The four posters in the collection of MoMA’s Library are part of One Year Performance 1981–1982 by Tehching Hsieh (Taiwanese, born 1950). To complete this work, which is often referred to as Outdoor Piece, the Taiwanese artist spent 365 days, from September 26, 1981, through September 26, 1982, outdoors, on the streets of Manhattan, with the self-imposed rule of never seeking shelter while only equipped with a sleeping bag and small backpack.

Outdoor Piece is the third in a series of five One Year Performances that have few art-historical counterparts. For each one, Hsieh dedicated an entire year of his life to isolate, and take to the extreme, certain basic conditions of human existence. For One Year Performance 1978–1979, he spent 365 days alone in a cage, with minimal contact with the outside world. The following year, for One Year Performance 1980–1981, he attempted to grapple with time by punching a time clock every hour on the hour, thereby making longer periods of sleep, or any other continuous activity, impossible.

Whereas Outdoor Piece dealt primarily with the human need for shelter, Art/Life One Year Performance 1983–1984 explored human relations. Using a rope, Hsieh spent a year tied to the artist Linda Montano, thus depriving both him and her of any kind of privacy and subjecting their relationship to much strain. One Year Performance 1985–1986, the last of these works, can be interpreted as an abandonment of art, with the artist’s pledge not to do anything related to art for a year and to “just go in life.”

These short summaries stand in sharp contrast to the extended duration of the pieces and thereby emphasize the sheer impossibility of fully grasping Hsieh’s lived experience between 1978 and 1986. If it wasn’t for his ingenuity in documenting these works, the One Year Performances might have become yet another urban legend. Hsieh, however, recorded his experiences and the passage of time with remarkable rigor and precision through photographs, objects, maps, notations, and sound recordings, which together serve as impressive traces of the enormity of his oeuvre. The four posters in MoMA’s collection stem from this archive, originally serving as invitations that enabled audiences to witness Hsieh, who was otherwise mostly alone, during his Outdoor Piece.

Though all of the One Year Performances took place in New York City, Hsieh’s Taiwanese origins are of great importance to a full understanding his work. The artist’s experience as an illegal immigrant, who had jumped ship at age twenty-four and made his way, with almost no English-language skills, in a foreign society, certainly informed his intense focus on the subjects of solitude, time, shelter, relationships, and abandonment. Now, forty years later, he has become known and respected for this work. After decades spent as an artist known mainly by other artists, he started reaching a broader audience, with his work being shown by major international art institutions (such as MoMA in 2009). In Taiwan he is considered a role model for a generation of younger artists, which was made evident during a recent research trip, part of our cross-departmental initiative C-MAP, when he frequently was cited during studio visits.

The four posters from Outdoor Piece in the MoMA Library’s collection are hopefully just the beginning of a longer engagement with Hsieh’s work in the Museum’s collection. Not only is he one of the most important Taiwanese living artists, his oeuvre situates itself between two recent areas of focus at MoMA: Conceptual art and performance. Hsieh’s formal rigor and preference for lists, numbers, contracts, maps, and the like put him in proximity with 1970s Conceptual art, but the fact that this data represents lived experiences also makes him a central figure in the history of durational performance art. As one of the few artistic practices that truly fulfilled the avant-garde dream of fusing art and life, Hsieh’s works are of central importance to the history of art as it is represented at MoMA and beyond.

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The vivid memories of the scents and tastes of East Asia have stayed with us long after the trip. We enjoyed delicious dishes prepared by artist Siren Chung for the Chuseok holiday in Seoul, quaffed magic water consecrated by the father-in-law of Japanese artist Wada Masahiro, at the Yokohama Triennale, enjoyed the best tofu while talking to Lee Mingwei about exquisite Taiwanese snacks in a restaurant near the Tokyo Tower, and sipped amazing hibiscus tea infused with sun-dried tangerine peel in the company of artists Lee Minghsueh and Tseng Yu-chin at IT Park in Taipei. It is incredible how food connects people and how many times we chatted over food and drink with art professionals. At such moments, life and art are inseparable.

Two weeks are of course barely enough to take the pulse of the dynamic art scenes in three countries. Numerous galleries, studios, museums, restaurants, and cafes slipped out of our intense schedule.

