Togak Gwimo

I am a wandering spectre, moving through interior and exterior spaces, appearing in various forms that are simultaneously jovial, grotesque, incomprehensible, unstable, vulgar, absurd, and mysterious. Embodying all these meanings, I exist as a contemporary myth, characterised by a deformed and oversized anatomy. My skin is torn, my flesh exposed, bluish organs seemingly spilling out, elegantly blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. I stand here, a brazen, vulnerable and seductive form, a phenomenon attempting to inhabit this space.

Togak Gwimo hovers between a live exhibition and a malleable choreographic performance. Drawing from the supernatural, the past, and the present, this mutant being subverts existing social, racial, political, gender, and class boundaries. It distills abjection by challenging the authority of constructs like the borders between object and subject, life and death, self and other, while questioning the very notions of the natural and the artificial. An aberrant morphology emerges from the fusion of a human body and a large non-human costume. Initially grotesque, this form flounders and stumbles, yet it moves stealthily, ignoring the clumsiness caused by its heavy fleshly envelope. Through trivial performative acts, it haunts the space, filling it with an aura of strangeness.

The idiomatic expression 兎角龜毛 (Togak Gwimo) is composed in Korean from the Chinese characters 兎 (rabbit), 角 (horn), 龜 (turtle), and 毛 (fur). It refers to things that cannot exist in reality, evoking the chimerical images of a rabbit’s horn and a turtle’s fur.