Fragments
2026
Scatter
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 site where prayer and silence, sanctity and desire brushed against one another and opened narrow cracks. What happened within me was too intricate to call a conflict. There was collision and resistance, but also a strange curiosity. The forbidden came sharply into view, while the sacred drew close, almost like skin. As religion and queerness, norm and deviation, fantasies of blasphemy and early intuitions of intersectionality overlapped, my way of reading the world tilted off-centre. That inclination carried its own anxiety, yet it quietly guided me elsewhere.
Those early sensations 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) became the first chapter of that enquiry.
I retraced experiences carried in my body since childhood, seeking the source of my masochistic energy: the force that keeps destruction and creation in the same room. It was an attempt to observe how the body objectifies itself and then gathers itself again, moving across the boundaries of religion, emotion, and pleasure. I later reworked that material into the autobiographical fiction When the Water Blushed (2021), opening another field of practice.
The text I am assembling now looks towards a different layer, one that formed behind those earlier questions. It does not excavate origins again; instead, it reflects on the scenes staged by my later works and the structures they have tested. It also draws a long journey into a single current: a sensory mode of thought that began in the body and expanded towards the stage and the crowd, sacrifice and norm, desire and fracture.
EdgeFractures in the world always begin quietly at the edges. The centre may appear composed, but bodies at the margins tremble first, and their trembling eventually spreads until the entire structure shivers. I learnt this gradually through my own body. The pressure of norms always registered at the outer edge first, and taboo loosened earliest at the periphery. Certain bodies were positioned where these vibrations accumulated.
The body onstage inhabits this same zone. A stage may look radiant, yet beneath it lies a stratum 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, registering the weight of norms with almost involuntary precision. At times, the body onstage is less a symbol than an instrument that records the circulation of emotion.
Norms speak from the centre, but their form is never clearest there. They become legible only at the margins. When a particular body is consumed too intensely, idealised beyond recognition, or subjected to inexplicable violence, the world reveals what it has concealed and whom it has sacrificed. Bodies placed at the edge have long served as society’s testing grounds. Queer bodies, Asian bodies, and idol bodies, those assigned to particular categories, remain there the longest.
Looking back at my early works, I see that I was following sensation before I had a theory for it. Small tremors and vague discomforts came first. I turned instinctively to video and performance to hold on to them. I did not yet understand why those scenes felt necessary, but I can now see that the question of the “boundary body” was already taking shape underneath: Why did certain bodies tremble first? Why did some surfaces feel fragile, almost unstable? The answers have become clearer only with time. Those early works were records of sensation, moments in which the body moved before language.
When a body trembles at the boundary, something becomes visible. I wanted to show that long before I could articulate it. The scene came first; thought followed.
My first attempts were Paradise Lost (2016) and Me Gustas Tú (2016), filmed in a Roman cathedral and aboard a British naval submarine. The cathedral condensed histories of Western imperialism and religious authority; the submarine carried remnants of colonial expansion and military rule. Each space exerted its own gravitational pull, and placing an East Asian body within it brought the tension of the boundary to the surface.
A male body performing a female idol’s voice, K-pop drifting through imperial architecture, Asian choreography repeated aboard 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 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 practice, returning in different forms and scenes.
BecomingWhen a body at the edge is observed long enough, its trembling gradually takes on a distinct form. A boundary body struggles to remain still; it slips into other shapes and reconstructs itself from angles it does not yet understand. As I followed these shifts, I began to call them modes of “becoming.” Becoming is not a declaration of identity. It is a slow experiment through which the body reassembles itself according to its own tremor. This sensation has shaped the movement of my practice.
As a boy, I inhabited a male body yet felt an unmistakable pull towards the dances and voices of girl-group idols. That desire was more than conflict; it felt like a small current in which prohibition and curiosity travelled together. Within the architecture of normativity, I often regarded myself as a failure. Only later did I recognise that failure could open another door. While studying in Europe and travelling through South America, I encountered repeated reminders that what presents itself as “the centre” never represents the whole. Across many non-European contexts, shamanic traditions placed trust in the body’s tremor rather than in hierarchy or doctrine. That trust felt foreign and strangely familiar. A body that moves before language and rearranges the world through sensation is something I have always recognised within queer existence.
