Walking the Threshold

2022 | Expanded-cinema Installation

Projection-mapped moving image, sculptural screen architecture, reflective and translucent materials, and four-channel sound

Exhibited at Kala Art Gallery, Berkeley, California

Walking the Threshold is an expanded-cinema installation that takes the sangyeo (상여), a funeral bier carried collectively in traditional Korean funeral processions, as its formal and conceptual point of departure. Rather than reconstructing a ceremony or treating the bier as a fixed cultural artifact, the work translates its underlying actions of carrying, passage, and separation into relationships among moving image, sculptural form, sound, and the spectator.

The projected landscape, recorded in my hometown of Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea, travels across a screen structure derived from the geometry of the sangyeo, passing through reflective and translucent surfaces and extending onto the surrounding architecture. As these surfaces conceal and redirect the image, its unstable, fragmented passage evokes a hon (혼; spirit) that no longer belongs to the world of the living.

Because no single position in the gallery offers a complete view, spectators must continually reposition themselves in relation to the projection. Their movement becomes an embodied form of editing; the cinematic sequence is produced through this encounter between the projected image and the moving body. A four-channel sound field further alters perceived distance, orientation, and acoustic perspective. Image and sound therefore continually recompose the architecture around the spectator, transforming the gallery into a cinematic apparatus.

Installation Documentation Excerpt| The moving image is projected across a sculptural apparatus that extends into the gallery space. This excerpt documents how projection, reflective and translucent surfaces, spatial sound, and the spectator’s shifting position collectively produce the work’s cinematic form.