At 10:48 AM, I boarded the subway. I could confirm the exact boarding time because I had a photo taken with my smartphone at that moment. As soon as I got on, something felt odd. In the same train car, a young woman and a middle-aged woman stood far apart from each other, each holding a bouquet of flowers. While holding flowers itself wasn't unusual, it felt peculiar that both women were holding three bouquets each. I found this odd and decided to record the bouquets with a photo. At that moment, the door connecting the train cars opened, and this time, a person carrying two flower baskets appeared. "Triple, Triple, Double" was written on them. I couldn't help but wonder what was going on.
Before long, I was able to deduce the cause of that peculiar scene. It was because I noticed several carnations among the piles of flower bouquets. "Tomorrow" was May 8th. They were delivery people for flowers. Their attire resembled that of ordinary office workers, making it difficult for me to initially associate them with delivery jobs. While it wasn't this year, I too had once used a flower delivery service to send flowers to my parents. Flowers were being delivered like this, although they could also be delivered by other means. Many flowers were quietly making their way through the ordinary scenes of strangers' daily lives inside the subway, subtly altering those mundane landscapes. We are often close to those who "order" and those who "receive." Yet here I was, imagining myself holding the ordered item, while the delivery person stood next to me for quite some time, gazing out the window. In this imagined scenario, the train continued to rush forward.
As the two individuals behind Mu:p looked back on their past works, they wondered why the memory of that May 7th subway experience suddenly came to mind. A sudden thought occurred to them: did Mu:p's work evoke a resemblance to someone standing beside them, not just holding one bouquet but two or three? It was as if they were summoning events that should belong in a different place, but in reality, had always been near them—events that, through various transformations, found their way to their side. If in my simple imagination there existed only one object, now there are multiple objects, and if there was just a single occurrence, now it manifests repeatedly in strange scenarios within the forest of Mu:p's creations.
The performance Unfolding Dance, Theater (2013) and
the documentary Theater Unfolding (2014) stills
Mu:p has always created a sense of continuously sweeping something away. Just as the subway on May 7th swept away the ordinariness of "one," prompting me to imagine different scenarios, they have persistently endeavored to sweep concepts anchored in place, pushing them elsewhere through their bodies or other tools brushing the ground. The four images above were recorded by me in February 2013 as the two individuals of Mu:p prepared for a performance together. They contemplated sweeping the emptiness of the lobby space on the 1st floor of the LG Arts Center (located at Yeoksam Station) filled with purposeless footsteps of office workers, using a combination of movements. Structuring the stage plane according to their intentions is crucial for effective sweeping. The collection of white dots directs the functions of several movements. Once the performance begins, daily life will blur, and different scenes will unfold. However, it's important not to forget that this place remains a "familiar" space to you. Outside the window, the familiar landscapes always surround you. Nevertheless, designing acts that make other imaginations possible is the goal. They continue to drag ( ) and sweep away ( ).
Translated by ChatGPT
