Five Acts & A Monologue

'Five Acts' begins with overlooked stories from Korea’s modern and contemporary history of women’s labor, revealing that women’s bodies and labor have never been peripheral – even as their stories have long been excluded from dominant historical narratives centered on heroes. Figures such as Hyun Kyeok, a former gisaeng turned independence activist; Bu Chunhwa, a haenyeo who led anti-Japanese protests in Jeju; and Shin Soonae, a leader in the Cheonggye Garment Workers’ Union, are among those whose struggles Hong brings into focus. Key moments from these histories are embroidered onto a 40-meter-long tapestry, offering a charged site of rupture—a surface for activation, brought to life through five performances held during the course of the exhibition.

'Accidental Paradise', installed in a darkened room, is a sound installation in which a text written and read by the artist is transformed into a polyphonic composition that merges human and nonhuman voices. Collaborator Owen Lloyd developed a program that analyzes thirteen distinct characteristics of the artist’s voice and matches each moment with over a thousand crane calls. Through this program, the artist’s reading voice is transformed into a range of crane vocalizations with varied timbres and tones, evoking the effect of her voice being rearticulated as a chorus of cranes. The artist was drawn to the crane not only because of its symbolic status as an endangered species, but also due to its social nature and the multiplicity of sounds it produces when in groups. Recalling her first encounter with a crane in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), she attempts to interweave the presence of the crane with her own—bridging the two through a shared sensory and imaginative space.