Performance
4K, Color, Stereo, 18 mins (edited from 30mins performance)
Performer Isu Kim Lee
DoP Lara Fritz
Written & Directed by Eunju Hong
Supported by BBK Bayern, Bayerische Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst, Maxvorstadt
She seemed devastated, when I was weeping with Joy is a performance which originated from the artist’s research into East Asian traditional puppetry during her residency in Taiwan in 2024. The work explores the shifting dynamics of power, emotion, and control between the human body and a non-human body—the puppet.
The performance centers on a life-size puppet produced through 3D printing, modeled after the artist’s own face and body, and a performer who moves alongside it and enters into a physical and emotional relationship with it. Historically, puppets—originating from ritualistic and ceremonial forms—have evolved into toys, automata, animatronics, cyborgs, and robots, repeatedly serving as proxies for the human body and vessels for human desire. This work situates itself within that lineage, presenting the puppet not as an object but as an alternative body where vulnerability, projection, and control intersect.
Made of gray plastic, the puppet scrapes against the floor, producing dull mechanical sounds, and moves through space while gazing at the audience with an uncanny, almost sentient stare. In these moments, the fragility of the body and the latent violence involved in animating it become entangled, gradually dissolving the boundary between the manipulator and the manipulated, the human and the non-human.
The puppet functions as a ghost-like presence that hovers between reality and simulation, desire and memory, life and inert matter. As its hand traces the contours of the performer’s body and its joints fragment and collapse, a mirror shatters, redirecting the gaze inward. Through this gesture, the performance invites the audience to confront their own interiority through the mediated body of another.
3mins Trailer, performed at Apartment der Kunst Munich
Full version under request
Screeshots from the Performance recording (Shot by Lara Fritz)
Installation view (Photo: Thomas Dashuber)