CONTACT
Bokyung Jun
윙윙 Wing Wing | 2023 | 14’44”
Courtesy the Artist
Courtesy the Artist
Synopsis
Based on the global decline in bee populations, a Finnish university developed the artificial bee “Fairy,” a biomimetic device that merges technological innovation with principles derived from nature. By synthesizing the flight patterns of bees with the dispersal mechanisms of dandelion seeds, Fairy was designed to imitate the crucial role these organisms play in pollination and ecological circulation. The project reflects both the urgency of environmental crisis and the growing tendency to turn to technological substitutes for disappearing non-human life.
Building on this point of departure, this performance explores how such biomimetic logic can be embodied through movement. The performer integrates qualities associated with bees, dandelion seeds, and wind into her body, creating a shifting physical language that oscillates between precision and drift, intention and surrender, animation and stillness. Through these movements, the work investigates how living and non-living entities, whether natural or artificial, interact with their environments and adapt to external forces.
About the artist
Bokyung Jun is an artist working across video, sound, performance, and installation. Her practice explores how the human body perceives and is transformed through its entanglements with technology, environments, and non-human entities. Since 2016, she has conducted research with skilled workers and artisans, collecting embodied gestures and oral knowledge and reconfiguring them into books, films, and spatial installations. Through this process, she has questioned the role of the artist, the relationship between labor and art, and the sensory values embedded in lived movement.
More recently, Jun has expanded this inquiry toward ecological and technological relations, focusing on how signals from machines, data, and environmental forces can be translated through the body. In her work, the body is not simply a tool of expression, but a conduit of translation through which rhythms of breath, tremor, balance, and gesture mediate between human and non-human worlds. Through this approach, she proposes a new sensory grammar that repositions the body as a relational and porous interface.