Mass brings together two bodies of work, Arirang Half (2016/2026) and Body Borders (2023), in an exhibition that asks wh

Mass brings together two bodies of work, Arirang Half (2016/2026) and Body Borders (2023), in an exhibition that asks what borders do to bodies, and what bodies can do to borders. Moving between collective spectacle and intimate trace, between the scale of nations and the scale of a single moving figure, the exhibition offers roam projects as a space for sitting with that question. Arirang Half takes the North Korean Mass Games as its point of departure: a propaganda spectacle involving over 100,000 performers, staged under the name of a legendary Korean folk song shared across both Koreas. The work responds through abstraction, bodily transcription, and phonetic drift. A three-hour video projection in loop shows the artist's body, captured from above and superimposed across multiple frames, composing and dissolving the Mass Games' original texts through movement. A single figure does quietly what the spectacle did with thousands. Alongside it, up to 115 inkjet-printed video stills form a grid that echoes the placards held by thousands of performers, collective ritual refracted into individual gesture. A handbound book completes the installation, rendering the source texts through formal abstraction and semantic slippage: the resulting poetry is nonsensical yet evocative, pointing to the instability of meaning when filtered through cultural and linguistic borders. Arirang Half transforms a symbol of rigid collectivity into an open field for interpretation, foregrounding the body's capacity for ambiguity and resistance. Body Borders commands the gallery at full scale: a 400 × 300 cm drawing made with oil pastel shoes on paper, created through an hour of performative movement across the surface. The accumulated marks evoke landscape, a land mass charted not by surveyor's instruments but by the weight and path of a body. Mass, here, is double: the body as physical fact, the land as political one. The body is not an expressive tool but a negotiating agent, mapping its encounter with space, surface, and boundary through marks that accumulate and overlap. The shoes used in the process are also on view, emphasizing the embodied labor behind every line and the traces that movement inevitably leaves behind. Together, the two works invite viewers to consider how borders, whether national, linguistic, or corporeal, are made, unmade, and remade through movement, translation, and creative action. John Seung-Hwan Lee John Seung-Hwan Lee is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, performance, video, and writing. Born in the US and raised in South Korea, he moved to New York where he pursued a master's degree while simultaneously immersing himself in hip hop and breaking culture, two worlds he refused to keep separate. That tension between institutional and vernacular knowledge remains at the core of a practice that activates the entire body as an instrument of mark-making: torso, arms, legs, feet, and head become agents of gesture that blur the boundary between dance, drawing, and writing. Alongside his studio practice, he organizes reading groups and philosophical inquiry, understanding the questions pursued together in dialogue as inseparable from artistic expression. Mass by John Seung-Hwan Lee 20.6 Sat Vernissage 6-9 pm 21.6 Sun, 24-27.6 Wed-Sat 4-7 pm 22-23.6 Mon-Tue by appointment 26.6 Fri Finissage 7-9:30 pm (talk 7 pm)

roam space, Kreuzberg