“Mass” by John Seung-Hwan Lee

“Mass” brings together two bodies of work, “Arirang Half” (2016/2026) and “Body Borders” (2023), in an exhibition that explores what borders do to bodies and what bodies can do to borders.

Between collective spectacle and intimate trace, between the scale of nations and the scale of a single moving figure, the exhibition offers roam project space as a place to engage with this question.

Arirang Half takes the North Korean Mass Games as its starting point: a propaganda spectacle featuring over 100,000 performers, staged under the name of a legendary Korean folk song known in both Koreas. The work responds to this through abstraction, physical transcription, and phonetic displacement.

A three-hour video projection on a continuous loop shows the artist’s body, filmed from above and superimposed across multiple images, as she composes and dissolves the original texts of the Mass Games through movement.

Alongside this, up to 115 video stills printed using inkjet technology form a grid reminiscent of the posters held aloft by thousands of performers—a collective ritual that breaks down into an individual gesture.

A hand-bound book completes the installation, rendering the source texts through formal abstraction and semantic displacement: the resulting poetry is nonsensical yet moving, pointing to the instability of meaning when filtered through cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Arirang Half transforms a symbol of rigid collectivity into an open field of interpretation and brings the body’s capacity for ambiguity and resistance to the forefront.

“Body Borders” dominates the gallery in full scale: a 400 × 300 cm drawing created with oil pastel shoes on paper and produced through an hour of performative movement across the surface.

The body is not a means of expression, but an agent of negotiation that maps its encounter with space, surface, and boundary through traces that accumulate and overlap. The shoes used in the process are also on display, emphasizing the embodied labor behind every line and the traces that movement inevitably leaves behind.

Together, the two works invite viewers to reflect on how boundaries—whether national, linguistic, or physical—are created, dissolved, and reshaped through movement, translation, and creative action.

John Seung-Hwan Lee is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist working in the fields of drawing, performance, video, and writing.

This institutional and folk knowledge remains at the center of a practice that activates the entire body as an instrument of marking: the upper body, arms, legs, feet, and head become vessels for gestures that blur the boundary between dance, drawing, and writing.

June 20 Opening Reception 6–9 p.m.

June 21, June 24–27, 4–7 p.m.

June 22–23 by appointment

June 26: Closing Reception 7–9:30 PM (Panel Discussion at 7 PM)