Fragments
EN/KR
People learn the world in different ways. Some begin with language; I began with the body. In my father’s house—a pastor’s house—the body of his gay son became a place where prayer and silence, sanctity and desire brushed against each other and opened thin cracks. What happened inside me then was too intricate to call conflict. There was collision, resistance, and also a strange curiosity. The forbidden appeared sharply, and the sacred moved close, almost like skin. As religion and queerness, norm and deviation, fantasies of blasphemy and early senses of intersection overlapped, my way of reading the world leaned off-center. That lean carried its own anxiety, but it quietly guided me toward another place.
Those early sensations naturally became acts of expression—long before they became “work.” I followed the body’s records, traced the marks of rupture, and tested the structure of sensation by turning it inside out. During my MA in London in 2015, DIONYSIA: The True Story of My Relationship with My Body (2015)
The text I am assembling now looks toward a different layer—one that formed behind those earlier questions. It is not an effort to excavate origins again, but to reflect on the scenes my later works have staged and the structures they have been experimenting with. It is also a record that ties a long journey into one current: a sensory way of thinking that began in the body and expanded toward the stage and the crowd, toward sacrifice and norm, desire and fracture.
— Paradise Lost
Fractures in the world always begin quietly at the edges. The center appears composed, but the bodies at the margins start to tremble first, and that trembling eventually spreads until the whole structure shivers. I learned this slowly through my own body. The pressure of norms always registered on the outside first, and taboo loosened earliest at the periphery. Certain bodies were placed in positions where these vibrations accumulated.
The body onstage exists in this same zone. A stage looks radiant, yet underneath it lies a layer where emotions the world cannot manage gather and begin to shake. The body standing there absorbs the crowd’s expectations and anxieties with unusual speed, sensing the weight of norms with a precision that feels almost involuntary. At times, the body onstage is less a symbol than an instrument—one that records how emotion circulates.
Norms speak from the center, but their shape is never clearest there. They become legible only at the margins. When a particular body is consumed too intensely, idealized in ways that feel unnatural, or exposed to forms of violence that defy explanation, the world reveals what it has hidden and what it has sacrificed. Bodies placed at the edge have long served as society’s testing ground. Queer bodies, Asian bodies, idol bodies—those assigned to certain categories—remain there the longest.
Looking back at my early works, I see that I was simply following sensation without any theory. Small tremors, vague discomforts—these came first. I turned instinctively to video and performance to hold onto them. I did not yet know why those scenes felt necessary, but now I can see that the question of the “boundary body” was already forming quietly underneath. Why did certain bodies shake first? Why did some surfaces feel fragile, almost unstable? The reasons are becoming clearer only now. Those early works were not the beginning of theory but records of sensation—moments where the body moved before language.
When a body trembles at the boundary, something becomes visible. I think I wanted to show that long before I could articulate it. The scene came first; thought followed later.
My first attempt at this was Paradise Lost (2016)
The mismatch of a male body performing a female idol’s voice, K-pop drifting through imperial architecture, or Asian choreography repeated atop a naval vessel—these dissonant elements aligned precisely with the boundary-sensation I had long carried. I was not trying to topple structures of power; I simply wanted to witness the moment they began to tremble.
That experience left me with a question:
When does the boundary body begin to shake,
and what does that shaking reveal?
This question became the spine of my work, returning again and again in different scenes.
— Kiss of Chaos
When you watch a body at the edge for long enough, its trembling gradually forms a distinct sensation. A boundary body struggles to remain still; it slips into other shapes and reconstructs itself from angles it has yet to understand. As I followed these shifts, I began calling them modes of “becoming.” Becoming is not a declaration of identity but a slow experiment in which the body reassembles itself according to its own tremor. This sensation has shaped the entire movement of my practice.
In my boyhood, I lived in a boy’s body yet felt an unmistakable pull toward the dances and voices of girl-group idols. That desire was not simply conflict—it felt like a small current in which prohibition and curiosity drifted together. Within the architecture of normativity, I often saw myself as a failure. Only later did I sense that such failure could open another door. Studying in Europe, traveling through South America, I found repeated reminders that what presents itself as “the center” does not represent the whole. In many non-European contexts, shamanic traditions trusted the body’s tremor more than hierarchy or doctrine, and that trust felt both foreign and strangely familiar. A body that moves before language—rearranging the world through sensation—is something I have always recognized within queer existence.
