Reenactment of Being
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Reenactment of Being
TOKAS Project Vol. 9
― Exhibition that reexamines contemporary life through the act of “reenactment”
The TOKAS Project is designed to foster international exchange and inspire reflection on diverse themes from multicultural perspectives. In its ninth edition, in commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the exchange between TOKAS and Seoul, South Korea, the project welcomes five artists from Japan and South Korea, who mainly have previously participated in the residency program, and who reimagine reality through their own bodily experiences. In this exhibition, the artists approach diverse subjects—such as history, life, humanity, physicality, and society—from the perspective of “reenactment.” Through their distinct artistic practices— including fiction, sculpture, digital media, and physical performance—they seek to re-establish “being” in this space and reexamine the nature of life today.
Throughout the history of art, people have sought to remove the world before them and the living beings around them from the flow of time, anchoring them in place through painting, sculpture, photography, film, and the moving image, in an attempt to imbue them with immortality. Live arts such as theater, dance, and performance, for their part, have explored ways of summoning real lived experience into the performance space through the performer’s physical actions. This is a dynamic artistic undertaking that deploys the body in the present to evoke life in all its fleeting, unrepeatable immediacy, ceaselessly changing and impossible to grasp an instant later, and to share it with others beyond the bounds of time and place.
Through acts of reenactment that give renewed form in the exhibition space to aspects of life observed by the artists from their differing perspectives, this exhibition invites fresh interpretations grounded in the artists’ sensations and viewpoints in the moment of experience, while shedding new light on what it means to be alive today. Rather than merely transcribing reality or reproducing the past, the artists give flesh to a reality that encompasses their own physical experiences of events, including the memories and emotions associated with them, and apprehend it as something still unfolding in the present. Their practices excavate the many layers accumulated beneath the process of living and invite us to contemplate the complex, uncertain reality of being here and now.
Information
| Title | TOKAS Project Vol. 9 “Reenactment of Being” |
|---|---|
| Period | Oct 3 (Sat) - Nov 8 (Sun), 2026 |
| Time | 11:00-19:00 (Last Entry: 18:30) |
| Closed | Mondays (except Oct 12), Oct 13 (Tue) |
| Venue | Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (2-4-16 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo) |
| Admission | Free |
| Artists | EUN Jae Pil KIM Dohee KOO Donghee MINO Arata PARK Minha |
| Organizer | Tokyo Arts and Space (Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture) |
| Cooperatoins | SeMA Nanji Residency, MMCA Residency |
| Endorsed by | KOREAN CULTURAL CENTER KOREAN EMBASSY IN JAPAN |
Artists (Order of exhibition structure)
Untitled (Research photographs), 2025
Photography
© Arata Mino
【Reenactment of history】 – Living amid signs of war –
MINO ArataMino Arata conducts research and pursues a cross-disciplinary practice
centered on connecting memories and landscapes that linger in
marginalized places and things, identifying and foregrounding various
intermediaries between “here” and “there.” Working primarily from
photographs and moving images he shoots himself, he creates fictions and
presents them through various media, including his own body and those of
others.
For this exhibition, Mino wrote the new play Greenhouse/ Onsil,
drawing on historical research into the Yongsan US military base in Korea
and the postwar occupation period, as well as his examination of how war
continues to affect everyday life and the body in the present. He constructs
the greenhouse in which the play is set within the exhibition space and
stages the story as an installation using the methods of object theater,*
interweaving dialogue among three objects: a stone, an iron wire, and a truck. The work invites viewers to grasp the history of relations
between Japan and Korea, not as a set of objective facts, but as a reality
that bears directly on their own lives today.
*A form of theater in which objects are treated as living beings and used to tell stories and express
emotions.
[Profile]
Born in Fukuoka. Lives and works in Tokyo and Kanagawa.
Earned his PhD in Fine Arts from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2017.
Recent exhibitions: “The Secret Pass Exhibition: Passing, Creating, and Being Together—
Circuits for Living,” Arts Maebashi, 2026, “Suguru Yamamoto & Arata Mino, ʻHere to
stand, Here we standʼ,” Sapporo Parallel Museum, 2024, “Till Things Are Quiet,” Towada
Art Center space, Aomori, 2023. Participated in Exchange Residency Program in 2025
and stayed at SeMA Nanji Residency.