01. Gwangju Biennale: Okin Collective Intervention in the Exhibition Space

By Yu-Chieh Li

It would be difficult to miss Okin Collective’s intervention in the exhibition space at the Gwangju Biennale. While we were touring the show, a cheerful, amplified voice broke in unexpectedly throughout the day and in a pleasant cadence started giving instructions in English and Korean for performing lung exercises.

Hi everybody. We’re Okin Collective.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

Now, it’s time for lung exercises.

No lung, no art.

Your lungs, our power!

Guards in the exhibition space took part in the performance, by performing the gymnastics, to encourage visitors to participate. The sound piece For the Beloved and Song (2014) was broadcast with exercise instructions at irregular intervals over the PA system in and around the exhibition space, its background music adapted from “March for the Beloved,” the official song commemorating the Gwangju uprising of 1980. The lung exercise is presumably beneficial for general health, but it can also potentially protect practitioners during social and political emergencies. Lungs power the song that recalls the past and prepares for the future.

The political implication of the piece was not perceived quite as directly as this description suggests. As is typical of Okin’s work, the call to exercise was mostly taken at face value. In the exhibition space and on the Biennale Plaza, we saw members of the public performing Tai chi-like movements to the broadcast. Spontaneous participation of this kind diluted the work’s heavy intent.

02. Gwangju Biennale: Yamashita Kikuji

By Sarah Suzuki

Sometimes a work is so good or so strange or so unexpected that it will stay with me for days. Such was the case with Yamashita Kikuji’s 1968 painting Season of Change, installed at the 2014 Gwangju Biennale. As I’ve familiarized myself with the art of postwar Japan, I’ve been fascinated with the surrealist tendency present in some of the work. You can certainly see it in the etchings of Chimei Hamada. Born in 1919, Hamada studied art, and upon graduation was immediately drafted into the military. His first-hand knowledge of the horrors of war reverberated in his work for decades to come: his dark, forceful etchings of the mid-1950s depict the tragedy and absurdity of war while revealing his artist’s eye for composition and his ability to use abstract forms to convey horror.

Yamashita (1919–1986) was also drafted and fought in China. His paintings from the postwar period, which drew on his battlefield experience, suggest the hallucinatory, nightmarish paintings of Hieronymous Bosch, in which animals, demons, and humanoid figures interact in scenes of horrific depravity. A pointedly political allegory, Season of Change addresses the power dynamic between the United States and Japan after World War II. Having seen just a few examples of Yamashita’s work before, notably in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), this strange and haunting picture left me curious to know more.

03. Lionel Wendt at the Gwangju Biennial

By Eva Respini

Biennials offer plenty of opportunities to make discoveries. My favorite discovery at the 2014 Gwangju Biennial was not a hot new young artist, but rather an artist who was at his prime in the 1930s and ’40s—the Sri Lanken Lionel Wendt (1900–1944). About halfway through the maze of galleries presenting works (many of them in large installations) by artists active today, I stumbled into a beautiful gallery with approximately 25 modestly sized black-and-white photographs. A closer look revealed that many of the pictures were solarized and montaged, techniques that are hallmarks of photographic experimentation that took place in the 1920s and ’30s. Indeed, the label revealed that Wendt was working in Sri Lanka during the waning years of colonial rule. I was fascinated by the variety and beauty of the pictures, ranging from a handsome portrait of two men in turbans, with its silvery patina from solarization, to a doctored seascape, a photomontage of a boat at sea collaged into a frame reserved for decorative art works. A quick Google search revealed that Wendt was also a musician, critic, and cinematographer and that there is an art center in Colombo dedicated to his legacy. Surrounded by contemporary art, Wendt’s works seemed utterly fresh and surprising, and they held their own in an elegant and quiet way. Since leaving Gwangju, those pictures have made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps a trip to Colombo is in order to learn more?