Returning to Korea, I wanted to craft another kind of body—one that could resist the theological centrality that shaped my upbringing. Rather than relying on explanation, I created HornyHoneydew, a figure that holds both the shamanic body and the K-pop idol’s surface at once. It may have been a strategic disguise, yet it was also the natural expression of a boundary body slipping into “another becoming.” Becoming-shaman, becoming-idol, becoming-offering. For me, “becoming” was not an identity to claim but an attempt to redesign the body outside oppressive structures.
Purple Kiss (2018)
In Kiss of Chaos (2020)
Looking back, these becomings were not performances designed to replace one identity with another. They were sensory strategies for survival—ways a boundary body protects itself. Becoming-idol and becoming-shaman may appear to diverge, but they feel like two waves trembling in different directions along the same fault line. Becoming is not a matter of will or declaration; it is a redistribution of sensation. Deleuze’s concept of becoming—a process grounded in transformation rather than identity—resonates strongly here, and Haraway’s notion of “becoming-with” similarly emphasizes entanglement over individuality. The becomings in my work emerged through similar entanglements—shamanic gesture, idol surface, the rhythms produced by performance. Their tremors became the groundwork of my practice, leaving “becoming” as a bodily language that reveals the fractures of normativity.
— Dear Fear
Certain bodies sense the structure of the world more precisely only when placed in a specific position. For me, that sensation arrived through the body long before it became a concept—most clearly when I remained in the submissive role within BDSM play.
A body held in place appears motionless from the outside, yet somehow becomes the quiet center of the scene. From the surface, it seems as if I have surrendered power: I follow commands, request permission to move, stay fixed in a restrained posture. But the inability to move begins to draw the currents of the room toward me. Sensation widens there, and that widening gently shifts the balance of power. The one who gives orders must keep adjusting, calculating, and moving to sustain the scene. Outwardly, domination seems to flow from above to below, but in truth, power is redistributed through the bound body.
This reversal happened again and again. Sometimes the restrained body acted as a surface that redirected the flow of sensation; sometimes pain softened the language of control; sometimes pleasure bent the frame of normativity just enough to reveal its seams. Sadomasochism performs obedience, but that performance quietly unsettles the structure that domination relies upon. It feels less like reenacting violence and more like testing the balance that violence requires. A silent experiment in turning a system inside out.
The bound body often speaks more loudly than language. Even without words, it remakes meaning. In religious ritual, sacrifice once concentrated the community’s anxiety into a single body to preserve order. But within the scenes I experienced, that logic tilted in another direction. Pain was no longer sanctified; sacrifice was no longer consumed for the peace of others. Instead, the body that felt pain became the surface where the fragility of power was exposed.
Around the time of Dear Fear (2020)
In Dear Fear, I revisited scenes where fear and pleasure, domination and submission, intersected. Nights spent in a trunk, unsure of where the car was heading; moments under surveillance cameras with my body exposed to anonymous eyes; hours suspended on a cross with nothing but breath to hold onto. These were not confessions but small laboratories showing how structures of power collapse and reassemble.
Through this process, the body of the offering became more than an abstract figure. It was not a weak body, but a body that senses collapse earlier than others—a body standing at the first fracture. Some truths reveal themselves not at the center but at the site of rupture, and those truths arrived to me more accurately through the body than through speech.
I have never fully shed my fear of the sacrificial position. Yet through different forms of becoming—becoming-shaman, becoming-idol, becoming-offering—the fear has gradually shifted direction. These modes of becoming were never about declaring conclusions. They were gestures that pried open the gaps normativity tried to seal, and through those gaps the body recorded the fractures unfolding beneath the surface. The faint tremors that leaked through those openings have long been the language I understand best.
— I Surrender
When I think of the religious body, it first appears as something sealed and intact. But when I look more closely, that body is always slightly open, leaking at its seams. Religious ritual stages pain and binds it to the language of salvation, yet its stitching has never been perfect. The scenes in which the sacrificial body absorbs the anxiety of a community—and in the same moment sends that anxiety back—formed the starting point for how I began to understand the religious body.
I came to sense this vibration more intimately through my experience of sadomasochism. The bound body seems, from the outside, to be the one who obeys. But in that fixed position, the direction of sensation shifts. Pain does not reinforce discipline; it reveals the gaps within it. The body trembles before any sacred language can speak, and power does not descend from above—it scatters across the surface of sensation. I recognized a similar structure in religious sacrifice. Pain is placed at the center in order to preserve order, yet on the surface of pain another meaning always spills out. The more stable the order appears, the more violently its supporting body trembles.
