie text often referred to as ‘keywords’ when the city government tries to promote its urban development projects. In the film shot in Cheongpadong, the artist attempts to include the visualized text of ‘vanished sensations’ referred to in the poem “Do You Remember Cheongpa-dong” by the poet Choi Seung-ja. Regardless of how successful these attempts were, the inclusion of non-narrative (storytelling) text as a key element in the films appears to be meaningful on its own. No matter how faithfully a recording can capture the energy of the performance, it is impossible to completely capture the sensations generated when the bodies of the viewers are collocated with the bodies of the performers. Efforts to supplement such gaps often ultimately lead to the creation of a standalone work of film. As most filmed performances cannot fully portray the on-site ambiance, standard editing techniques are employed to create the ‘llusion’ of the viewer being present at the site. Instead of attempting to induce such illusions, however, the text of PungJeong.Gak serves to possibly elucidate the sensations the dancers are attempting to deliver. Perhaps for that reason, the Cheongpa-dong film includes a scene that forfeits any attempts to create the illusion of the viewers being onsite, and instead blatantly makes it clear that the film takes place solely within the ‘their [the performers’] space.’ In the scene, it is clearly evident that the viewers are not the ones directly seeing the bodily movements of Youngsun and Hongsuk. Instead, the two characters are chased around by a group of curious people, or perhaps ghosts, and the viewers are merely peering over the shoulders of these stalkers on-screen to see the two characters’ movements.

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Performance view of 《As Reflection Does Not Reflect on Its Own Reflection》, Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, 2019. Image provided by Incheon Art Platform.

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PungJeong.Gak features both professional and ‘non-professional’ dancers. Although it is somewhat possible to tell the difference between them based on their physique or adeptness, they coexist naturally during the performance with each group evoking a different sort of imagination. For example, the quotidian movements of the non-professionals feature bodily movements that were likely commonplace in their respective venues, evoking imagination on the ordinary lives that once filled the filmed locations. Such movements also encourage viewers to escape the tendency to focus solely on the beauty of the human body as is common when watching dance performances. Like the ‘Tino Sehgal effect’ that often appears during performances in exhibition spaces, the sparseness of these nonprofessional dancers’ movement prevents the sensation of unfamiliarity from washing over every other emotion. Meanwhile, the beautiful, powerful, yet unfamiliar movements of the professional dancers transforms the familiar locales into an unfamiliar stage, thereby making such scenes stand out among the others. These scenes seem to provide the viewers with a balanced selection of elements they can deliberately focus on and those that can naturally seep in while the viewers watch the film. This duality falls somewhere between the feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity present in the calm yet dramatic, multi-layered, uniquely geometric spaces of Nakwon Musical Instrument Arcade or the Janganpyeong Auto Parts Market in Seoul.

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Admittedly, other elements of collaboration still present a certain sense of typicality in this performance featuring a heterogeneous group of performers. Instead of filling the space in conjunction with the performers’ bodies, the melody-driven background music strives to set the ambiance on its own, which sometimes makes the films feel more like meticulously prepared promotion videos for performances than standalone works of film. Nothing feels particularly strange when the music from the fourth film is recycled in the condensed version of the film that includes segments from all eight films. However, this is not so much because the music feels organic to the film; it simply demonstrates that the music has been merely “appended”onto the footage. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with ambiance-setting music. However, I cannot help but imagine how different it would be to have the music offer a broader sense of meaning.

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PungJeong.Gak is beautiful. It is beautiful like retro outfits that sometimes bear a sense of modernity or a nostalgic yet surprisingly unfamiliar classic movie. The persistence of such beauty is also astounding. However, the continued exposure to such beauty somehow makes us expect something not so beautiful down the road. Perhaps it is because there is too much violent annihilation and oblivion around us to merely romanticize this city.

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1)Miwon KWON, One Place after Another, Trans. KIM Inkyu, WOO Jeong-ah, and LEE Young-wook (Seoul: Hyunsilbooks, 2013), P. 22.

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※ This content was first published in 『2019 Incheon Art Platform Residency Program Cataloge』, and re-published here with the consent of Incheon Art Platform