Poster image of 《Perfect Condition》 © Post Territory Ujeongguk

This exhibition, open 24 hours a day for ten consecutive days, visualizes desires and illusions that continue to operate without pause even in moments beyond our awareness through the work’s ceaseless process of activation, while physically revealing their relationship to reality.

Human desire produces illusions. The illusions generated by desire appear before us in a state indistinguishable from reality and become ideal goals for the individual. Desire demands “perfect conditions” for the realization of such goals. Although these “perfect conditions” can never truly be attained and exist only as concepts, desire leads us to treat them as if they were achievable in reality, causing us to fall into illusion.

This exhibition explores the ways in which desire and illusion operate in the real world. PARK Seong Jun and the Small Tent of Zone 5 by the Yeolhyeol Youth Art Troupe create ruptures in the fantasies generated by the human pursuit of “perfect conditions,” sensorially revealing the gaps within them.

In doing so, they prompt viewers to experience doubt toward the present reality unfolding before their eyes. The exhibition space becomes a “house” in which these ideas are cultivated and amplified.

The expression of desire, situated at the deepest level of the human interior, begins with wishes and things longed for, while our awareness of them is formed through experience and learning. Yet desire seems to operate independently of this process: it takes shape as images within the unconscious, produces illusions, and intervenes in our perception of reality. As a result, illusion and reality become impossible to separate.

At the most visible surface of human behavior, image-based desires—whose status as reality or illusion remains uncertain—are reproduced through unspecified actions. Absorbing, expelling, and relating to their surroundings in different ways, desires continually transform while accumulating the contents of time.

PARK Seong Jun’s new media works momentarily create a disjunction between sensation and cognition, producing cracks in our faith in concepts. The Small Tent of Zone 5 by the Yeolhyeol Youth Art Troupe stages four figures whose desires become entangled across different situations over the course of 240 hours.

Through an interdisciplinary form that combines PARK Seong Jun’s new media art with the theatrical practice of the Small Tent of Zone 5, an elusive sense of disjunction is continually reproduced.

When the boundary between reality and illusion becomes perceptible, the enactment of desire is disrupted by doubt toward our own perception. At such moments, confusion arises, and we instinctively attempt to redraw the distinction between reality and illusion. This process is inevitably repeated, because everything we perceive and do is ultimately connected to the “perfect conditions” that we imagine as an illusion.

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