04. The Belated Funeral as Performance: A Dialogue with Minouk Lim

By Yu-Chieh Li

The opening performance of the 10th Gwangju Biennale, a powerful piece by Minouk Lim, took place on a rainy afternoon. A helicopter hovered over Biennale Square, where ambulances and buses converged, carrying high school students, relatives of civilian victims of the Korean War, and members of the May Mothers’ House, who lost children in the Gwangju uprising. Remains of civilian victims from the Korean War were carried from an ambulance by blindfolded family members to shipping containers on the square as the May Mothers and high school students looked on. A mourning ritual was enacted in front of one of the shipping containers, surrounded by reporters and Biennale visitors. Spectators were silent; sounds of camera shutters and rainfall dominated the scene. The performance was streamed live both in the exhibition space, where it was shown as a two-channel video installation, and on the website of OhmyNews. The shipping containers holding the human remains were left on the square until the Biennale ended. The next day was sunny. We were amazed to see the square empty and the two containers standing under the blue sky. The bright image presented a striking contrast with the gray scene of the day before. We had loads of questions for Minouk, with whom we had a fifty-minute talk rather than a formal interview. It ended up being a great time for sharing thoughts.

Click here to read the transcript of the dialogue.

05. SeMA Biennale Mediacity

By Jenny Schlenzka

Seoul is a bustling metropolis with lots to observe: high-tech screens beeping and flashing everywhere, hyper fashionable teenagers, K-Pop blaring in all directions, and, of course, tempting flavors from street-food vendors, all clamoring for attention. It wasn’t easy to stick to our packed schedule, but luckily the Mediacity biennial, held at the Seoul Museum of Art, turned out to have its own worthwhile sensations. Founded in 2000, the biennial was intended as a reflection on the media and technology frenzy that is at the heart of Korea’s booming economy.

Whereas former iterations reportedly focused mainly on new-media art works, the 2014 edition included some sculptures, installations and two-dimensional works that gave the exhibition some breathing space and made for a stimulating walk-through. According to his catalogue statement, this year’s artistic director, the artist/film director Park Chank-yong, chose to focus on Asia and aspects of its history that continue to inform the present, though often in forgotten or overlooked ways. The theme of invisibility is hinted at in the biennial’s title Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers, three key words through which to look at Asia’s “experiences of intense colonialization, the Cold War, rapid economic growth and social change in such a short period.”

The biennial presented 42 international artists from 17 countries. Haegue Yang’s Sonic Rotating Ovals (2013), which were installed at the beginning of the exhibition as well as on the top floor, are playful sonic sculptures covered in countless small metallic bells that, triggered by visitors’ movements, make an enchanting sound reminiscent of spiritual or religious rituals. The night before we had had dinner with the artist, who had just moved back to her native Seoul after a long and professionally successful stay in Europe. She told us about her feelings of exhilaration regarding Seoul’s cultural and economic boom mixed with a slight frustration at its slow shedding of the old political and social systems, which make life in Korea more complicated and restricted than she had hoped.

The video SeaWomen (2012) by the young Anglo-Greek artist Mikhail Karikis is an impressive portrait of a community of elderly female sea laborers called haenyeo, who live on a South Korean island and make their living by diving for pearls and seafood. The immersive soundscape of the installation is composed of so called sumbisori, the traditional breathing technique. The sound resembles seabird screams and invokes a sense of the danger these women face in their daily work. None of the laborers in the video seems younger than 50, which leads one to wonder about the sustainability of this ancient matriarchal and communal profession in times of globalization.

Another room featured an extensive archive of the Japanese avant-garde group Zero Dimension, led by Kato Yoshihiro and Iwata Shinichi and active from the early 1960s to the early 1970s. Most of the photos and flyers on display carried images of the group’s so-called “rituals” and “art terrorism,” which the members often staged in public spaces, dressed in costumes and equipped with props. Their activities climaxed with the anti-Expo movement in 1970, captured in the documentary White Rabbit of Inaba (1970). Unlike the Japanese avant-garde artists who got involved in the international mega-exhibition, Zero Dimension protested with rituals in and around Osaka against art’s participation capitalist consumer culture.

A whole chapter of the biennial focused on Shamanism, once the official religion in Korea and still practiced widely today, albeit in reduced form. My favorite contribution, Ba Ba Bakuhatsu (Grandma Explosion) Series (1969–70), was by the photographer Naito Masatoshi, whose portraits of elderly Japanese women shamans are taken at night with a flashlight as the women speak to their deceased husbands and sons, conduct nocturnal prayers, mourning ceremonies, and dances. The vitality and intensity in the women’s expressions, heightened by the lighting, makes one believe in their ability to communicate with the afterworld.

