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Dancing in the Thin Air

​무용한 무용 :  無用한 舞踊

   There are moments when we must part, even when we want to stay. I collect their traces as if they were relics: pages from old diaries, buttons, scraps of fabric from clothes I loved. From these clues, I paint the landscape of time that rises in my mind, then cut it into long, thin strips, as if dividing time into units. Holding each strip in my hands, I fill the surface by crossing the front, where time is recorded, with the back, where its traces have seeped through. This performative labor is my way of showing time.
   As I work, I think of the pirouette: spinning quickly while balanced precariously on one foot. I circle a single point in the past, trying to recover what was lost, yet a moment can never be replayed whole. What reaches me is only a thread pulled from a fantasy woven over time, and the more I weave, the more unfamiliar the scene becomes.
   Here, the stories that were hidden, the stories that showed through, and the stories never chosen repeat their movements in thin air. Repetition grown out of loss may seem useless (無用, muyong), yet with remembering and grief it becomes a mournful dance (舞踊, muyong). This seemingly erroneous landscape is not a re-creation of the past but a working space in the present: an incomplete chronicle that began with half-finished records, a useless dance that is not useless.

 

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