Walking the Threshold

Expanded-cinema Installation | Projection-mapping, Screen Sculpture, 4-channel Sound

Exhibited at Kala Art Gallery, 2022, Berkeley, California

Walking the Threshold is an expanded-cinema installation that takes the sangyeo, a funeral bier carried collectively in traditional Korean funeral processions, as its conceptual point of departure. Approaching the bier as a structure of collective mourning at the threshold between life and death, the work translates the central gestures of carrying, separation, and transition into a spatial procession that engages spectators as participants.

The landscape recorded in my hometown of Gumi, Gyeongsangbuk-do, where I witnessed a sangyeo procession, is projected onto a screen structure derived from the bier’s geometry. The image travels across reflective surfaces and extends into the surrounding architecture. This spatial expansion evokes a hon (spirit) crossing from the world of the living into the afterlife, opening a path beyond the memory in which it has remained.

No single position in the gallery space offers a complete view, so spectators must continually reposition themselves in relation to the sangyeo, as if drawn into the procession. Their movement becomes an embodied form of editing; the cinematic sequence emerges through the encounter between the image and the moving body. A four-channel sound field further alters perceived distance, orientation, and acoustic perspective, recomposing the gallery as a cinematic apparatus.

Installation Documentation Excerpt

The projected image moves across a sculptural apparatus that extends into the gallery, where reflective and translucent surfaces, spatial sound, and the spectator’s shifting position collectively shape the work’s cinematic form.