As I looked through the list of works in the portfolio that Mu:p had given me, I started from the most distant past, examining the titles and locations of the performances. The earliest memory I have begins with “Threshold Phenomena, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Changdong Residency” in 2017, which is listed seventh from the end. While I don’t recall the title, I distinctly remember seeing Mu:p’s performance for the first time at the Changdong Residency. I don’t remember the season. The Changdong Residency was inherently like that—a place where you couldn’t discern the season. It was a place with a chill evoked by the old government office-style cement building, where you rarely saw other people unless it was a special occasion. On that day, there were quite a few people. They lingered in or wandered the building's long, monochromatic, and rather featureless corridor throughout the performance. If it hadn’t been for Mu:p’s performance, I wouldn’t have spent so long lingering and staring at that corridor. It is quite remarkable how an unremarkable space can become special simply by being observed for an extended period.

Hyeong-jun Cho from Mu:p was huddled in that corridor. He appeared to be either frozen as if time had stopped or moving very slowly, occasionally jerking into sudden, spasmodic movements. In the dimly lit corridor, dozens of people had gathered around him, observing him closely. It was an unusual time. The ordinary corridor, which was far from theatrical, became an enigmatic space simply because so many people lingered and wandered in it. It felt like a temporary waiting room for some ominous event that might occur in the future, with people hesitantly pacing, anticipating something to happen. When the performance finally began, and they watched the performer, his movements seemed to flow in a different rhythm from the viewers' time, creating a parallel universe that was momentarily formed in the corridor of a building.

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            In the spring of 2012, I was copying black-and-white news film footage from the video archive of the Korean Policy Broadcasting Corporation. The footage was part of Korea News No. 397, reporting on the completion of a new workers’ dormitory in Munrae-dong in 1962. I was engrossed in the story of a building that had existed in Munrae-dong for over 30 years, where my studio had once been, but had been demolished, making its location nearly impossible to find now. I was searching for all available materials related to that building, and the black-and-white news film was part of that collection.

The news footage consisted of edited segments showing people visiting the new building to celebrate its completion in 1962, along with shots of the empty interior spaces of the building. The footage likely depicted images of the vacant spaces before anyone moved in—rooms with four sets of bunk beds, hallways, bathrooms, and so on. However, as I watched the footage from 1962 in 2012, I knew that the building had already been demolished, and the administrative documents revealed that it had been destroyed in a single demolition blast.

As I repeatedly watched those empty spaces in the video archive, I began to think that these might be the vacant spaces left behind after the occupants had all moved out just before the demolition. It was as if the news film documenting the building’s completion already contained the future of the building’s disappearance. I felt like a time traveler whose path had become entangled, witnessing a prophetic vision of a past where the boundaries between before and after were indistinguishable.  

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           In 2016, I was looking at the plans for an exhibition that never took place. The summer of 2015 was a time when artists-in-residence at the Geumcheon Art Factory in Guro-gu were preparing for their final exhibition. However, that summer saw a rise in confirmed cases of MERS, a contagious disease, causing widespread anxiety and fear. Consequently, the exhibition was canceled, and it was rescheduled to take place in the summer of 2016.

I walked through the empty exhibition hall, holding the blueprints for the canceled show. I intended to create a work about the exhibition that had been canceled. As I walked through the vacant space, holding the SketchUp plans that detailed the exhibition's spatial design and the arrangement of artworks, I felt an uncanny overlap of past and future, present and past. The space depicted in the plans was conceived by the exhibition curator and space designer, representing a future imagined in the past. Yet, at the same time, it was also an unrealized past, now on the verge of being re-realized as an unrealized past.

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            Sometimes, I think about a time traveler who has lost their abilities. As if the compass needle is swinging erratically and the clock hands are spinning uncontrollably, their sense of time becomes distorted. At such moments, the lost abilities briefly resurface, and the traveler drifts away from the fixed sense of time in reality, experiencing a fleeting sense of disorientation.

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            In 1960, the novelist J.G. Ballard published a short story titled "The Voices of Time." The story is set in a future where people increasingly regress, falling into dreamless sleep and eventually drifting into a state of coma. A neuroscientist named Powers, who experiences the same symptoms, attempts to discard the diminishing sense of time in reality and search for its meaning.

            His actions to this point had been a struggle against time itself. As he stood up to bid farewell to Anderson, he suddenly resolved to discard his alarm clock and free himself from the futile obsession with time. To solidify his decision, he took off his wristwatch, deliberately set the time to an arbitrary mess, and put it in his pocket. As he left the building and headed towards his car, he reflected on the freedom this simple act had granted him. He could now explore the side doors of the corridor of time. Three months could be equivalent to eternity.

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            After some time had passed, I revisited the Changdong Residency. I can't clearly remember if it was an open studio event or some other occasion. However, the moment I faced that corridor again, I realized that the performance of "Threshold Phenomena" was not yet over. "Threshold Phenomena" was still playing somewhere in my mind. As soon as I stood in that corridor again, I understood that the performers and audience from that day were continuing their performance like embedded ghosts within the corridors of my memory. The Changdong Residency corridor could no longer be the same as it had been before. I couldn’t determine the tense to describe that corridor.

^{Translated by ChatGPT}