Returning to Korea, I wanted to construct another kind of body, one capable of resisting the theological centre that shaped my upbringing. Rather than relying on explanation, I created HornyHoneydew, a figure who holds the shamanic body and the polished surface of the K-pop idol at once. It may have begun as a strategic disguise, but it also became 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 beyond oppressive structures.
Purple Kiss (2018) was the first moment in which this movement took form. Bringing the shamanic body and the idol body into one frame was more than an aesthetic combination. Shamanic practice, with its layered genders, circulating energies, and shifts between states, resonated with the long history of transformation within queer embodiment. Boundary bodies learn these techniques early: how to shift, alter form, and quietly slip away from existing structures. Purple Kiss was my first attempt to follow that rhythm through my own flesh.
In Kiss of Chaos (2020), this becoming appeared more directly. I placed the sensory technologies of North Asian shamanism, including tremor, chant, fire, and gestures of transition, within the polished surface of a K-pop music video, creating a scene in which two systems pass through one another. Fire became a signal of passage rather than punishment, a small medium capable of shifting worlds. The shamanic body does not divide the world into two; it unsettles dualism and quietly opens forbidden senses. This movement mirrors queer existence: stepping outside structure, falling slightly out of alignment, and generating new sensory arrangements. Kiss of Chaos was an experiment in applying that capacity to my own body.
Looking back, these becomings were not performances intended to replace one identity with another. They were sensory strategies for survival, ways for a boundary body to protect itself. Becoming-idol and becoming-shaman may appear to diverge, but to me they are two waves travelling 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. Haraway’s notion of “becoming-with” likewise emphasises entanglement over individuality. The becomings in my work emerged through related entanglements among shamanic gesture, idol surface, and rhythms produced through performance. Their tremors became the ground of my practice, leaving becoming as a bodily language through which the fractures of normativity are revealed.
OfferingCertain bodies perceive the structure of the world more precisely when placed in particular positions. For me, this knowledge arrived through the body long before it became a concept, most clearly when I occupied the submissive role in BDSM play.
A restrained body appears motionless from the outside, yet it becomes the quiet centre of the scene. On the surface, I seem to have surrendered power: I follow commands, ask permission to move, and remain fixed in a bound position. Yet immobility draws the currents of the room towards me. Sensation expands, and that expansion subtly shifts the balance of power. The person giving orders must continually adjust, calculate, and move to sustain the scene. Domination may seem to flow downwards, but power is in fact redistributed through the bound body.
I encountered this reversal repeatedly. At times, the restrained body became a surface that redirected sensation; at others, pain softened the language of control, or pleasure bent the frame of normativity just enough to expose its seams. Sadomasochism performs obedience, yet the performance quietly unsettles the structure on which domination depends. It feels less like a reenactment of violence than an examination of the balance violence requires: a silent experiment in turning a system inside out.
The bound body often speaks more forcefully than language. Even without words, it remakes meaning. Religious sacrifice once concentrated a community’s anxiety in a single body in order to preserve social order. In the scenes I experienced, however, that logic tilted elsewhere. Pain was no longer sanctified, nor was sacrifice consumed to secure the peace of others. The body experiencing pain instead became the surface upon which the fragility of power was exposed.
Around the time of Dear Fear (2020), I began to work with this sensation more directly. Through the persona Huh Need-you, pronounced “Honeydew” (허니듀 in Korean), I explored images and emotional registers that felt too radical to carry under the name Dew Kim. The persona became another surface, one that concealed me while opening a passage towards deeper sensation.
In Dear Fear, I revisited scenes where fear and pleasure, domination and submission, intersected: nights spent inside a car boot, uncertain of the destination; moments exposed to anonymous eyes through surveillance cameras; hours suspended on a cross with nothing but breath to hold on to. These were not confessions. They were 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 one that sensed collapse earlier than others, a body positioned at the first fracture. Some truths reveal themselves at the site of rupture rather than at the centre, and those truths reached me more accurately through the body than through speech.
I have never completely overcome my fear of occupying the sacrificial position. Yet through different forms of becoming, becoming-shaman, becoming-idol, becoming-offering, that fear has gradually changed direction. These modes of becoming were never declarations of a conclusion. They were gestures that prised open the gaps normativity tried to seal. Through those openings, the body recorded the fractures unfolding beneath the surface. The faint tremors escaping through them have long been the language I understand best.
