Servant School: Exhibition text commissioned by Muyeong Kim for his solo exhibition at No.9 Cork Street

2024

In the Rubber Hand Illusion, a participant may begin to feel that a fake hand is a part of their own body. A rubber hand is placed on a table parallel to the real hand, and the real hand is concealed from the participant's view by a cloth or screen. At first, the rubber hand and the real hand are stroked synchronously. Then, eventually, actions performed on the rubber hand alone are 'felt' by the participant – a phantom sensation, somewhere near but not quite of the body. 

What interested Muyeong is that the illusion also seems to bring out a certain violence in people. Onlookers are apparently compelled to pinch, stab, or cut the rubber hand to see if it will make the participant recoil, shriek, laugh. What interested me is that the illusion must have to overcome an attempt by the mind to rationalise the sensation. A will to passivity; an attempt to remain numb.

Muyeong told me he’d drawn a diagram of the Rubber Hand Illusion. He wanted to borrow its set of relations and fill its architecture with things in his practice, to see how they might be transformed by it. The real hand as an actor, for example; the rubber hand as the actor’s image. The cloth, the table, the tools for tickling, prodding, provoking swapped out for things like a location, a gesture, a material. I wonder – where will playful violence emerge? What will attempt to remain numb? 

Muyeong’s Servant School forms a study of willed passivity and its violent ruptures. Like the diagram of the Rubber Hand Illusion, the works in this exhibition appropriate the relational architectures of things. The structure of a theatre, the folds of a cigarette packet, the aspect ratios of cinema, a doorway, a light box, a spread and stitched patchwork of animal skins – Muyeong borrows these systems and within them stages delicate constellations of desire, control, passivity, and violence. 

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Shot on black and white 16mm, Bimanual indulges in the haptic power of images and the somatic sensations they can induce. Hands play piano, hands caress other hands, fingertips twist hairs into moist spikes – matches are stuck like birthday candles into what appears to be a severed pig’s trotter. Czerny’s piano piece School of Velocity provides the score: a piece typically used by students in piano lessons as a coordination exercise.

A new series of photographs entitled Foe, This Little Pause on The Road to You, a Cloud / That Hides My Fever / Flowing Blue And Blue, Convinced by The Westering Sun, to Conjure in Your House invites associations between the gaze of an artist, a tourist, and a prison guard, and the dynamics of power and passivity implied by these roles. For the title, Muyeong translated into English an extract of Dohwa Dohwa, (桃花桃花) a poem by South Korean poet Suh Jeong Ju. Though he remains a beloved and influential figure in Korean literature, Suh Jeong Ju’s legacy is controversial due to his open support for the Japanese occupation. 

Taken with a discreet pinhole camera made from a coffee can, the photographic series documents a trip to Seodaemun Prison in Seoul. Built by Japan during its occupation of Korea, the prison site is now maintained as a museum by the Korean government. For this exhibition Muyeong selected one photograph from the series depicting an outdoor yard where narrow partitions were built to prevent prisoners from talking to each other while exercising. Forming a fan-shaped panopticon, the structure reminded Muyeong of the remains of an amphitheatre. Another photograph in the series, not shown here, was taken in the prison's former leprosy ward where prisoners were kept in isolation. 

Vomitoria are similarly influenced by Muyeong’s interest in architectural design and surveillance. Made from glass paperweights pressed against various animal skins and fixed to the wall like small portholes, they take their name from the passageways in amphitheatres and stadiums that allow efficient access and exit for large crowds. Vomitoria are bulimic devices. A quick way out for a ‘too much’ held within. Here they become magnifying lenses, peepholes, the bulging, anonymous eyes of cctv cameras. For Muyeong, however, they’re still passageways. I asked him if they aren’t more like windows than doorways but he said no. They can open, but to him they are closed.

A closed door in Marquee too. A photograph of M’s living room in Seoul. The room is lit by a ‘marquee’ – a small lightbox mimicking the ones typically found on a cinema’s facade with black lettering spelling out the night’s showtimes. This one, however, is blank. A silent sign. Projected on a closed door in the room is a porn video, turned 90 degrees as if playing for someone lying on their side on a sofa. But to a viewer standing in front of the photograph, the bodies in the projection appear to stand vertically – the gravity and weight of their position strangely disrupted. 

For Tiring house, Muyeong made a copy of the marquee in wood and covered it with black eel skin. With its function as a lightbox removed, it appears as a negative of the original. A phantom object. A rubber hand? 

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Servant School’s title comes from the Brothers Quay film Institute Benjamenta. The first time Muyeong saw the film, he described it as so perfect that he almost didn’t want anyone else to see it. He didn’t want his excitement to be numbed by someone else’s ambivalence. In the film, a young man named Jakob von Gunten enrols at a school for training servants. The students are all men who have decided (or accepted) that they will never amount to any personal greatness, and so they dedicate themselves to a life of servitude instead. In foggy black and white we watch them rehearse an absurd choreography of catatonic gestures and murmurs under the solemn gaze of Fraulein Benjamenta. Occasionally the film returns to an image from within a murky fish bowl: an enlarged eye in a distorted face leans close to watch a goldfish flutter against the curving glass. 

One night, finding himself alone at last, a tipsy, wistful Jakob whispers: I should never let myself be rescued.