Eulsukdo Island is so brilliantly green. Shockingly so, in contrast to the usual muted blues and greys of a rainy day in the city of Busan, on South Korea’s southeastern coast. Once a landfill in the 1990s, the island has since been restored to a wetland teeming with wildlife, once again a haven for migrating birds. On the northern side of the island is the Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, the vertical garden that covers the building’s exterior matching the museum’s lush surroundings.
However, when I visited the museum, one of the exhibitions on view seemed to contradict the verdant rebirth happening outside. Inside Body, Under Experiment, very different kinds of creatures, more plastic and metal than flesh and blood or leaf and stem, were being gradually brought to life.
Body, Under Experiment consisted of three separate worlds: Geumhyung Jeong’s “Studio/Storage,” Hoonida Kim’s “Fine-Tuning Training Room,” and Byungjun Kwon’s “Robotic Sound Workshop.” The artists visited the museum on regular schedules to complete each “laboratory performance” over the course of weeks. In the center of the main room connecting all three installations was a table with iMacs, where visitors could browse a digital pamphlet on screen or fill out a printed “experiment log” with their observations. Though a few families milled around the gallery and no rule forbade speaking, the main room was almost completely silent. Seemingly, the mood had been set. The experiments were already underway.
Stepping into “Studio/Storage” alone, my blood ran cold. Jeong was absent that day, but the remnants of her performance lay scattered on lab tables and on the floor. At first glance, they looked like dissected human bodies. Inching closer, I realized that the bodies were medical manikins, many of which she dismembered and outfitted with wheels and motorized parts. On one wall played a video showing two of Jeong’s robots, with human faces from the nose up but no mouths, turning their heads as if to kiss. As I tiptoed around the lab benches, I braced myself for the possibility that something in the exhibition might move. To my relief, but also perhaps to my disappointment, nothing stirred.
Next came Hoonida Kim’s “Fine-Tuning Training Room.” Contrasting sharply with the clutter of “Studio/Storage,” Kim’s room felt extremely empty, as if everything except the lights hanging from the ceiling had blipped out of existence. However, I was not actually alone in the room—it was just that most of the objects were painted white like the walls. On one end sat two identical wearable devices, each with an artist-built “AI application,” a gigantic domed top to cover one’s head, and little handles to hold onto while walking around the gallery. On the other side of the room was a large screen and a vest on a stand. Through a cable that could be attached to the vest and the bottom of the monitor, the contraption translated people’s proximity to screens into physical tension, with the wearer’s movements changing the resolution of the content on the screen. Kim’s room unsettled me. Who was the training in “Fine-Tuning Training Room” for, and what was getting fine-tuned? In the case of the first two devices, was the device itself trained through users’ labor? Or, as vest-wearers were being leashed to screens, did the exhibition train visitors to become comfortable and docile in their use of technology?
The last laboratory, Kwon’s “Robotic Sound Workshop,” felt the most familiar to me. Upon entering, I encountered a rack of green lab coats, each labeled with a name written in black Sharpie and some further personalized with a small doodle. It reminded me of my time as a student researcher in wet labs during high school and my first year at Yale, and I suddenly remembered what it felt like to assume my “scientist” persona whenever I put on my coat and sterile gloves. However, the scientists in the workshop were not maintaining petri dishes of cells or pipetting proteins, but building vaguely humanoid robots. The robots, in varying degrees of completion, sat in different corners of the lab. Some had human-like hands and facial features but no legs, while others had legs and feet but otherwise did not have any other features that resembled organic bodies. Like the manikins in “Studio/Storage,” none of the robots came to life, but they still seemed to challenge visitors to acknowledge their presence beyond their existence as passive objects.
The day I visited, only one scientist sat at one of the tables, fiddling with some wires and occasionally getting up to check on something in the 3D printer. Yet, a photo projected on the wall showed the entire team hard at work on an earlier day, and a seating chart near the entrance showed who sat where. While having assigned workstations is commonplace in labs, I couldn’t help but feel like this seating chart was more of a performance program than an internal lab document. Instead of being there to tell the scientists where to go, it intended to explain the cast of characters to the visitors, who by entering the space became the audience for these Frankensteinian assemblages.
After lingering in each of the three installations, I still had a hard time pulling myself away. I’m aware that I get spooked more easily than others, but despite knowing this about myself I could tell that I wasn’t alone in feeling like something was pulling me back into the exhibition. Children stood and stared at Kwon’s robots, trying to match the gaze of the creatures looming over them. Parents completely avoided bringing their children into Jeong’s “Studio/Storage,” except for one young mother with a stroller, though even she averted her eyes from the half-faced robots.
When I eventually broke free of that strangely tethered feeling, I went back into the museum lobby. A window near the stairs looked out on the island’s dense vegetation, which I suddenly remembered had been shaped, for better or for worse, by years of shifting human interests. Still reeling from the exhibition, I tried to refocus my gaze on the bamboo stalks and the birds flying overhead, then on the rain pattering against the glass between us. I stared through the window for a long while.
