ARTIST

• What You are Touching Now- Gangneung, 2025, single-channel video, color, sound, 13min 3sec.

Hong Lee Hyunsook’s works intertwine sculpture, installation, video, and performance, often exploring physical engagement with space and social narratives. In her latest work, <What You Are Touching Now – Gangneung>, she transforms historical sites—including Sammun, Chilsadang, and Jungdaecheong—into performative entities. Accompanied by a percussionist, she enacts a ritualistic ‘drumming’ of these structures, metaphorically awakening them from dormancy.
In her vision, over a millennium-old Sammun and Chilsadang serve as the guardian spirit that protects the city from misfortune. Through rhythmic percussions that resound over the East Sea, she revives these spaces, filling them with renewed vitality. This act of invocation is also a lament for all lives lost due to human recklessness, a prayer to prevent the recurrence of such tragedy. 
By conceptualizing these cultural heritage sites as living bodies, Hong initiates physical communication between past and present. As the performance intensifies, the vibrations resonate through various structures of the building, awakening the walls, the columns, and the floor, inviting the audience to participate in the process vocally and spiritually.