INSTITUTE OF ASIAN PERFORMANCE ART > News

In the center of the second section of “Institute of Asian Performance Art” (IAPA) was a simple, unpolished wooden table strewn with undeterminable black lumps. These objects are remnants from a performance by pioneering Korean performance artist Kim Kulim’s Wiping Cloth (1974/2018), in which the artist uses a white cloth to clean the wooden table. In an almost magician-like fashion, the cloth slowly disintegrates and reveals more and more black lumps of dirt. Interrupting the flow of the otherwise pristine white gallery in which they were installed, these leftover objects represented the spirit of aesthetic disturbance that dominated Asian performance art from the 1960s to the ’90s. Curated by Victor Wang, “IAPA” was the most recent edition of the David Roberts Art Foundation’s “Curators’ Series,” and focused on East Asia for the first time in the program’s near decade-long history, offering a rare, multi-city transnational presentation of performance art in Japan and Korea, with satellite events featuring Tehching Hsieh and Yingmei Duan. 

Installation view of KIM KULIM’s The Meaning of 1/24 Second, 1969, single-channel video: 10 mins, at “Institute of Asian Performance Art,” David Roberts Art Foundation, London, 2018. Photo Christa Holka. Courtesy the artist.