Following these tremors brought me, naturally, to the idea of the “temple.” Christianity says that the body of Christ is the temple, yet this body is torn, opened, and required to leak something through its wounds. It was never a closed structure. It was a temple forcibly held open—a space where the line between the sacred and the violent remained blurry and unresolved.
I Surrender (2023)
As I followed this image, I realized I had been building another kind of temple within my work. A quiet opening, a body that yields itself, yet whose yielding becomes a force that unravels order rather than submitting to it. The religious body and the masochistic body may seem distant, but both hold the double meaning of surrender. Surrender is demanded at the altar, yet in BDSM it becomes the spark that overturns the scene. It is the gesture that opens the body into a wider, layered space.
I Surrender was born from that threshold. When sensation trembles, the boundary of the sacred trembles with it. When the body opens, the concept of the temple opens as well. Pain does not leave destruction; it becomes a path of transformation. Pleasure becomes a language that illuminates the fractures norms have tried to hide. The temple is not an immovable structure; it is an event that appears within the gaps of the body.
I wanted to remain in that gap. It was a place where the sacred fell apart and reassembled, where power flowed, tangled, and dispersed. In those moments, the body did not exist only as a sacrifice; it became another world. I Surrender was a scene that lingered for a moment at the threshold of that world.
— Enrapture
When I think of the crowd, what comes to mind is not the number of people but the way emotion gathers in one direction and then scatters away. The crowd is always searching for a body that will tremble first, a body through which it can confirm the feelings it cannot sense on its own. The sacrificial victim, the idol onstage, the face on a screen—each becomes a surface where that flow briefly rests. Words like love, devotion, and support appear at the front, but what truly moves is the structure of emotion.
This is why fandom culture felt so close to religion. In a temple courtyard, each body prays alone, yet incense, light, and the rhythm of joined hands bind them into a single current. A similar scene repeats in K-pop fandom. Choreography becomes a new prayer; fancams and cover videos spread like secular acts of evangelism. People no longer hang their hopes in temples but in stages, cameras, and algorithmic rooms.
As If… (2022)
In Enrapture (2022)
I didn’t want that face to drift away as just another image. Through lenticular surfaces, light, and the slight blur of the frame, I tried to hold not a specific expression but the excess of meaning the crowd places upon it. Just as religious iconography never speaks only of the sacred, the idol’s face holds love, obsession, possession, and anxiety all at once.
When the viewer’s reflection merged with the face on the screen, the structure of the crowd inverted again. The face they desired overlapped with their own, producing a slight hesitation—a moment when one cannot tell whether they are subject or object, crowd or idol. The structure of fandom finds completion only through this reflection. Desire always seems directed outward, but it inevitably circles back.
The crowd’s desire gathers around a single body, then disperses, verifying its own feelings through that movement. Thus cruelty appears disguised as love; possessiveness appears disguised as support; idolization and erasure repeat in the same short span. It seems as if the crowd moves only through one chosen body, but that body is merely a composite of the crowd’s own unmet desires.
If you follow this current long enough, a quiet truth emerges: the body trembling onstage is not the one shaking—the crowd itself is.
— The Last Scene
The stage has always felt like an entrance to another world. When the lights rise and a single body steps forward, the space detaches itself from daily life and begins to function like an altar. As the performance nears its peak, time slows, and the crowd’s gaze condenses into a single point. In the final moment, all emotional currents converge onto one face—the ritual of the “ending fairy,” a uniquely contemporary rite.
The ending fairy is not merely a camera close-up. It is the instant when a body worn down by repeated choreography reveals its most human traces. Ragged breath, the heat of sweat, trembling muscles. Yet the face is still expected to present a calm, perfected image. This collision creates an inexplicable allure—a surface where enlightenment and exhaustion, the sublime and the bodily, meet at once. It is the same technique long used in religious iconography, where depletion and serenity, flesh and transcendence are layered into a single image. Through this face, the crowd closes the heat of the performance and returns its disordered emotions to their place.