06. Seoul: Soo Sung Lee at Audio Visual Pavilion

By Yu-Chieh Li

Audio Visual Pavilion is an art space that feels like a secret garden hidden in the hustle and bustle of the Korean capital. With traditional tile roofing, a simple residential interior, and plain exhibition rooms of various sizes, it is an anomaly among Seoul’s sophisticated galleries. We saw an exhibition by Soo Sung Lee, who merged his works with the architectural setting, filling every space with light colored, minimalist sculpture, including a pool placed in the yard. The entire pavilion was incorporated into the artist’s work.

07. Yokohama Triennale

By Eva Respini

What happens when an artist curates a biennial? Our group had the opportunity to find out on our first day in Japan, when we traveled 30 minutes by train from Tokyo to the busy port city of Yokohama. The 2014 edition of the Yokohama Triennial was directed by the esteemed photographer Yasumasa Morimura, who is known for his performative recreations of iconic images from art history, from Duchamp’s gender-bending alter ego Rrose Sélavy to Cindy Sherman’s centerfolds. The triennial’s title, Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the Sea of Oblivion, took as its inspiration Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel, later adapted to film by François Truffaut. A newbie curator, Morimura stated on the Triennial’s website: “The future is unknown. But a ship has set sail from Yokohama Port, and to be completely honest, the journey is likely to be risky with me as the captain. Being an artist, I’ve never had the chance to serve as the artistic director of any international exhibitions. I’m taking the wheel for the first time and the ship has already left port without my having had a chance to learn how to steer.” Armed with this information, we set off to view the triennial, which filled all the floors of the Yokohama Museum of Art as well as a large, airy pier on the water, reachable by bus in 10 minutes. Free to explore as he wished, Morimura included a wide range of artists working in all mediums, hailing from all over the world, from the past and the present. Smaller than previous iterations of this triennial, the 2104 show offered a window onto Morimura’s many interests, from the performative photographs of French provocateur Pierre Molinier to the drawings of Japanese artist Chiyuki Sakagami. A discovery for many in the group, Sakagami’s intricate (verging on obsessive) drawings were like little jewel boxes, each seeming to contain a universe, a whole cosmology of new biomorphic forms. Another crowd favorite was Belgian conceptualist Marcel Broodthaers’s Interview with a Cat, a recorded interview from 1970 that provided comic relief for the group. We ended the tour with a trip to the pier, where we witnessed the performative unveiling of a mobile stage for Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi’s theater piece Nichirin no tsubasa (Wings of the Sun), based on a text by Kenji Nakagami.

08. Tokyo: Mori Art Museum

By Sarah Suzuki

For me, no trip to Tokyo is complete without a visit to the Mori Art Museum in the towering urban complex known as Roppongi Hills. Sure, the view is a draw but more important are the memorable exhibitions I’ve seen there: big midcareer surveys of Lee Bul and Mokoto Aida; projects with emerging artists like Meiro Koizumi and Tsang Kinwah; in-depth investigations of historical moments, such as Metabolism: City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present Day Japan, held in 2011; and Roppongi Crossing, the museum’s biennial exhibition of new art that always yields fresh discoveries.

On this visit, we arrived between shows as construction and planning were underway for Lee Mingwei and His Relations. The galleries might have been empty of objects, but they were full of deep thinking, conversation, and planning by the artist and the museum staff. Lee Mingwei’s work is not primarily object-based but instead is often centered on ideas of interactivity and participation. Over the last 20 years, his projects have involved dining, mending garments, conversing, and letter writing. This kind of experiential art can be challenging to show in an institutional context and is further complicated by a retrospective presentation in which multiple works are activated at once.

We’ve faced similar challenges at MoMA while installing Rirkrit Tiravanija’s landmark installation untitled 1992/1995 (free still) and Superflex’s CopyLight Studio. One of the key opportunities of travel is the chance to engage in in-depth dialogue with colleagues around the world about institutional issues like these and the varying strategies we employ to respond to them. In the past, I’ve had the pleasure of discussing the challenges and complexities of reinstalling Gutai works from the phenomenal collection of the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art with curator Koichi Kawasaki. On this trip, we had the honor of talking with the Mono-ha artist Kishio Suga and hearing his views on reinstalling and recreating sculpture made of ephemeral materials. Lee Mingwei described to us his aim for a multipronged approach at Mori, including experiences that visitors would have to register for in advance, and others that could be encountered by chance in the galleries. Conversations like these are crucial. They suggest new approaches and new answers to questions that we’re all asking. Alas, I left Tokyo without getting to experience Lee Mingwei and His Relations for myself, but I look forward to another conversation about it on my next trip to the Mori.