TempleWhen I imagine the religious body, it first appears sealed and intact. A closer look, however, reveals a body that is always slightly open and leaking at the seams. Religious ritual stages pain and binds it to the language of salvation, yet the stitching has never been perfect. Scenes in which a sacrificial body absorbs a community’s anxiety and simultaneously sends it back became the starting point for my understanding of the religious body.
I came to sense this vibration more intimately through sadomasochism. From the outside, the bound body appears to obey. Within that fixed position, however, the direction of sensation shifts. Pain does not reinforce discipline; it exposes the gaps within it. The body trembles before sacred language can speak, and power does not descend from above but scatters across the surface of sensation. I recognised a similar structure in religious sacrifice. Pain is placed at the centre to preserve order, yet another meaning always spills from its surface. The more stable the order appears, the more violently the body supporting it trembles.
Following these tremors brought me to the idea of the “temple.” Christianity describes the body of Christ as a temple, yet this body is torn open and made to leak through its wounds. It was never a closed structure. It was a temple forcibly held open, a space in which the line between sacredness and violence remained blurred and unresolved.
I Surrender (2023) began with this image of the open temple. The work emerged from a sensory question about how a body opens and expands. The dilated body in the BDSM practice of fisting was more than a sexual metaphor. It was a moment in which temple and body began to collapse into one another. Pain and pleasure mingled until their boundaries dissolved, echoing the ancient fractures embedded in religious bodies. The temple was not an enclosed space but a trembling surface that opened, split, and reconstructed itself. There, the sacred no longer appeared as eternal order, but as sensory residue, a shifting gap, and a redistribution of power.
As I followed this image, I realised that I had been building another kind of temple through my work: a quiet opening, a body that yields itself, yet whose yielding becomes a force that unravels order rather than submits to it. The religious body and the masochistic body may appear distant from one another, but both carry the double meaning of surrender. Surrender is demanded at the altar; within BDSM, it can become the spark that overturns the scene. It is a gesture that opens the body into a wider, layered space.
I Surrender emerged from that threshold. When sensation trembles, the boundary of the sacred trembles with it. When the body opens, so does the idea of the temple. Pain does not simply leave destruction behind; it becomes a path of transformation. Pleasure becomes a language that illuminates fractures concealed by norms. The temple is not an immovable structure, but an event that appears within the openings of the body.
I wanted to remain within that opening, where the sacred disintegrated and reassembled, and where power flowed, tangled, and dispersed. In those moments, the body no longer existed solely as a sacrifice; it became another world. I Surrender lingered briefly at the threshold of that world.
CrowdWhen 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. The crowd is always searching for a body that will tremble first, one through which it can confirm feelings it cannot sense on its own. The sacrificial victim, the idol onstage, the face on a screen: each becomes a surface on which that current briefly rests. Words such as love, devotion, and support occupy the foreground, while underneath them an emotional structure is in motion.
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 within K-pop fandom. Choreography becomes a new prayer; fancams and cover videos circulate like secular acts of evangelism. People no longer place their hopes solely in temples, but also in stages, cameras, and algorithmic spaces.
As If… (2022) began with a desire to translate this structure into space rather than metaphor. By layering the temple courtyard over the stage, I wanted to observe how people entrust their desires to someone’s face. The smartphone screen ceased to be a recording device and became a small altar on which the crowd’s wishes paused. Faces were endlessly replaced and bodies infinitely replicated, yet the form desired by the crowd remained unchanged: someone to tremble on their behalf, smile for them, and fall apart in their place.
In Enrapture (2022), I focused on the most compressed moment within this structure, the so-called “ending.” A breath on the verge of breaking, wet skin, an expression momentarily frozen. The crowd remembers this brief instant as a climax and pours its own emotion into it. The face no longer belongs to one person; it becomes a surface on which the crowd reflects itself. Religious icons once layered pain and ecstasy, death and salvation, onto a single image. The logic here is similar.
I did not want that face to drift away as just another image. Through lenticular surfaces, light, and the slight blur of the frame, I attempted to retain not a particular expression, but the excess of meaning projected onto it by the crowd. Just as religious iconography never speaks only of the sacred, the idol’s face holds love, obsession, possession, and anxiety at once.
When the viewer’s reflection merged with the face on the screen, the structure of the crowd inverted once more. The desired face overlapped with the viewer’s own, producing a brief hesitation in which it became impossible to distinguish subject from object, crowd from idol. The structure of fandom is completed only through this reflection. Desire appears to be directed outwards, but inevitably circles back.
