Kyungwoo Chun, born in 1969 in Seoul has been primarily working with photography and interactive performances involving his audience as his mediums. He is professor of photography at Chung-Ang University in Korea and is globally recognised for his blurry effusions in portraits that give the viewers a sense of movement and motion. Chun’s approach to photography and performance is its usage as a medium manifesting that which is invisible into visible visualizations.

Chun’s practice evolved from photography to a parallel placing of it with performance and instructional practice in the early 2000s. His work is mostly a framework that he creates and then it structures and grows as the partakers follow with it. His work initiates and instructs and leaves it to an open end to take a shape. He often works around the idea of mark making and visible invisibility, being a tracer of time and embodying in it interactions, objects, images and thoughts, often in the form of words.

Chun’s work is often multisensory in its approach and tends to initiate a conversation within and with that can be seen in his massive body of work that he has created and showed globally through his career. His work is represented in major museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston(MFAH), Huis Marseille stichting voor fotografie in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Emden, Museet for Fotokunst Odense, Musée Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine, The Museum of Photography Seoul, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea(MMCA) among others. Chun performed at the Sunaparanta space for the first time in 2015 with his exploration of touch and tactility as emotional agents in social interactions with his work titled ‘Ordinary Unknown’ – a performance that marked Chun’s first interaction in Goa. Where 30 guests were invited for dinner. Divided into two rows A and B they were seated at either ends of a dining table with a spread of 15 sets of tiny bowls, filled with Goan delicacies. Each performer was made to sit before someone they had never met before. Each guest was directed to select his/her own combination of delicacies from the containers. Row A was first instructed to feed the stranger in front of them. In utmost silence, with the session lasting for around 10 minutes followed by Row B feeding their stranger partners. This interactive set up evoked all sorts of emotions within the participants, some turned teary recalling their mother, some felt cared and nurtured, some developed trust while some experienced an intimate bond, unveiling the layers of emotional sensibilities and human dependency of companionship and touch.

Sunaparanta yet again presented and hosted Chun’s work after approximately eight years with “Songs Without Lyrics”, where Chun explores the definition of humanity, possibilities of compassion and empathy with designed interactions and representation through documentation. He has also collaborated with the Ektaal Children’s Choir, which marks the beginning of the show. Chun has closely worked with the children from the choir on two major productions that the show puts forth for experience in Goa for the first time. The children were asked to sing to nature, to imagine sounds and to picture compositions that culminated into an emotional connection between the children and nature juxtaposing the ideas of life existence.  

Along with these photographic and video performances, ‘Songs Without Lyrics’ also presents a series of participatory works that further with the involvement from the audiences making them ponder over the dialectics of being, emptiness, self-awareness and correlation.

Care is our very essence. It molds the empathic process, shapes social structures and builds our understanding of the world, building on the fundamental connection to others, where care becomes a collective experience. Kyungwoo Chun’s practice lies within the space that holds together empathy, care and compassion, focusing on how human interactions work within spaces. He designs and creates situations and experiences to make the viewer enter into and understand these systems of care closely with ordinary conversations, requests, tasks that culminate into possibilities for exchange.

Chun sets narratives and conditions that seek physical presence and participation to engage with strangers, histories, fears, flaws, faults and the body that generates data with which he furthers his process into building unusual and provocative settings that take shape depending on how it is interacted with. He deciphers meanings from the most mundane movements and actions like shaking hands and wrapping them together for a prolonged period, leaning against each other, feeding a meal to a stranger and experiencing pure emotions in the process, looking at self and the other closely, with a pause.

“Songs without Lyrics, explores alternatives for lyrics with no notes. The works in the show make visible what is often not seen or yet unknown, stretching our capacities for listening to sounds that are invented, and generating unimaginable terrains for communication.” Writes the curator of the show– Leandré D’Souza

Chun’s collaboration with the Ektaal Children’s Choir, makes these children the catalysts in a series of interventions in Goa captured in ‘Resonance’, a photographic piece where the children sing to nature. They perform in compassion singing to the trees before them with a dusk sky in the backdrop. As they converse, the plants come alive in subtlety. The final portraits appear as overexposed effusions, of saturated monotones and memories of the dialogue between the child and the tree. Nayantara Mascarenhas de Lima Leitao, Trainer and Conductor, Ektaal Children’s Choir says- “This production has been a unique experience and an unforgettable opportunity for the children of my choir. Working with an internationally renowned artist – Kyungwoo Chun has expanded their capacity for hearing and visualizing sound. The children’s minds were opened to a unique form of communication with nature, which I hope will shape their musical growth and stretch their imagination.”

“Chun’s association with the choir continues with Songs without Lyrics as they select scores that were composed by Korean children with hearing disabilities. Each score has a title, a colour corresponding to melodies and a number indicating the length of tone. In Korea, the sound sequences were activated by the sounds of bells. In Goa, the choir singers, acting like conductors, create their own rhythms to each piece and perform for the original composers of these scores.” – Leandré adds.

‘Songs without lyrics’ holds soul capturing photographs, confessional interactions, make thinking movements in visuals and empathetic interactions put together by Chung that takes the viewer a step closer to knowing the self and the other, exploring the anacrusis of life, experiencing the power of compassion and empathy in its purest, rawest form. Chun makes the invisible speak in visuals and experiences in the tactile

‘Traveling Faces’ is a video performance in which 200 people of varied age groups and cultural backgrounds were chosen to participate. They were asked to connect to a person close to them residing in another country via their smartphones and the contacted person was requested to send a selfie portrait which was then made to sculpt by the participants using the selfie as the reference point. In ‘100 Questions’, a hundred participants from different backgrounds were asked a personal question that was expected to be answered anonymously with a slight nod.

In ‘1000 Names’ we are guided to enter a space with bright red walls and are handed headphones carrying music, being instructed to listen to the sound piece and remember those most precious to us further made to write the names on the wall with no space nor separation between the individual names. While ‘Seventeen Moments’, captures the space in between the breath, the expanse between one breath and the next with a moving image. The participants for this piece being the 17 dancers, where the video starts and ends with a single moment, when the act of breathing stops. The notion of life with inhaling and exhaling of breath moves parallel on two screens facing each other marking the oscillation within the space of life and death, facing each other.

While Chun does not physically participate in the portraits, performances, videos he crafts, there exists a conscious thought process and exploration of the relational structures, the invisible entities that he builds in visuals and voices. He makes the unspoken speak through time and situations as the catalysts that bind the partakers. Chun locates relationships, communication, vulnerabilities, care and empathy within the liminal spaces reminding us to pause, to live and to breathe.

‘Songs without lyrics’ resonates with the idea of breathing without a sense of life, of seeing without observing, of hearing without listening and of touch without feeling of sensations that the body responds to. It holds a body of work that is observant, inviting, engaging and subtle in provoking a profound dialogue within and with. Chun’s songs without lyrics hold more meaning and sensibility than a language and words can hold.