09. Taipei: Chen Chieh-jen’s “Realm of Reverberation”

By Yu-Chieh Li

On a warm and humid afternoon we strolled from The Cube Project Space in the Gongguan area through the streets teeming with snack bars to Chen’s studio, situated in an apartment building in the Wenzhou Street area. Located opposite National Taiwan University, the neighborhood is a labyrinth of cafes and bookstores but smells more like a rainforest.

Chen Chieh-jen was a leading performance artist in Taiwan in the 1980s. In the 1990s, after an eight-year pause in his career as an artist, he started to address Taiwan’s colonial history using the moving image. We had the privilege of seeing his almost-finished film Realm of Reverberation before its debut at the Asia Triennial Manchester 2014.

The film takes the Losheng protest as its starting point. The Losheng Sanatorium for Lepers was founded by the Japanese Colonial Government to forcibly house and quarantine people suffering from Hansen’s disease. In 2002 the sanatorium was demolished by Taipei’s Department of Rapid Transit Systems (DORTS) over vehement protests by residents, scholars, lawyers, engineers, and documentary filmmakers.

Chen showed us the second section of the film, which depicts the visual narratives of the inmates and takes the viewer on a tour of the ruins of the sanatorium. Like many Taiwanese films, Realm of Reverberation is slow-paced. With much modesty and shyness in his smile, Chen kept telling us, “This passage is almost over. But let me know if you want me to fast-forward.” On the contrary: we were deeply moved by the tranquil beauty of the lepers’ faces—the images still linger in our minds.

10. Taipei: Yao Jui-chung and his archive

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yao Jui-Chung’s 18-year-old cat Moca kept wanting attention from us as we pored over the artist’s portfolio and archives in his studio. Yao is also an art critic and an enthusiastic collector of newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs of art events. Such documents fill his studio and are the basis of his pioneering works Installation Art in Taiwan 1991–2001 and Archives on Performance Art in Taiwan, 1978–2004.

Yao might well be described as a modern literati figure, but his projects are concerned with political and social issues rather than his own emotions. He has never concentrated on a single medium at any one time. His latest work, Ruins Series, a photographic project documenting unused public buildings that were originally intended as exhibition spaces in Taiwan, was shown in this year’s International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Unfinished landscape drawings made with ink on paper were also on view in his studio. From afar they look like traditional ink scrolls, but up close the brushwork is idiosyncratic and tumultuous.

11. Taipei: IT Park

By Yu-Chieh Li

IT Park is perhaps the oldest artists’ space in Taiwan. Founded in 1988 by Chen Hui-chiao, Liu Ching-Tang, and Tsong Pu, it is an exhibition space, a place where artists’ archives are preserved, and, even more importantly, it is a center for artistic exchange and a place to socialize and hatch ideas.

Lee Ming-Hsueh’s brilliantly-installed solo show largely comprised conceptual prints and found objects: dust brooms joined with dust pans, sculptures made of contact lenses, lighters attached to the wall and combined with graffiti. The highlight was the watermelon/knife. I was surprised at how these readymades went so well with the gallery space. Everything had a minimal, casual beauty.

IT Park captures the persistent energy behind Taiwan’s relatively slow-paced lifestyle. In fact, I find that much Taiwanese art does just that.

12. Taipei: Yu Cheng-Ta’s “Practicing live”

By Yu-Chieh Li

Yu Cheng-Ta’s new three-channel video is a send-up of the contemporary art world. The plot is woven from the dialogues of a fictional family of art professionals portrayed by renowned artists, curators, art critics, and gallerists from Taiwan, Japan, and the UK. The actors play alternate versions of themselves: for instance, the gallerist Chi-Wen Huang plays a museum director. Their conversation centers on the rules of the global art world and their plight as art professionals. Well-known maxims from philosophers and cultural theorists pop up in mockery of the overuse of quotations in art criticism.