The crowd’s desire gathers around a single body and then disperses, verifying its own feelings through this movement. Cruelty appears disguised as love; possessiveness as support. Idolisation and erasure unfold within the same brief interval. The crowd may seem to move through a single chosen body, but that body is a composite of its own unmet desires.
Follow this current for long enough and a quiet truth emerges: the body trembling onstage is not the only thing shaking. The crowd itself trembles through it.
GazeThe stage has always felt like an entrance to another world. When the lights rise and a single body steps forward, the space detaches from everyday life and begins to function as an altar. As the performance approaches its peak, time slows and the crowd’s gaze condenses into a single point. In the final moment, every emotional current converges upon one face: the ritual of the “ending fairy,” a distinctly contemporary rite.
The ending fairy is more than a camera close-up. It is the instant in which a body exhausted 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 and perfected image. This collision produces an inexplicable allure, a surface on which illumination and exhaustion, the sublime and the bodily, meet. Religious iconography has long employed a similar technique, layering depletion and serenity, flesh and transcendence, within one image. Through this face, the crowd brings the intensity of the performance to a close and returns its disordered emotions to their place.
This operation became clearer while I was preparing The Last Scene (2023). At the height of the performance, the body is consumed as a finished image, yet traces of collapse remain beneath its surface. The crowd is drawn to this contradiction, and I found myself returning to its source. In that moment, the idol’s face no longer belongs to one person. It becomes the surface on which the emotions of an entire crowd settle briefly. When the face trembles, the viewer feels the fracture first.
This structure expanded into the space of The Enchanting Offering (2024). The quiet atmosphere of a cathedral and the climactic image of an idol reflected one another, producing an uncanny resonance. Sacred space sanctified the body’s surface while revealing how easily that surface becomes an object of consumption and fervour. Within this mutual reflection of sacredness and desire, the body ceased to appear as a single individual and instead became a passage through which the crowd’s emotions moved.
The body onstage does not deliver a clear message. What reaches the viewer before language are disordered expressions, the thin boundary between ecstasy and depletion, and the brief interruption of breath. Through these delicate signals, viewers momentarily recover a spectrum of feeling they had forgotten. The climactic image may be the perfect form desired by the crowd, but that perfection lasts for only a single frame.
Perhaps what the crowd seeks is the fracture within that moment. Desire and lack reveal themselves inside the crack, against which people reflect their own silhouettes. The body onstage becomes less an individual than a mirror that gathers the crowd’s emotions. This is why the climax is summoned repeatedly. People seek another face in which they can briefly lose themselves. When the performance ends, they withdraw from that face and begin waiting for the next peak.
The body onstage is therefore less the centre of the altar than its surface, the place where the crowd’s desire first gathers and its anxiety most quickly becomes visible. The ending fairy is not simply the image of one performer, but the final ripple of the crowd’s emotional structure. Once that ripple settles, people disperse and return to everyday life, already searching for the next climax.
Perhaps that waiting is the ritual of our time. The stage is simply the smallest world in which the ritual is endlessly reborn.
CollapsThe stage rises towards a climax, yet the landscape left behind holds an entirely different sensation. Once the lights go out and the cheers fade, only traces of the desire and tension that passed through the space remain. What becomes visible is not who stood there, but how the structure surrounding that body moved. The end of a stage is always bound to the end of a body.
After the Applause (2025) grew from a desire to attend to this aftermath. What lingers after the climax is not a finished image, but a set of surfaces slowly giving way. A bent microphone resembles a body that has lost its voice; an extinguished lightstick evokes desire cooling after its peak. These instruments have fulfilled their roles, yet the residue of the forces that animated them remains suspended in the air.
This is more than the aftertaste of performance. The body onstage has always trembled between praise and depletion, recalling the structure of an older ritual. The deeper the worship, the closer the sacrifice. This cruel cycle, in which intensifying devotion demands increasing exhaustion, reveals how closely religious ritual and contemporary popular culture mirror one another. The body receiving the light is always the one most quickly worn down. The crowd reads this depletion and renews its desire through it.
Beneath the stage, fragments of sound dissolve into darkness until applause and screaming can no longer be distinguished. Even after the celebration ends, the crowd’s echo remains layered with joy and sorrow, fervour and ridicule. These layers form the altar’s invisible skeleton. The crowd may appear to be a single mass, but it is an accumulation of conflicting emotions. When that sediment shifts, the surface of the stage collapses with it.