Sea Snake Six Navels, 2026
Audience participatory instrument sculpture, bronze, interactive sound graphic system, light
Photo: Dohee Kim
【Reenactment of the connections of life】– Life existing through relationships –
KIM Dohee
Kim Dohee is drawn to the dynamic energies generated by the “body as
substance,” such as friction and heat. She traces the paths through which
these energies are transmitted and interposes her own body into them,
seeking to capture fleeting moments when the boundaries between self
and other, artificial and natural, and life and death become blurred. Her
work places less weight on eliciting an immediate response than on
revealing layers of sensation formed as energy accumulates over time.
Since 2018, Kim has focused on the navel as a symbol of the
origins of human life. In her ongoing project Navel Mountain, she makes
molds of peopleʼs navels and, through the communication that arises in the
process, creates spaces where participants can experience life as a web
of connections among countless people. In this exhibition, she presents
Navel Strike, a sculpture in the form of a bell that extends the navel motif.
The sonic vibrations produced by the viewerʼs physical act of ringing the
bell resonate throughout the space.
[Profile]
Born in Busan in 1979. Lives and works in Seoul.
Graduated with an MFA from Hongik University in 2006.
Recent exhibitions: “Boundaries Resonate, Life Overflows,” Gimhae Museum of Art,
South Korea, 2026, “Chanting the Henʼs Dream: Phantom Sensation,” Yangju Art Studio
777 Residence, South Korea, 2025, “The Sound of Light Surface,” Seongbuk Young Art
Space, Seoul, 2024. Participated in Exchange Residency Program in 2018 and stayed at
TOKAS Residency.
Film still fromTime Paradox, 2024
Video
© Minha Park
【Reenactment of the human through technology】 – Life in flux between machine and human –
PARK Minha
Grounding her work in extensive research into actual events and archival
materials, Park Minha fuses science fiction with documentary in a
multifaceted practice encompassing film, moving image installations,
publications, and sound works. Her investigations into images decode the
frameworks that shape our sensory world and reveal hidden narratives.
She is particularly interested in the genealogy of optics and in audiovisual
byproducts derived from science, history, and media technology. By tracing
these byproducts as they appear in objects, places, and online archives,
she uncovers dispersed voices that linger like ghosts, and renders these
voices visible through storytelling.
For this exhibition, Park confronts a reality in which the blind
capitalist pursuit of ever greater efficiency and precision at todayʼs tech
companies has replaced human labor with robots and AI. Factories operate
without pause, fueling mass consumption, while human beings become
subservient to the hyper-productivity of technology. Through a moving
image work, she asks what aspects of humanity cannot be reduced to
digital data and what it means to be alive.
[Profile]
Born in Seoul in 1985. Lives and works in Seoul.
Graduated with an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 2013.
Recent activities: Screening “CPH:DOX 2025 NEW VISION AWARD,” Kunsthal
Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2025, Exhibition “The Second Life,” Atelier Hermès, Seoul,
2025, Exhibition “Foreverism: Endless Horizons,” Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, 2024.
Participated in Exchange Residency Program in 2025 and stayed at TOKAS Residency.
Blue Night, Blue Shadows, 2026
Performance
Photo: Sung Eui Suk
【Reenactment of the physicality of female roles】 – A past life embodied through a present body –
EUN Jae Pil
Eun Jae Pil explores the meaning of belonging and
“home” through the lens of migratory memory, focusing
on personal emotions and peripheral histories that
resist easy translation. By dismantling the boundaries
between tradition and modernity, as well as masculinity
and femininity—concepts often rigidly defined by
Western-centric societies—his work offers a sensory
experience that transcends simple explanation.
Since 2020, when he encountered a
rare volume documenting 12 poses and 53 hand
movements devised by Mei Lanfang, the celebrated
master of female roles in Peking opera, Eun has
studied female-role performance in Peking opera.
He has also trained under one of the few surviving
masters of this form, honing his performance technique
and reenacting Mei Lanfangʼs gestures through his
own body as he explores a bodily sensibility unconfined by biological sex. In this exhibition, Eun seeks to revive the figure
of the historical female-role performer in the present through a performance embodying Mei Lanfangʼs dance, together
with copperplate prints. This exhibition marks the first presentation of his work in Japan.
[Profile]
Born in Wonju (South Korea) in 1991. Lives and works in South Korea and the Netherlands.
Graduated with an MA in Art and Design from Sandberg Institute in 2021. Graduated with a BFA in Photography from Chung-Ang University in
2017.