This complex operation became clearer while preparing The Last Scene (2023)
This structure expanded into the space of The Enchanting Offering (2024)
Still, the body onstage does not convey a clear message. What arrives before language are the unorganized expressions, the thin line between ecstasy and depletion, the slight pause of breath. Through these delicate signals, the viewer briefly recovers a spectrum of feeling they had forgotten. The climax-image may be the perfect form the crowd desires, but that completion lasts only a single frame.
Perhaps what the crowd seeks is the fracture within that moment. It is within the crack that desire and lack reveal themselves, and people reflect their own silhouettes against it. The body onstage becomes less an individual than a mirror gathering the crowd’s emotions. This is why the climax is summoned again and again. People look for another face so they can briefly lose themselves. When the performance ends, they exit that face and soon begin waiting for the next peak.
Thus the body onstage is less the center of the altar than its surface—the place where the crowd’s desire gathers first and where its anxiety shows itself most quickly. The ending fairy is not the image of a single performer but the final ripple of the crowd’s emotional structure. Once the ripple settles, people disperse and return to their everyday lives, already searching for the next climax.
Perhaps that waiting itself is the ritual of our time.
The stage is simply the smallest world in which that ritual is endlessly reborn.
— After the Applause
The stage rises toward its climax, yet the landscape that remains afterward holds an entirely different sensation. Once the lights go out and the cheers fade, what is left are only the traces of desire and tension that have passed through the space. It becomes clear not who stood there, but how the structure surrounding that body moved. The end of a stage is always tied to the end of a body.
After the Applause (2025)
This is not merely the aftertaste of performance. The body onstage has always trembled between praise and depletion, and that tremor recalls the structure of an older ritual. The deeper the worship, the nearer the sacrifice. This cruel cycle—where rising devotion demands rising exhaustion—reveals how closely traditional religious forms and contemporary popular culture mirror one another. The body that receives the light is always the one most quickly worn down. The crowd reads this depletion and renews its own desire through it.
Descending into the darkness beneath the stage, the fragments of sound blur—no longer distinguishable as applause or scream. Even after the celebration ends, the echo of the crowd remains layered with joy and sorrow, fervor and ridicule. These layers form the invisible skeleton of the altar. The crowd appears as a single mass, yet it is in fact an accumulation of clashing emotions. When that sediment shifts, the surface of the stage collapses with it.
At the height of performance, the body onstage appears as an object of worship, but after the peak passes, maintaining that worship demands someone’s collapse. The remains scattered through After the Applause show this structure with clarity. The microphone that once carried a voice lies on its side; the lightstick that once glowed now sits in silence. This is not simple ruin. It is a scene that reveals how the crowd’s emotions loop back toward themselves.
Climax never belongs to an individual. It is an event briefly produced by the crowd, and a body is summoned to occupy the sacrificial position for that event to occur. The sacrificial body may appear to prove the presence of the sacred, but it is equally the place where violence becomes visible. The body onstage does not stand there out of its own desire; it is pulled into position by the emotional architecture of the crowd. After the Applause captures the residue left by this architecture, as well as the moment when that residue begins to stir into another desire.
The stage ends, but the crowd does not disappear. Even as they scatter, they reflect their own lack through each other and move toward the next climax. The ruined stage may look like an ending, but the moment the crowd begins to search for a new face, the next ritual has already begun. The altar rebuilds itself again and again, and another body is drawn to its center. The debris of the climax is not a sign of ending but a signal of repetition.
What After the Applause ultimately leaves behind is a single truth: the stage can vanish at any moment, but the crowd rarely does. As long as the crowd persists, the altar will be rebuilt, and another body will walk toward it. Even in the wreckage of the stage, the crowd is already waiting for the next scene—waiting for another face to tremble, another surface on which they might reflect themselves.
This unstable waiting is the final scene of the stage—and, at the same time, the beginning of the next.
The stage ends, but the scene does not fully close. Which bodies pass through the place of sacrifice, which norms subtly shift, and how the crowd disperses toward its next emotional position—this cycle continues. The traces left onstage may scatter like fragments, but within the gaze that lingers on those fragments, a new structure of desire quietly begins to grow. I did not wish to stop the cycle; I wanted only to look more closely at how it carries itself forward. Behind the collapsed altar lie the moments in which the grammar of the world is finally revealed.
Even after the stage is cleared, the vibration does not easily settle. The silent space fades quickly, but the faint tremor left inside the body lasts longer. Within that trembling is the quiet sense that another world is about to begin.