《Poetics of Relation》
Participatory Installation
size : Variable size, approx. 1050cm(W)×270cm(H)×350cm(D).
materials : Furniture, daily household items, wall structure, lighting, tableware, personal belongings, human presence.
2025.
“Why is it so hard for people just to be with one another?”
I attempt to respond to this question through works mediated by space, the body, and institutional frameworks.
This work sets up two identically configured rooms separated by a single wall. One room is uninhabited, furnished only with everyday objects. In the other, within the same arrangement, I and several members of my share house remain present, welcoming visitors while going about our daily life. I envisage acts and situations in which we share coffee or a glass of wine and a light meal, speak with initial nervousness, then gradually relax into small, casual conversation. At times, those who entered as viewers find themselves quietly sharing the comfort of being-there with a stranger seated beside them. Speaking or not speaking, meeting another’s eyes or not—everything is permitted.
Here, a field of “resonance,” in Hartmut Rosa’s sense—relation marked by sensitivity, responsiveness, transformability, and non-controllability—comes into being. This structure is grounded in my experience of opening my home as a share house after my mother’s death. In a communal life that relies on neither kinship nor titles, I have encountered moments when the boundary between self and other becomes unnecessary. This work is the practice of carrying that event of co-presence into the institutionalized space of exhibition.
Contemporary art institutions—especially exhibition systems—are predicated on asymmetrical relations between viewer and work, artist and audience. Within them, events are predesigned, and the audience is kept at a remove, asked to passively receive a “presented relation.” Reproducibility, documentability, and visibility function as metrics of value. Against this, the work establishes a situation that can be realized only through being with someone, rather than looking at something. The neighboring unoccupied room, though formally identical, is reduced to mere space insofar as relation does not occur there; by contrast, in the room where people come and go, the living eventfulness of being-with accumulates as the work itself and continues to transform.
My aim is not to flee or negate the institution, but to bring lived relationality into it—opening a fissure from within. This is a structural implementation of a poetics of relation that shifts the center of gravity from viewing to being-with, from documentation to transformation, and a quiet yet fundamental challenge to the institution of art.