The Attempt of a Hug, 2024, Black construction paper
Supported by and developed during the residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; open studio program at forever gallery, Seoul.
Attempt of a Hug (Drawing), together with other movements as part of Sound Dance Drawings, 2024, 8,5 in x 15 in, movement notation on grid vellum paper (set of 16)
Attempt of a Hug is at once a documentation (notation) and a score of a single movement. Its current form is a paper sculpture that has been growing since its inception in 2024, accumulating layers of different hugging attempts.
This work was developed as part of a larger project titled Sound Dance, which initially aimed to archive gestures collected during a period of illness and paralysis, when my body became dependent on the intimate care labor of others. In its first phase, I gathered small, sustaining movements that keep my sick body alive—gestures of tucking, lifting, brushing hair, holding, stabilizing, or reaching out. These micro-actions, usually unrecorded and culturally invisible, formed a personal data culture of care: movements that carry emotional, social, and ethical information but rarely enter public narratives or institutional frameworks. Sound Dance treated these gestures as embodied data units—fragments of relational knowledge generated in moments of vulnerability, interdependence, and survival.
Among these gestures, the movement titled Attempt of a Hug became one I wanted to further explore in a second phase, developing it into a paper sculpture through processes of folding and cutting based on its notation drawings. While the notation drawing distills gestures into lines, directions, weight, temperature, tempo, and texture, the sculptural form emerges through folding and cutting processes inspired by the paper rituals of Korean shamans. In these practices, fragile paper forms are hung in domestic or ritual spaces to house benevolent spirits and repel harmful forces. Reworking this tradition, Attempt of a Hug reimagines choreography as a contemporary method of cosmological and social tending—a way to organize movement so that it protects, holds, and rebalances the body in times of instability.
The work may return to the broader Sound Dance archive of gestures in the future, but for now, it dwells within the movement of the attempt of a hug. The work aims to preserve a form of intimate labor that circulates below the threshold of public visibility. It gives material and spatial form to the otherwise ephemeral movements that accompany illness, healing, and relational endurance.
There is also a desire for the paper sculpture—suspended from the ceiling or a tree—to become not only an abstract archive, but a tangible nest and sanctuary: a place where subtle, often unrecognized gestures of survival are held, honored, and allowed to resonate beyond the private sphere.
The image is from an installation during New Suns Open Studio program at forever gallery, Seoul