The Adventure of Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee

This performance was developed from one of the drawings of Monster Map, 15min. The drawing is composed solely of text about an unconnected conversation between Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee. The text in the drawing shows unidentified fear, alienation and the humor about them. The Adventure of Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee is a rendition of the text, performed in time and space of theater.

In the Performance appear nine performers and one dog: a young woman disguised as an old woman; a young man turning a ballpoint pen; a young man who looks at the eyes of audiences; a middle-aged woman disguised as a middle aged man; a man disguised as a ghost; an Asian men disguised as a Western man; a young woman disguised as a children; a dog and an owner of the dog. During two hours of performance, they are affixed to their positions in two dressing rooms, stage and corridor, except for the dog and its owner that wander around those places. Audiences enter the performance through a dressing room, pass through the stage, roll up the curtain, walk by the empty seats and go out through the entrance of the theater. While wandering around in the theater, they wear headsets and hear a pre-recorded sound(created by Ryu Hankil) in MP3 players given to them at the entrance.
(Chung Seoyoung)

This is a continuous performance. Audiences will receive brief information about the performance at the lobby desk, then be guided to enter into the theater through different gateways with a headphone and an mp3 player. At the moment audiences enter into the theater putting on the headphone, the performance “begins.” Entrance is allowed only thirty minutes before the ending of the performance.

The Adventure of Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee by Chung Seo Young begins in the form of drawing and installation, then transforms into performing arts. In her past projects, Chung has created a strange landscape of language, object, and our human condition in everyday life represented with cold humour. Her approach makes these elements into strange (uncanny) multiscapes by combining aspects of the sculptural and the everyday objects. Her interest expands as to encompass the issues surrounding the incommensurability between linguistic operation (as a semiotic system) and reality (as a lived experience). If she has so far revealed the chasm between the symbolic and the real by examining the structured meanings, now she pushes the boundaries of her artistic interests and attitude by taking a form of theatrical performance.
A unserious seriousness, meaningless meaning, and a humorless humor demonstrated in previous sculptures, installations, drawings all integrates in this performance with the living objects in the theater space-on site.

The Adventure of Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee
On a large-scale paper Chung drew (wrote) a discontinuous conversation between the two men. The drawing does not show or tell any specific event but is instead structured in the form of abstract texts. While looking at the fragmented pieces of words—conversation—we can experience the absurdity, violence, and discontinuity of life.
The performance is made up with anti-narrative stories, disjointed events without a sense of cause-and-effect. This is situated in between reality and un-reality(theatricality), leaving both the audiences and the performers in the liminal space between the inside and the outside—the theater and the world. In this sense, Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee may not only refer to the performers but they could be mirrored images of our own situated in our daily lives. The surreal moments that we experience in daily lives deconstructively operates in theater, or, the world. The purpose of this performance is to disclose the sense of confusion about the world, which indicates the theater. This feeling of confusion and disruption will estrange the illusion of ideology, and serve to expose the un-reality of the world in which we live in the mode of theatrical performance.

A Living Object: A Transformation not as Disguise but as Symptom
There are nine characters in the performance: a young man #1, a young man #2, a young small woman disguised as a child, a young man disguised as a monster, a dog and its owner, a young woman disguised as an old woman, an Asian man disguised as a western man, a young man disguised as a young woman, and a middle-aged woman disguised as a middle-aged man. However, the performers do not “act”—they are situated in the space of theater as a living object/sculpture or as a moment of deconstructive events. We cannot figure out why they are there as fragments of so-called events. They merely confront us as disconnected beings of their own events. Their state of being is not in disguise, but instead functions as a symptom. What we see is not the process of transformation but one frozen moment in time in the (dis)jointed process of physical transformation.

Theater, Theater in Process of Re-editing, and Sound
The space of theater in The Adventure of Mr. Kim and Mr. Lee becomes re-edited and re-imagined by the audience. Here, the conventions of the theater—the respective “roles” of the audience and actors, and delineation of spaces and boundaries—are completely subverted. The audience has to re-edit the space in which they are situated along with the “performance” they have come to see. In the process of re-editing/re-imagining of space, the audience’s assumptions are continually questioned as they begin to consider if they themselves are the actors. The only clue given to the audience is “sound.”
(Kim Jang Un)