Dissident Chorus, Busan Biennale 2026

We Were Trembling as If in Cold Water (2026) responds to the eerie atmosphere of abandonment the artist encountered throughout the Former Busan Nam High School. The kitchen, once functioning as the school's public heart, sustaining teachers, students and staff, now remains as infrastructure rendered obsolete: a redundant network of aging pipes seemingly locked in time. Park's installation reimagines this site—once the central metabolic organ supplying, processing and digesting energy—as a “Blue Darkroom.” A constellation of existing and newly commissioned sculptures bathes in a cold blue light, drawing the depths of the sea off Yeongdo into the exhibition, as though the space itself were submerged underwater. Extending from the central structure into the surrounding spaces, hoses and lighting form a continuous flow resembling both a nervous system and a network of waterways, loosely connecting the entire space. They link a central sculptural body to fragmented, pendant-like forms. Multiple strands of delicate hose are repeatedly braided like hair into a single thick, densely bound line. The force of the hands and the repeated movements of pulling and crossing remain concentrated in the twists and tension, giving the flexible material a firm cohesion and a sense of bodily strain. This compression finds an echo in the pinched and constricted forms of the central body and pendants, binding the scattered fragments into a single organic structure. Water driven by a pump circulates through the hoses, while light pulses regularly from the pendants, giving the structure continuous movement and rhythm. As though organs detached from the central body were still exchanging signals, these pulses animate the installation with a sense of breath and heartbeat. Pendere, the Latin verb meaning “to hang,” also gives rise to the notion of dependence. Through this etymological connection, Park traces the intertwined dynamics of sustenance, dependency, belonging and care that animate the installation. This circulatory network extends beyond the sculptural into the sonic. A soundscape by Seoul-based electronic music producer ABOPF, composed in collaboration with the artist, unfolds as a dense field of stretched low-frequency tones punctuated by echoes, cracks and glitches. Flowing through the former kitchen like an invisible current, the composition dissolves the boundaries between architecture, sculpture and body, eroding the threshold between interior and exterior, self and surroundings. Within this environment, Park's creatures, seemingly suspended between life and death, transform the abandoned kitchen into an organism that appears simultaneously dormant and alive. Installed within the existing conditions of the site, the work conjures a “sense of anxiety already inscribed in the body, even before learning and education take place.” Moving through these suspended fragments, viewers gradually lose their bearings as the familiar logic of the former school gives way to an unfamiliar bodily experience. Park invites us into a state of heightened awareness, where distinctions between dependence and autonomy, protection and exposure, remain suspended.