The story culminates with the arrival of the news that son, David Yu, deemed by his family to be an unsuccessful artist, has won the Turner prize. It is also revealed that he has two other identities – famous artist David X and collector Skyban. With a story woven around an artist with multiple identities, this film throws a question to the global art system—How do you survive today as a contemporary Asian artist?

13. Taipei: Stray Dogs at the Museum: Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition

By Yu-Chieh Li

“Before Tsai Ming-liang’s films appear, we actually did not know what ‘slowness’ is.” – Chang Hsao-hung. “Slow Walk in Museum.” (from the brochure for Tsai Ming-Liang Solo Exhibition at MoNTUE)

We left time in the afternoon of our last day to slow down with Tsai’s award-winning film Stray Dogs presented in an unusual way, in an unconventional setting. In recent years, Tsai has identified himself more as an artist who works with moving images than as a film director. When entering the Museum of National Taipei University of Education (MoNTUE), we had to walk between heaps of tree branches to reach the screening places. The film was shown in several locations and scales: beneath staircases, on walls, and in a cozy space furnished with floor cushions where it was projected on two facing walls. Visitors were free to orient their cushions any way they wished.

In the brochure to the show, Tsai explains how he’d like to challenge the traditional idea of cinema as a temple-like place.

In my childhood, the cinema was usually a single-building architecture, like a big box surrounded by barbed wires outside, also like a temple with more than one thousand seats…All family would see the movie together, too. At that time, going to the cinema was like a pilgrimage. It happened during the 1960s and 1970s….Now the cinema has become a shopping mall… It is composed of small halls and frequent showing sessions. You can go to see them at any time.

The artist defies conventions of big-box cinemas and multiplex warrens by isolating fragments of the film and projecting them in corners as independent installations. The magic of Tsai is his ability to create drama by showing unremarkable slices of ordinary life—people eating, walking, sleeping in real time and suddenly introducing a disturbance. By decontextualizing these sequences, he opens them up to new and different readings.

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Stuart: Were you happy with how it went yesterday? It’s weird to ask if you are “satisfied,” though.

Minouk: I brought the bones that have not been buried yet. It is so difficult for me to think about how to tell [this story] and where to start. I hope this square [Biennale Square] will be the last stop for the shipping containers, which serve as coffins. And I hope this place will be the starting point from which we can speak about these tragedies once again, and together. However, the sound of countless camera flashes has shown the gravity of silence. The journalists who attended seemed only to take photos, since the story was too complex for them to cover.

Stuart: I cannot imagine the political games you had to play to get permission to do this work.

Minouk: I asked for permission after consulting with the association of bereaved families. Getting permission from the families was not difficult because they are eager for people to know about the killings. However, I had to ask government officials for permission to transport the containers holding the remains of the dead. But since it’s absurd that the remains are kept in these containers in the first place, I realized it was nonsense to ask the state authorities for permission to move them Anyway, the main problem was the right of private landowners to refuse the return of the containers to their original locations after they had been moved.

Jenny: So there is no historical record of the massacres?

Minouk: For sure, there are many. The problem is that the historical records are decaying in places that deserve to be called tombs. What is the use of records from the past if they do not become part of the present? In 1999 the issue received attention when the Associated Press reviewed the No Gun Ri Massacre. More than three hundred Korean civilians were killed by the US Army at No Gun Ri in 1950. The US government still denies the charges of intentional murder. It merely says that it “deeply regrets” the incident. During the Korean War, the South Korean government killed more than two hundred thousand suspected Communists and political opponents. South Korea’s fifteenth and sixteenth presidents Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun, who were democratically elected, made public apologies for the deaths caused by state violence, and they organized the Presidential Truth Commission on Suspicious Deaths and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. However, only 17 of 168 suspected burial sites of civilian massacres across the country have been excavated, and the commissions have been disbanded. I found out last year that there are collective memorial services throughout the year in Korea. The killings took place across the country. Some of the excavated remains are stored temporarily in professors’ laboratories and in an anthropology museum at a university, since there is no other place for them. Some of the other remains have been left in shipping containers. The containers I transported to the Gwangju Biennale Square are from Gyeongsan and Jinju.

