But what does it specifically mean for a gesture to be vivid, or for a body to be vivid? To answer this question, it might be useful to talk about the screen that I had postponed discussing. After all, the body we see is often in a state of being obscured by something. Coincidentally, in the first part of the video <Short Three Times, Long Once> divided into four "Rounds," the story conveyed through the subtitles directly addresses the idea of the screen.
"I think I was around 7 years old. It was the day the last episode of Eagle Five aired, so it must have been November 9, 1990. With both the joy and sadness of the final episode, I was walking home from kindergarten. As I entered the apartment complex and was almost at my home in building 303, I suddenly heard the sound of a car screeching to a halt, followed by a woman's scream. Amid the murmurs of people, when I looked back, there was a blue 1.5-ton truck, and the man who had gotten out of it was at a loss. In front of him, there was a child who looked about my age, lying on the ground, and a woman, presumably the child’s mother, was sitting by the child, covering the child's head with her skirt and screaming. [……] It was such a horrible situation, and everyone around had frozen in place. I wanted to keep watching, but in order not to miss the last episode of Eagle Five, I regained my composure and went up to apartment 303 in building 303."
As this story clearly shows, a screen is first used to conceal something horrifying. But who is it shielding from whom? The mother, having lost her child, would not be covering the child’s mutilated head for the sake of protecting others from shock. In other words, this screen is for the child, protecting the child's head from the gaze of others. However, even so, if the child is already dead, it raises the question of why such protection would be necessary. One possible answer is related to the fact that reality is nothing but the gaze of others. In other words, the mother was not only protecting the dignity of the dead child from others, but was also shielding the broken head itself from reality. In essence, she was preserving the child’s head in a state before it was shattered. By using the screen, the mother deceives reality, delaying the moment when the irreparable is registered as irreparable.
But this is not the whole story. The screen operates in a slightly different way for the young narrator who witnessed this scene. The child leaves the horrific scene behind and heads home, because there was something more urgent—the final episode of Eagle Five—that he needed to watch. The cartoon is a typical realm of fantasy. In this sense, the final episode of Eagle Five functions as a screen, allowing him to avoid the harsh reality he unexpectedly encountered (one of the core elements of fantasy is that it is always more urgent than reality). However, the young narrator does not forget the scene he just witnessed while watching the cartoon. Instead, he "could not stop imagining the face of the child hit by the truck just a moment ago" throughout the TV show. Here, we see another function of the screen. The screen generates a desire to lift it and makes the following imagination inevitable. This imagination is fundamentally obscene because it implies a kind of intrusion. According to the young narrator, "I was so curious about what was under the woman’s skirt, and though I was somewhat scared, I couldn’t stop imagining it."
In this way, the issue of desire is raised. I feel that the two functions of the screen operating in this story encapsulate the attitude of Mu:p toward how we view our bodies. These two functions can be summarized by two principles.
- The body does not exist (and we delay revealing this non-existence).
- Therefore, we must imagine the body (and desire is the most important driving force and form of this imagination).
We often say that desire blinds the eyes. It prevents us from seeing things clearly. Through the gaze distorted by desire, ordinary objects appear more valuable, more polished, more beautiful, or conversely, more hideous or terrifying. It leads us to foolish choices. Once the veil of desire is lifted, the object becomes nothing. We know countless stories of those who threw their lives away for these nothingnesses and perished. Such stories always advise us to be wary of desire, emphasizing the importance of seeing things in their unaltered form. But what if that unaltered form has already been irreparably damaged, and the idea of an intact object never truly existed in the first place? Desire may be seen as a distortion unrelated to the object itself, but when that distortion disappears, the object itself vanishes as well. The lesson of "The Emperor's New Clothes" is that when the king's clothes are stripped away, what remains is no longer the king. The king's body vanished along with his clothes.
Therefore, conversely, desire must be understood as a capability—a capacity to create something from nothing. To see without desire is to not see at all. Just as the floor is not simply the floor for Mu:p, the body cannot just be the body. Mu:p always sets up the stage, positioning our bodies within narratives, coordinates, and veils. The body of the performer lying on the floor is wrapped in a sack, submerged in smoke, and obscured by passing text (<Short Three Times, Long Once>), emerging as something sudden, like a partial object that breaks through a wall. A partial object refers to fragments of the body segmented by desire. (In <Butler and Foster>, the scene where Cho Hyeong-jun examines the hand emerging through the wall looks as if he is about to kiss it). According to Slavoj Žižek, it is "a mysterious organ with a bizarre autonomy that exists without a body. It is like the disembodied arm wandering in surrealist films, or the Cheshire Cat's smile in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that persists even though the body no longer exists [….] More precisely, it is like the undead in horror fiction. It is not the sublime spiritual immortality, but the obscene immortality of the 'living dead,' which reconstitutes itself after every annihilation and grotesquely continues to exist."
What is particularly important in our context is that the body, pierced by desire, the partial object, transcends the boundary between life and death. Typically, to desire an object and to objectify it is seen as an act that deprives the object of its original vividness—an act that leads to a kind of death. However, for Mu:p, this death simply means that the object has moved beyond a different boundary. "My love, I thought you were dead, but you just transitioned to another life." Therefore, the problem is not to pursue the impossible goal of capturing the living object itself, but to cross the boundary and reach another life. In this sense, one might say that for Mu:p, the body is a dream. Mu:p seeks to reach the reality of the body by pushing reality in such a way that it becomes as vivid as this dream. And so, what we see is another life, and the body in the dream.