Recent activities: Performance “Blue Night, Blue Shadows,” Seo-Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2026, Performance & Solo Exhibition “Red
Celebration,” Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art, Middelburg, the Netherlands, 2025.
Delivery, 2019
Installation
Photo: Yeonje Kim
【Reenactment of bodily sensation in contemporary society】 – Life formed within social norms –
KOO Donghee
Koo Donghee employs unremarkable everyday incidents and fragments of
her surrounding environment, including television, the internet, and urban
life. By sampling and recomposing these materials and interposing absurd
and uncanny occurrences, she disrupts our perception and illuminates the
latent dissonance within the familiar. Her process deliberately introduces
improvised happenings and game-like rules to generate tension and open
the work to unpredictable developments. Her practice is characterized by installations combining different media such as moving images, photography, and sculpture. Rather than directly addressing specific political or social
issues, she examines the limitations of social systems with humor and
irony, deftly engaging viewers both visually and psychologically.
In this exhibition, she presents a moving image work that explores how
our consciousness and senses are subordinated to a hyper-connected
information society. The work calls into question the apparent stability of
bodily habits and fixed norms shaped by everyday social life.
[Profile]
Born in Seoul in 1974. Lives and works in Seoul.
Graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2000. Graduated with a BFA
in Sculpture from Hongik University in 1998.
Recent exhibitions: “Dear Alexa,” Art Archives Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2026, “Tabula
Rasa,” Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2024, “Delivery,” Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2019.
Participated in Exchange Residency Program in 2007 and stayed at Tokyo Wonder Site
Aoyama.
About the partner institutions in Seoul
Since 2006, TOKAS has been collaborating with four partner institutions in Seoul to exchange artists.
（In parentheses are the fiscal year when the artist was dispatched or invited to each institution.）
SSamzie Space (Period of partnership: 2006-2009)
Dispatched artists: OHMAKI Shinji (2006), SASAKI Ai (2008), EBATA Kyoko (2008)
Invited artists: KIM Jinran (2006), KOO Donghee (2007)、PARK MeeNa (2008)
SAMUSO (Period of partnership: 2009)
Dispatched artist: KURIBAYASHI Takashi (2009)
MMCA Residency Goyang (Period of partnership: 2012-2018)
Dispatched artists: TSUCHIYA Nobuko ( 2012), NITO Kento (2013), ITO Hisaya (2014), HARIMA Midori (2015),
YAMAMOTO Takayuki (2016), KAMATA Yusuke (2017), MAKIZONO Kenji (2018)
Invited artists: YUN Sungji (2012), SIM Raejung (2013), KIM Taedong (2014), JUNG Ji-Hyun (2015),
KOH Jaewook (2016), LEE Sooyoung (2017), KIM Dohee (2018)
SeMA Nanji Residency (Period of partnership: 2019-present) *Suspended during 2020-2023
Dispatched artists: KIKUCHI Tomoko (2019), KIM Sajik (2024), MINO Arata (2025), TAKAHASHI Kentaro (2026)
Invited artists: CHUNG Jaeyeon (2019), Anna Han (2024), PARK Minha (2025), KIM Yesul (2026)
*Artists participating in this exhibition are underlined.
Related Event
Artist Talk
| Date | Oct 3, 2026 (Sat) 15:00-17:00 |
|---|---|
| Artists | EUN Jae Pil, KIM Dohee, KOO Donghee, PARK Minha |
| Venue | Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo |
| Admission | Free |
| Language | Japanese / English |
*Schedule and participants are subject to change.
Performance | EUN Jae Pil
| Date | Oct 3, 2026 (Sat) 17:30-18:00 |
|---|---|
| Artist | EUN Jae Pil |
| Venue | Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo |
| Admission | Free |
*Schedule and participants are subject to change.
Theater Performance | MINO Arata
| Date | Oct 10, 2026 (Sat) 15:00-16:00 |
|---|---|
| Direction | YAMAMOTO Hiroki (Inu no Senaka-za) |
| Venue | Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo, Space A (1F) |
| Admission | Free |
| Language | Japanese |
*Schedule and participants are subject to change.
Artist Talk | MINO Arata
| Date | Oct 10, 2026 (Sat) 16:00-16:30 |
|---|---|
| Artists | MINO Arata |
| Venue | Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo, Space A (1F) |
| Admission | Free |
| Language | Japanese |
*Schedule and participants are subject to change.
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