Bow

BOW is a site-based performance project that transforms the bodily gesture of bowing (拜) into an artistic act of physical practice. Rather than functioning as a religious ritual, the project reinterprets bowing through the repetition of a body that collapses vertically—as if consciousness has been cut off—and rises again without pause. Through this cycle, the work reflects on the bodily experience of life and death, disappearance and persistence.

The starting point of this work is the recognition that “we are already low beings.” If bowing in religious practice is an act of lowering both body and mind, the bow in BOW begins from a state that cannot be lowered any further—complete collapse. The performer lets the body fall toward the ground as if consciousness has been severed, surrendering entirely to gravity, and then immediately rises again. This uninterrupted sequence of falling and standing becomes a physical language that reveals life and death not as separate states but as a continuous loop.

BOW unfolds in the public space of Seoul Station Square. As a place where arrivals and departures, settlement and movement constantly intersect, Seoul Station is a symbolic site where individual lives overlap with broader social flows. Within this environment, the repeated act of bowing overlays the performer’s bodily time onto the temporal rhythm of the city, posing a question to those who encounter it: what does it mean to exist here, now?