Stuart: Allan Sekula also uses shipping containers. He did a film two years ago called The Forgotten Space and it starts with shipping containers. It’s somehow relevant because he was very much interested in following the path of shipping containers to start to locate invisible people—laborers who work in terrible conditions and are never seen. These people make capitalism function, but you never see them because they are on ships or work with shipping containers. I am just thinking about visibility in your work: the visibility of death, the visibility of societal outrage and atrocity that are never discussed in the media.

This morning we were discussing the way we assume that the cameras are staged by you, but you cannot totally control Instagramming. So I was interested in your strategy of making the invisible visible when you stage a media event, and I am also interested in knowing whether that act has been taken on by the audience as well. I am curious about your process, about the extent to which you can control the cameras. It was very interesting to watch that all coming together with the helicopter.

Minouk: In fact, it is not completely true to say the media have never covered the civilian massacres. The No Gun Ri massacre received global attention when the Associated Press uncovered the story in 1999. Only then did the Korean press delve into it. By presenting the issue in an art context, I am hoping that people today will see the event for what it was.

I made the piece because information broadcast on the media constantly flows and dulls our vision. The victims of civilian massacres are like specters who received attention and then were cast into oblivion. People get tired of hearing the same information over and over again, even if they haven’t actually taken it in. However, the context of art is where people see, meet, and think about things for themselves. Thus I believed that many cameras would draw the deaths into people’s everyday lives, not merely channel the event as an isolated occurrence. I wanted to experiment with the logic of the media on the issue of visibility, incorporating all these circumstances into the documentary film. This is why I chose to air the event live, and it was important that everyone face the proceeding and bear witness. The event was streamed live on the Internet by OhmyNews.

The funeral procession was a mobile, LTE [Long-Term Evolution, a standard for high-speed wireless communication commonly marketed as 4G LTE] procession that traversed the globe across boundaries of region and time, as people could watch it on their mobile devices connected to the Web. I wanted all those different scales of means to be used to soothe the wandering spirits of the missing dead and amplify hidden voices. I wonder how the photos of the remains in everyone’s mobile phones will be understood over time. However, what I had hoped was pushed away by the internal struggle of the art scene.

Jenny: Were you involved in the broadcasting?

Minouk: When the helicopter was hovering over the Biennale, I was communicating with the pilot. And I was in the broadcasting bus, controlling the position of the cameras and switching the sources to the main channel.

Jenny: How did you find participants for the performance?

Minouk: I met Dr. Han Sung-hoon while doing research on civilian massacres carried out during the Korean War. He has been studying the massacres for fifteen years. He also worked for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He informed me that the remains of victims in Gongju were being excavated and told me to visit the site if I was interested. I started to visit massacre sites, meeting the families of the dead. During the process, members of the May Mothers’ House in Gwangju worked together with the Gwangju Trauma Center. Seoul Youth Factory for Alternative Culture also participated in the process through workshops. It is an alternative school for students who refuse to receive formal education. I once worked there as an art director.

Stuart: Who are the blindfolded men coming out of the buses?

Minouk: They are family members of the victims from Gyeongsan, Jinju, and Hampyeong.

Jenny: And there was a kind of funeral yesterday?

Minouk: There was a very simple rite. It was to show respect for the dead, at least. In Korea people visit graves on each anniversary of a loved one’s death and on certain holidays. People also observe rituals in their homes. What is important this time is that people wore mourning clothes and went through funeral rituals for strangers from other regions. Family members of the victims, long divided by regional antagonisms, talked to each other as they participated in workshops and visits. The most rewarding part of the work for me is the fact that they now understand each other’s pain and sorrow and remember each other’s faces.

Stuart: The strangest moment for me was when I walked behind the window of a container where the ritual was happening. Through the window you could see all the reporters taking photographs. The news media are always up front, never in the back.

Minouk: It is an important point. I chose to air it live so that viewers see it for themselves, as opposed to in the form of edited information. I did not know where all those reporters came from, and I could not even focus on the families of the dead through the cameras I was using since they were behind the cameras brought by the reporters. This shows very well how the media block direct encounters with subjects by interfering from the very front. Nevertheless, the families of the massacre victims were amazed to see all those news reporters, and they wanted to believe that the occasion would expedite the realization of their dream to hold a dignified funeral. Yet all those flashing cameras are already pursuing bigger tragedies and more sensational events. Now the container is left as if it is of no significance. What do these deaths tell us? How will these remains withstand LTE “long-term evolution” in reality? How will they fare, and how will they be perceived? These are some of the questions raised by art.

