Escaping

Text by Song Yu

When working in an office building, Kim feels locked up in a closed box and often fantasizes to escape. She believes this is a natural feeling shared by many office workers and it is necessary to free oneself spiritually from the closed environment.

The artist conceived a performance, in which she would, using computer cables as a safety belt, get out of an office building by climbing down a window.
It is a breach of normal office life: office workers would always go in and out of the building the way others designed for them. Cables are used for all kinds of electrical equipment and available in a modern office.

"To get free is to break through something, which also means you are doing something dangerous".

I can magine such a scene from distance: from a high spot of a huge closed object (the building), a small creature comes out and finds her way, by climbing down with a thin and weak "life belt". The whole action is so "improper" and dangerous that in the whole process both the audience and the artist herself has to be under great tension. Perhaps it is the cost for freedom.

Kim then developed the idea into an abstract performance to only present the most exciting breakthrough moment. She buildt a huge open cube inside a room using sixteen 210cm wooden bars. The top side is covered by a piece of thick plastic to construct a "roof". The artist would move herself to the "roof" to see what happens. The performance is an experiment. She may fall through the "roof" immediately or the "roof" could be too strong to allow her to escape.

In the video recording of the performance, we see a beautiful scene: a woman's naked body moves on to the semitransparent "roof". The plastic film is beautifully stretched by the weight, and the scrunched body can be mistily seen struggling mildly for a short while. Then the "roof" is ripped and the body falls down suddenly, followed by the sound of the crash. When held by the stretched plastic, the body seems to be in a choking position and is struggling, so I wondered what would happen next and for how long the struggle would last. There is such an impressive physical confrontation of the body with the confined setting that when she falls down, the ultrashort breakthrough moment does make me feel excited immediately because of the physical release. It is a strong abstract presentation of the original idea of escaping. Also, by seeing the whole performance, one can probably share the artist's mixed feelings in process of escaping as I do: dangerous, struggling, painful and free.