2025
2 channel video
4K, Color, Stereo, 18 mins
Monsters, ghosts, and spiritual beings have long embodied human joy, suffering, and conflict. Puppet theatre and mask performance have served as portals through which the body transforms into “another being,” crossing into a different world.
Shadow Play begins with a question that emerged during the artist’s 2024 residency in Taiwan, where exchanges with puppetry artists prompted a reflection on the absence of a continuous tradition of Korean theatre. During the Japanese colonial period, Korea’s traditional puppet theatre and mask performance were systematically disrupted and largely disappeared. Today, only fragmented forms remain: a few local troupes that continue regional traditions, and the village-based Bakcheomji-geuk still performed in Seosan.
The documentation of Korean puppetry is extremely scarce. Even the films recorded in the 1960s and 70s are limited to a handful of recordings, suggesting that what we understand today as “tradition” is often a reconstruction imagined from fragments.
In Shadow Play, documentary footage filmed at a puppet theatre group in Osaka and at the Bakcheomji Center in Seosan intersects with archival material, including a video of children playing with masks modeled after paper masks of the Jinju Ogwangdae produced in the 1930s. Through these layered images, the work traces the meaning of the present as something built upon disappearance.
Exhibition View, Faction, Seoul, KR (Photo : Studio Osciloscope)
Exhibition View, Faction, Seoul, KR (Photo : Studio Osciloscope)