Stuart: What status do the remains have now? Because the rituals happened yesterday, have the bones been fully recognized? Did the ritual formalize their status somehow?

Minouk: In South Korea the victims of civilian massacres are ignored by the government. I have come to realize that there is a difference between the law imposed by the state and the laws of ethics and morality. I did not start this work expecting anything from today’s politics or politicians. The remains of the massacred will be returned to their former locations in Gyeongsan and Jinju. Even though they are not officially recognized at this moment, they can at least be remembered through art. This is why I am trying to honor the victims through proper mourning in the context of art. This cannot be achieved through politics.

Stuart: I was thinking particularly of artists like Teresa Margolles, a Mexican artist who frequently uses real blood from violent massacres in Mexico. She did a piece during the Venice Biennale in which there was a man mopping the floors of the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich with water that contained the blood of Mexicans who had been murdered. Or she’ll take dirt soaked with blood from the ground where they were killed. And she coats flags with dirt and hangs them at the palazzo. The use of actual remains is still a powerful thing. I am not sure about the ethics in Korea versus those in the Americas. I mean it’s a very powerful thing, especially if you bring a religious ritual into the secular context of the art world—that means something different, too. Santiago Sierra, the Spanish artist, doesn’t deal with remains, but he deals with living bodies in a way that a lot of people find very troubling. I am sure you’ve been asked this a lot already, but I just wonder where your thinking is going about this a day after the event.

Minouk: I am thinking of death. I am looking for people—not the citizens, but the people. The word people reveals the one-sided reasoning of South Koreans, caused by the division of the North and the South. Thus, I have set out on a journey to find people who are not the slaves of community or ideology. In Korea ideologies have formed around every kind of viewpoint. Death is always interpreted by the living. These victims’ remains make me question the scope of what constitutes a community. Is there such a thing as a clear identity?

Jenny: What did the family members say after yesterday’s performance.

Minouk: The families were amazed by so many unexpected camera flashes of reporters from both Korea and overseas, and they seemed to expect to receive attention once again while appreciating the situation. They have spent sixty-four years wishing to inform the world of the atrocities they experienced. Watching them suffer, I thought of a poem by Gerhard Lohfink, “Death Is Not the Final Word.”

Stuart: So much contemporary art now, especially in the West, is still based on the strategies of Conceptual art in particular, which I think emerged in the 1960s with the rise of certain abstract political systems, like the rise of corporations and consumer society. It was moving further away from the object, real flesh and blood. It’s interesting that Jessica’s show [the 10th Gwangju Biennale was organized by Jessica Morgan] in general is returning to all these body art practices from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and this idea of trying to engage with real material and very factual society. And, I think, in your piece you are dealing with two things: the bones and the mediation—the image of the bones. It’s an interesting contrast, dealing with both the physical reality and also the distributive image universe.

And I have a very museum-related question, because you are dealing with the economy in this art world. What do you think in terms of how this work is archived and documented? The whole mission of museums is to remember, and increasingly it gets very hard with these kinds of practices because, for example, you cannot acquire the bones. I am just wondering if an institution wants to acquire your work, what do they acquire? What is the remaining art work? What are the ethics?

Minouk: The collection of a museum is a collective memory. I want my works in the collection to be open to any kind of combination with what is contemporary, so that they can always be created anew. Museums are places that generate incidents. An incident is a spark that occurs in an unexpected place, and there is a need for keeping records that enable different incidents to be constantly repositioned. I wanted to draw what is outside art into and within art, making art that cast doubt on itself. Emil Cioran asked if a person could love himself without destroying himself.

When we encounter an excellent work of art in a museum, what happens? Instead of informing us about something we don’t know, the art makes us question what we think we already know. What is undefined leads us to imagination rather than judgment. That’s why I’m dealing with two things: I am calling out and looking for the missing people in and through these objects. What should go into the collection from such work are these pivotal transitions.

The interview was conducted in English. Transcript and introduction by Yu-Chieh Li. Revisions made by the artist in Korean were translated into English by Jaeyong Park.

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