At the height of a performance, the body onstage appears as an object of worship. Once the peak has passed, however, sustaining that worship requires someone’s collapse. The remains scattered throughout After the Applause make this structure visible. A microphone that once carried a voice lies on its side; a lightstick that once glowed sits in silence. This is more than simple ruin. It reveals how the crowd’s emotions loop back towards themselves.
A climax never belongs to an individual. It is an event briefly produced by a crowd, and a body is summoned into the sacrificial position to make that event possible. The sacrificial body may appear to prove the presence of the sacred, but it is also where violence becomes visible. The body onstage is drawn into position by the emotional architecture of the crowd. After the Applause captures the residue left by this architecture and the moment when that residue begins to stir into another desire.
This sense of collapse extends into Legion, Nowhere Whole (2026), where fragmented bodies refuse to return to a single, coherent form. Here, disassembly becomes a means of slipping away from the systems that seek to identify, regulate, and possess the body. What appears to be ruin begins to suggest another way of surviving.
The stage ends, but the crowd does not disappear. Even as its members disperse, they reflect their own lack through one another and move towards the next climax. The ruined stage may resemble an ending, but as soon as the crowd begins searching for a new face, the next ritual has already begun. The altar rebuilds itself, and another body is drawn towards its centre. The debris of the climax signals repetition rather than closure.
After the Applause ultimately leaves behind 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 approach it. Even among the wreckage, the crowd is already waiting for the next scene, another face to tremble and another surface upon which to reflect itself.
This unstable waiting is the stage’s final scene and, at the same time, the beginning of the next.
ConstellationAfter following bodies that trembled, surrendered, and eventually collapsed, I began to wonder what might grow in the spaces they had left behind. When the centre disappears and the altar can no longer sustain its authority, do the bodies gathered at the edges continue waiting for another figure to take its place? Or can their scattered tremors begin to sense one another and form a different kind of order?
The Stage — After God (2026) emerged from this question. I was interested in the moment when belief loses its object but its structure remains within the body. Even after the god, idol, or chosen figure has vanished, the posture of devotion persists. Knees remember how to bend, hands continue to reach upwards, and the crowd carries the rhythm that once bound it together.
The work unfolds through three movements. The body summoned into the place of sacrifice in Act 1: The Stage of Blood (2026) encounters the void left by a vanished centre in Act 2: The Empty Center (2026). By Act 3: The Revealed Constellation (2026), that void no longer appears as an absence waiting to be filled. As bodies once oriented towards the centre begin to turn towards one another, scattered points of light trace new relations without becoming a single whole.
I wanted to look at what happens when gestures of devotion lose their original direction. The body may continue to repeat the movements it has learnt, yet repetition never returns in exactly the same form. A kneeling body can rise, hands raised in supplication can turn towards other hands, and the emotion gathered around a single figure can begin to circulate across multiple bodies. The disappearance of the centre creates anxiety, but it also leaves a space in which another form of relation can emerge.
A constellation offered me a way to imagine this relation. It is visible only when separate points are perceived together, yet it never asks those points to merge. Its form changes according to the position from which it is seen, appearing briefly before becoming something else. The bodies gathered within it retain their own distances while sharing a field of sensation and light.
What remains after God is therefore not simply emptiness. There are bodies that still remember the weight of kneeling, gestures that have lost their object, and fragments of light beginning to seek one another. From these remnants, another stage may briefly emerge. It has no permanent centre and promises no final salvation. It exists for as long as scattered bodies continue to sense, reflect, and illuminate one another.
TremorA constellation does not remain fixed for long. The shape briefly formed by scattered bodies begins to loosen as soon as their positions and perspectives change. Yet the tremor left behind is different from the one that began at the altar. What once passed through the body of a single offering now travels between multiple bodies, producing a sensation that no longer returns to one centre.
The stage ends, but the scene never fully closes. Bodies continue to pass through positions of sacrifice, norms shift subtly, and the crowd disperses towards its next emotional configuration. Yet repetition never returns in exactly the same form. Each cycle leaves behind a slight displacement, a faint vibration through which another relation becomes possible.
I have not sought to stop this movement or lead it towards a final resolution. I wanted to look more closely at how bodies carry it forwards, and how the grammar of the world becomes visible within those small shifts. Even after the stage has been cleared and its lights have disappeared, the tremor within the body remains. Within that trembling lies the quiet sense that another world has already begun.