PERIGEE UNFOLD 2026 Palm to Palm

"Instead of dreams, we want to have certain hands. Certain, material hands. (…) But certainty is only ever our half-waking dream, now we do not sing inside the grave. From a distant country, letters come now and then, (…) We go to bed reciting incantations." — Choi Seung-ja, "Instead of Dreams, We," Cheerful Diary (Moonji Publishing, 1984) Among the motive forces that sustain life is a belief that has never been concluded. Belief is a kind of promise. The possibility and steadfastness held within the believing mind cultivate life and society within the structures of the individual, the collective, and the world. Certainty always arises from a belief that is akin to dream, to fantasy. Now we must speak of hands that can be clasped only by way of dreams—of the fantasy that reveals its form through the hand. Within a fantasy one has surrendered to, it is entirely possible to keep walking even without reaching the destination. Leaving the distant in the distance, protecting belief from wearing thin is nothing other than protecting each of our own realities. Prospect—the gaze cast far—opens a wider world less through the object that might lie at its end than through the blind act of pressing toward that place. Through a bundle of promises and scenes without fixed appointment, we transform little by little into different beings. The nineteenth-century fantasy began with the annihilation of time and space. Photography and film, which imprinted moments of the past as images, and the railroad, which enabled passage to distant places, moved people from a world of place and matter into a world of representation and information. The acceleration and spatial contraction brought about by new technologies made the world faster and closer. Meanwhile, in the same period, another form of technology was spreading across an unfamiliar continent. The "ghost dance" was a desperate gesture of the heart performed by Indigenous North Americans who had lost the ground of their lives. When technology is said to be "a practice, a technique, or a device for altering the world or the experience of the world," the dance that longed for the return of dead ancestors and the buffalo—the ghost dance that shimmered like the light of the silver screen—was a technology devised to cross historical trauma and the gaps of time. Photography and moving images, which puncture the wall of time to summon what is distant as apparitions of light and shadow, are likewise, in this same sense, another ghost dance. The possibilities and failures lying dormant within belief revive along the resonance imprinted in the image and depict a belief in the world before us in place of the ungraspable Real. Palm to Palm attends to the technologies of artists who thus embody their respective realities through the medium of belief. Kim Yoonseo, Park Minha, and Park Sunho dissect the errors that arise in machine-translating postcards to trace a distant era, photograph strangers' empty homes to expose the tension between ownership and occupancy, and look into the glass plate photographs that recorded starlight, and into the lives of the women who worked with them. Each image, in ceaseless passage, embraces its own loss through fragmented observation. When what fantasy has promised and what it has taken away are set side by side, the seed of another story is planted at the site of heartbreak. Kim Yoonseo picks up the story at the point where the utopian gaze and optimism harbored in The Anatomy of Manchukuo (1932) come to an end, pinpointing its cause of death through a restaging of the dissection. The act of opening the skin of what has already breathed its last and performing an autopsy does not so much expose the flesh and bones within to confirm closure as it opens a corridor of passage toward multiple inflection points. A Nightmare with a long bridge (2026) opens with macro-photographed halftone images of postcards issued by "滿鐵 (The South Manchuria Railway Company)" and with words that break down the meanings of the pyeonbang, the small units that compose those characters. The alternating texts on love, shame, and sorrow are language written through the eye of an OCR translator that mistranslated the book's surveying reports and agitprop. Kim overlays these once more with Andreas Vesalius's sixteenth-century anatomical drawings and with the gaze cast upon pigeons, following the process by which historical trauma and context shift place physically and visually. The pigeon that will fly off in an instant and the finger sweeping across an unreadable language condense the whole video's movement of "pulling the distant near to dissect it, then letting the near flow away into the distance again." This sense of movement and disassembly converges once more into the image of the postcard, and Kim asks after the possibility of a different belief among broken promises. But when closure becomes the will to return or a new birth, belief arrives, just as the future comes. Fantasy sometimes becomes the driving force of action out of necessity. Park Minha savors the fantasy of unknowing in the blank spaces she has left alone rather than thoroughly excavated. In photographs where often mutually exclusive emotions are entangled resides the singularity of a life given concrete form without meaning or symbol. In Park's photographs, which affirm the process of wandering without grasping, being lost is the privilege of one who believes in the impossible. This belief acquires a concrete body within the series in which she has occupied and photographed strangers' empty homes. After moving repeatedly through the city of Seoul, Park decided to briefly take over spaces filled with objects she could never own to begin with. For the few hours the owner is out, the objects she has rearranged with her own hands drift, if briefly, without settled place, and the space constituted through choice and exclusion in itself attains a status equal to "the act of framing." Just as one reaches a hand into a darkroom flooded with dark to grope for film, the enigmatic time of gradually growing familiar within a stranger's empty home becomes an intense tactile experience that remains as photograph. The objects selected here are the most typical of things—a twisted shower hose, an ugly built-in wardrobe, mold on the floor—that, resembling nothing else, become singular, distinctive photographic subjects. The object within the photograph and the object onto which the photograph is affixed, the occupied space and the exhibition hall exposed by it, are inverted in layers, inside and out. In Park's photographs, the instant the shutter is pressed—a present constituted through the refraction of many forces—acquires not a flat surface but a supple, undulating mass. Through needs and frustrations that push outward and are drawn back in, through a deliberate deficiency, fantasy advances toward an attachment without possession. "The whetstone that sharpens all things—that which sharpens the gaze, the intellect, even intuition—is the heart." Park Sunho has attended to the shape of the heart with which people approach technology. The heart is less an empty vessel that can be filled with anything than a light of many colors that leaks outward, hard to conceal. In Tamed Light (2026), the stain between Park and the world she recorded by the light is layered over the glass plate photographs that inscribed starlight, over the lives of the women astronomical computers who measured and classified their brightness. In the video, the web of meaning connected by three lights is tamed into points and lines that slide and accumulate horizontally, into images of black and white. The doubly deferred light is projected once again onto a loosely woven screen, like transparent double-sided glass. The lights that set out long ago arrive here at last not through the narrative of reason written in conquest and submission, but through the touch that cares and tames, the attitude of tender, watchful attention. The lights not yet captured pass through the thin-threaded screen and reach as far as the space farther behind. It is not only light that flows. The light that dwells while moving between foreground and background is an archive of thoughts and yearnings carried down to today, and is inscribed together as a qualitatively transfigured musical impression. The sound that wraps around the space fills invisible time and space not at the periphery of the image but from within the frame's meter. Because "what saves us is always the smallest thing," Park tends the shape of the heart called belief within her relations with those women weakly connected to her. The hands of reality clasped in sharing turn toward an attitude of belief that lives with loss. Like the gesture of promise and prayer with palms pressed together, what they believe lies in the movement from palm to palm, from belief to reality, from far to near, or in the reverse. Collapsed optimism does not end at arrested mourning or restoration but becomes a belief that waits and welcomes; the latitude that, having given up possession, does not lose heart forms a loose attachment. The heart that cares for what disappears at a time-lag, or has already disappeared, at times sustains itself in the site of recovery. This exhibition therefore resolves to stand aside from the plural conclusions they are about to meet and keep watch over the fantasy that will endure. Certainty is only ever our half-waking dream.