( )
This account describes an encounter of performance thought to be dead. How is it possible to witness something that has already ceased to exist? Looking back, I realize I witnessed this performance even before it began. It started with a parenthetical comment from Mu:p before the performance began.
"Anyway, the title of the final performance is 'Nothing there, Yet the Persian Empire was razed to the ground.' This was the first sentence that came to mind when planning this project, but I had no idea how to begin with such a statement. This sentence, lacking a cause, directly speaks of an outcome. Perhaps our rehearsals and the process of the performance were about circling back to this sentence. In truth, this sentence is missing something before it. ( ) Nothing there, Yet the Persian Empire was razed to the ground. What can be imagined from the omitted cause seems to expand infinitely. It seems natural to imagine an outcome based on a cause, but in most cases, we are confronted with outcomes without knowing their causes. If rehearsal is the cause, performance feels like being suddenly faced with the result."
I don't know exactly what died in the performance, but I witnessed things that were already dead. The timing and cause of their death remain unclear, but one thing is sure: they are connected to the blank space between the parentheses. Witnessing or summoning the dead is not an extraordinary occurrence. Throughout history and across cultures, humans have learned various ways to deal with death. Missing person posters, for example, visually compress all available information about an absence. A detective might be called to trace the chain of causality from clues scattered across a scene, or a medium might be summoned to hear voices invisible to our eyes. But in my case, I had neither the means nor the aptitude to summon death; I stumbled upon it by chance, witnessing the dead by accident.
Chair-Sculpture
The first was a pile of collapsed chairs. Three days before receiving an email asking me to collect accounts of 4p8p: 8 Rehearsals and 4 Performances (2022), which Mu:p presented at Doosan Gallery for Stop, Time-Space, I was on 14th Street in Manhattan, New York. That day, I was on my way to Union Square Station to see a performance at the High Line Park when I encountered someone on the street. Usually, I cut through the city quickly, rarely lingering near eccentric individuals, but that day, I felt an inexplicable pull that made it impossible to ignore this person.
Dressed in a navy jersey with black stains and cargo pants riddled with holes at the hems, he stood in the middle of the street, muttering something to himself. As he shouted and moved, people around him instinctively adjusted their distance, clearing space as though an invisible circular barrier surrounded him, pushing others away. His murmuring was incomprehensible yet loud enough to resist dismissal—about the volume at which an audience in the front two rows of a small theater could easily hear lines without much effort. After one thunderous outburst, he stared into the empty air, muttering something again. Watching for the right moment to pass by, I walked past him just as he straightened his posture.
The chairs appeared suddenly right after that. Whether they had been hidden behind the pile of black garbage behind him or simply out of sight, I couldn’t tell—but like a meteor crashing down, they suddenly materialized in that spot. I had seen those chairs before. In 2022, during 4p8p: 8 Rehearsals and 4 Performances, Mu:p created chair-sculpture-piles, moving chairs on and off the stage with the performers. The audience watched the chairs slowly topple, upright, or spun by those nearby, eventually piling into slanted, standing, or lying heaps. Since there was no prior explanation, the audience carefully observed every detail of the chairs and the performers’ movements. In this process, the chairs themselves became performers. Of course, those chairs no longer exist in that space. After the exhibition was dismantled, they collapsed and vanished. Once they left the gallery, their whereabouts became unknown.
And yet, there they were. I stood frozen in shock, more so than when I encountered the screaming madman. How could those chairs from that day be here now? At first glance, the chairs bore no resemblance to the ones I saw in the gallery. The exhibition chairs were light beige and white, while they were dark brown and black. Yet they were unmistakably the same chairs. In an instant, I was frozen as an audience two years ago once again.
Earthquake-Ghost
I managed to walk away, convincing myself that the pile of chairs merely reminded me of the ones from that day. However, a second moment confirmed that the performance from that day was not dead. It happened during a family trip to Tokyo.
