Exhibition Information

Exhibition view

Exhibition view

Exhibition view

Exhibition view

			New Act: Lysis

Han Joo-ok

The hypothesis that a snail can read a book opens the discussion of New Act: Lysis.
At a time when accounts of relationships are constantly rearticulated through new languages and structures, the exhibition asks about the possibility of friendship by taking differences in sensation and cognition as its starting point.

This question evokes an imaginative scene in which the reader’s movements and sensory engagement while reading seem to overlap with the snail’s tactile passage across the page. Paths traced between letters, trails of mucus, and marks left by gnawing are set alongside our own movements across the page, momentarily evoking the act of reading. Yet this fable-like alignment reveals an inevitable gap, since the very notion of ‘reading’ presupposes criteria shaped by human sensation and cognition.

In thinking through this hypothesis, Team Project revisits a moment in which human reading and the snail’s movement intersect on the same page, in order to consider the conditions under which connection might emerge. In other words, the project reveals how a scene that appears to occupy a ‘shared position’ selectively calls forth certain sensations while immediately excluding others.
Some phenomena slip beyond the bounds of the world because they are too slow, excessively minute, or fail to register within prevailing criteria. What remains and what disappears are never fully resolved, forming a history of forgetting whose contours remain indistinct. In a present marked by accelerated judgment and the rapid reproduction of decisions and images, the impulse to reduce and define the world continues to narrow the radius of coexistence. Under these conditions, the a priori assumption that non-human beings cannot read books is brought back into question as a crucial point of departure for Team Project.

From this perspective, the project may be considered in relation to the concept of Umwelt,1) proposed by Jakob von Uexküll, which describes the environment each living being is capable of sensing and responding to. Attending to such singular environments, rather than reducing the world to a single, universal standard, resonates with Bruno Latour’s critique of the ‘universe’ as a unified world-image formed through historical and political processes.
By recalling what has been excluded under the idea of a single world, and by resisting the treatment of any set of laws as self-evident, the notion of ‘relation’ foregrounded in this project begins to take shape through a sustained posture of doubt and questioning.

The term Lysis, used in the exhibition title, refers to the dialogue on friendship by Plato. In Lysis, Plato’s practice of elenchus 2) —a dialogical mode that sustains questioning—moves through notions such as likeness, lack, and goodness in an effort to delimit the conditions of friendship, yet ultimately remains in a state of aporia.

Drawing on this form of questioning, the exhibition asks to whom—or toward what—friendship may be opened, extending the scope of the question itself. Proceeding from aporia rather than resolution, Lysis prolongs inquiry without arriving at a final conclusion. In this sense, friendship does not converge upon a single definition; instead, Lysis remains a site in which philia3) is posed anew.

Lee Yoonjae poses questions about how the world is perceived and interpreted, working across a range of media. APIS (2025), encountered by visitors upon entering the exhibition, is a sound work that organizes experiences of uncertainty and difference into relations through a temporal structure. At certain moments, listeners perceive sound with clarity; at others, it recedes into the background. Intermittent vibrations render the act of listening itself uncertain.

APIS (2025) begins with the full duration of the exhibition, thirty days or 43,200 minutes, which is then articulated into three mutually prime lengths 13, 47, and 71. Sounds associated with the human, the non-human, and artificial intelligence unfold simultaneously, remaining audible yet never aligning with one another. The artist converts Lysis by Plato, written in ancient Greek, into the format of a programming language through OCR4), and then translates it into an artificial voice. These processes are layered with the friction of paper, everyday noise, and the sounds of a snail feeding. A series of drawings accompanying the sound work, also titled APIS, renders this non-overlapping structure through hundreds of distinct triangular forms.

Entangled Reading (2025) begins from a proposal that links the snail enclosure in the artist’s room with the exhibition space. A camera installed inside the enclosure captures the snail’s movements in real time, and the footage is transmitted to a screen in the gallery. As processes of OCR and translation intervene, sensations and events that arise in separate spaces are drawn into a circuit of transformation, where they become entangled as a single act of 'reading.' Through this process of connection and transformation, distinctions between reader and read, environment and time, and the human and the non-human are reconfigured.

Finally, three books in which the time and voices accumulated through the project are gathered are placed on the shelves and tables. Interviews brings together a series of encounters with plants, animals, and non-human beings, sharing a language of friendship across these relations. Beginning with records of amplitude and frequency, Dialogues passes through the utterances of Lysis to develop the speculative premise of reading with a snail, unfolding at the boundary between fiction and reality. Within the exhibition space, books and tables, plants and visitors, light and darkness enter as elements that condition these relations, drawing different times and spaces into contact. Essays, to which six writers have contributed, approaches friendship through the sensation of memory that exerts a gravitational pull, the time spent waiting for a reply, relations revealed through distance, and connections formed with objects long kept close. New Act: Lysis places the conditions of friendship back into a space of questioning, sustaining moments of encounter as the form of the exhibition itself. Even when individual languages fail to meet at a center, the meaning of friendship continues to be renewed along their edges.


1) Jakob von Uexküll, A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans: With A Theory of Meaning, trans. Chee-Eun Chung(B Publishing, 2012).

2) Elenchus refers to the Socratic method of questioning through refutation, articulated in Plato’s early dialogues.

3) Philia (φιλία) refers to the Ancient Greek concept of friendship.

4) OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a technology for converting text in images into editable digital form.