We talked briefly

This event was a public program organized in conjunction with the work We Talked briefly by Yeon Ock Ko and JAT Project, a participating artist group in the 10th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Eu Zên.

We talked briefly began with a consideration of the “me too movement” that had occurred in the field of art and culture in South Korea. The artists intended to look into the individual existence positioned in “the social” that has accumulated for such a long time, and to observe what kind of choices they make, putting themselves under certain gazes in order to live as an individual being rather than as a human being in a general sense. The group project attempts to investigate the collective memories among related people and imagine possible relations that the existing connections could create through “the birth of an individual,” or the way in which an individual is born.

This project is also a montage of the individual and social “body.” By observing bodies that are situated within a variety of relations, the artists have discovered existing relational “forces” and inquire into the possible relational “forces” based on these present relations. The repetitive, fragmented, dispersed, floating, converging and destructing body movements of the performers make a scene that represents the effort to search for possible future “languages.” They hope that this scene enables the audiences not to discover one (grand) narrative, but to uncover the old narratives of numerous individuals and to dream about the new narratives of themselves.

Yeon Ock Ko is a play writer who debuted in 1996 at the Spring Literary Contest hosted by The Busan-Ilbo (The Busan Daily Newspaper). Selected works include Laugh. The Tombs (2003), Inside the Footprints (2007), The Lord Has Come (2011), I am Your Brother (2015), The Guests (2017), and The Sense of My Wife (2017). Ko’s works are significant in their examination of the human instinct by way of combining non-fiction stories with mythical ones.

JAT Project, an art-creation group founded in 2013, is comprised of eight young artists. Through the medium of performance, they roam through human lives, observing and considering the implications of our social bodies and the languages of our times, thereby exploring new languages and raising questions on human subjects. Selected works of the group are Poetry, Spit Out (Studio 76, 2014), and Through an alley (Namsan Arts Center, 2017).