The family trip was tedious. Determined to avoid visiting any exhibitions, I had set off, only to find that endlessly walking through similar-looking shopping arcades was equally tiresome. To make matters worse, it was the New Year's holiday, and all the shops were closed. Wandering around, searching in vain for an open restaurant, we eventually gave up and returned with an assortment of items from a convenience store. Snacks, drinks, triangular kimbap, cream buns, and various processed foods were lined up on a long, narrow table directly under the TV. It wasn't until I poured water into a cup and hung my coat on the closet handle that I saw the show again.
Four of us, including myself, were sitting on the white bed, with two mattresses placed side by side, when we all simultaneously felt something strange. Idle chatter naturally petered out, and before anyone could mention the oddity, the objects on the bed began trembling audibly. The water rippled, the coat hanger swung side to side, plastic bags quivered, and everything on the bed, including our bodies, tilted back and forth.
Long after the dizziness had passed, breaking news arrived. A 7.6-magnitude earthquake had struck Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. My family was excited, saying they had never experienced anything like this before. But I was the only one who felt an eerie familiarity. Wiping the spilled water with a tissue, I was certain the shaking was identical to something I'd felt before. During Mu:p's performance—or perhaps one of its rehearsals—I had experienced this tremor. That performance began in complete silence. Everything was in place, fixed as if it had to remain there forever. Then, gradually, things began to tremble, shaking ever so slightly in all directions.
The epicenter was unknown, and water had already spilled by the time the trembling became apparent. A coat's hem brushing against the next seat, paper on a table, sand on the ground, murmuring voices—all these things echoed and magnified the vibration, with cracks and tremors racing ahead of each other in cycles. Anything tall or elevated inevitably toppled. In that darkened space, I couldn't gauge how long it had taken from the silence to the collapse.
The sensation of trembling is said to belong to the realm of touch. Even if all visual and auditory input is blocked, the tactile memory of it lingers in the body. Those who have once witnessed the vibration of a crack cannot forget it. That day's tremor reappeared, disguised as an earthquake, in the small hotel room. This moving ghost, faceless and voiceless, circled beneath my skin with the same intensity and pattern as that day, indifferent to whether I remembered or had forgotten the performance.
Crossroads-Ruin
After several experiences, I no longer needed specific conditions or complex formulas to encounter the performance. What I once witnessed as objects or states had now become a place. From this point on, I gave up trying not to witness. My witnessing had already sparked a kind of contagion. This contagion tangled time arbitrarily, and ruins grew, feeding on the interwoven threads of time. Ruins are not confined to ancient sites or eerie places; they are often encountered right at your feet.
At an anonymous crossroads in Dadaocheng, Taipei, I encountered the most recent ruin. I had just left the tourist-filled streets, packed with modern history information centers, and was waiting for the traffic light to change at the largest intersection. Like a circular séance table enabling summoning rituals, the border of the sewer grate and sidewalk curb formed a small stage. On this stage were a single brown shoe and an overturned pot of instant noodles. Just outside this boundary stood a small bottle.
The shoe’s toe gleamed under the sunlight, and the concrete surface was littered with noodles, far exceeding the pot’s capacity. The label on the glass bottle was half-scraped off, leaving its original contents a mystery. What on earth has happened here? The question held no meaning, as the cause would forever remain unknown. As the traffic light changed three more times, I once again saw the performance that had already ended.
“He liked the uninhabited and ruined temples because they were the minimum of the visible world.” In Jorge Luis Borges’ The Circular Ruins (1940), the ruin becomes a space where one can dream of the world. The protagonist believes the ruin to be detached from the world, but by dreaming and creating a world within a world, he dissolves that boundary himself. In the end, the temple burns. Like curtains marking the start and end of a stage, touching both the audience and the performance simultaneously, and always ready to be lifted, the moment one dream, ruins refuse to remain solely in the past.
Nothing there, yet the Persian Empire was razed to the ground. Between the death of the future and the future of death, as we encounter nomadic ruins, we are simultaneously an audience, a ghost, a chair, an aftershock, and an endless dream.
