Main Facts Paris-based artist Mira M. Yang’s current exhibition, Ensemble, opened its first chapter at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg, Switzerland, running from September 12 through November 13, 2026, ahead of a second iteration scheduled to open at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris on November 23. Curated by Kathrin Bentele, the multi-chapter exhibition investigates what is systematically transformed, distorted, or lost when cultural artifacts and performances traverse national, ideological, and temporal boundaries. The core of Yang’s research centers upon the extraordinary life and legacy of Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969), a pioneering Korean modern dancer who achieved global renown during the late 1930s through her eclectic renditions of pan-Asian classical dances. Choi’s transcontinental career, which once brought her to share a New York stage with modern dance icon Martha Graham, stands as a complex historical precedent for today’s hyper-globalized cultural landscape. While Choi’s choreographies frequently adapted traditional Asian movement vocabularies to satisfy Western audiences’ exoticized expectations, they simultaneously operated as radical cross-cultural interventions. Yang’s Ensemble aggregates diverse bodies of newly produced work—including the 80-slide projected installation Cinematheque Moranbong (2025), the 16-minute experimental film Transmissions (2026) created in collaboration with choreographer Paula Pau, and a site-specific, deconstructed pneumatic pipe organ that translates Laban movement notation into architectural hums and rattles. This exhibition builds upon Yang’s broader artistic trajectory, which recently featured her video installation Karaoke Falsetto (2026) at Manifesta 16 in Essen, Germany. There, vocalists combined classical opera, Korean pansori, and experimental performance within a decommissioned Saint Marien church to reflect on the historical communities tied to sacred architecture. Chronology The Historical Genesis: 1930s–1950s Late 1930s: Korean modern dancer Choi Seung-hee achieves international stardom, touring globally and presenting a syncretic blend of pan-Asian dance forms, German Expressionism, and traditional Korean mask dances (talchum). Her performances in Western capitals like Paris (at the Salle Pleyel and Théâtre Chaillot) capitalize upon, yet subtly subvert, European exoticizing gazes. 1956: French filmmaker, writer, and left-wing intellectual Chris Marker travels to North Korea as part of a cultural delegation organized by the Parti Communiste Français (PCF). During his time in Pyongyang, Marker photographs Choi Seung-hee and her daughter, Ahn Seung-hee, performing at the Moranbong Theater. 1959: Marker publishes Coréennes (Korean Women), a photographic book chronicling his North Korean journey. The text serves as both a rare historical document of everyday life in the Eastern Bloc and a manifestation of the mid-century Western male gaze. The Contemporary Artistic Process: 2024–2026 Late 2024: While beginning a residency in Paris, Mira M. Yang encounters a copy of Marker’s Coréennes in the library of the Museum of East Asian Art Cologne. She subsequently visits the Cinémathèque Française, where Marker’s photographic estate is archived, to closely examine his original prints. 2025: Yang produces Cinematheque Moranbong, a quasi-stop-motion projection utilizing two Kodak slide projectors that overlay rephotographed images of Marker’s archival prints, viewed through a distorted magnifying lens. 2026 (Early): Collaborating with contemporary dancer and choreographer Paula Pau, Yang traces Choi Seung-hee’s historical footsteps across Paris, filming sites such as the Théâtre Chaillot and the Musée Guimet using a small body camera attached to Pau’s arm. September 12 – November 13, 2026: Mira M. Yang: Ensemble opens at Kunsthalle Friart in Fribourg, Switzerland, curated by Kathrin Bentele. The installation features Transmissions, the archival slide projections, and a custom spatialized pipe organ connected to Kinetography Laban scores. November 23, 2026: The second chapter of Ensemble is slated to open at the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris, continuing the project’s physical and conceptual migration. Supporting Data The multi-disciplinary and cross-media composition of Ensemble relies on specific archival sources, spatial technologies, and physical materials: Archival Trajectory: The exhibition traces a geographic and intellectual arc spanning Cologne, Pyongyang, Paris, Fribourg, and Essen. Primary Reference Materials: Coréennes (1959) by Chris Marker (photographs from the Moranbong Theater, Pyongyang). Historical performance programs from Choi Seung-hee’s European engagements preserved within the archives of the Centre National de la Danse in Paris. Exhibited Works & Media: Cinematheque Moranbong (2025): Comprises 80 projected slides displayed via dual Kodak slide projectors, creating slow chemical and optical dissolves that mimic early magic lantern shows. Transmissions (2026): A 16-minute, color-and-sound video work capturing contemporary Paris through body-cam footage attached to dancer Paula Pau, interspersed with an audio clip of Choi Seung-hee singing a Korean-translated version of "A Garden in Italy." The Sonic Architecture: A deconstructed pneumatic pipe organ embedded partially within the gallery walls of Kunsthalle Friart. Operated via wind and air pressure, it translates Kinetography Laban dance notation—compiled by Yang and two specialized movement notators—into atmospheric, low-frequency hums and mechanical rattlings rather than traditional musical compositions. Official Responses and Curatorial Perspectives Curator Kathrin Bentele, framing the conceptual parameters of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Friart, positions Ensemble not as a didactic historical survey of Choi Seung-hee’s contested political and artistic trajectory, but as an affective, fragmented encounter with history. In statements detailing the genesis of her work, Mira M. Yang elaborates on the philosophical underpinnings of the exhibition: "I initiated this research when I came to Paris for a residency two years ago… I’m fascinated by Marker’s way of sampling memory, place, time, myth, and the everyday into a highly sensitizing and poetic cinematic language. At the same time, Coréennes is a precious document of everyday life in North Korea in the ’50s… which also makes this book a document of the Western male gaze at the time." Reflecting on the mechanics of translation and historical reconstruction, Yang notes the intentional absence of original musical scores from Choi’s performances: "Something from Choi’s performances that has largely gone missing is the sound and musical accompaniment. She must have traveled with a group of musicians, but for the most part we don’t know who they were or what they sounded like… In order to bring back sound, I decided to translate our choreographies into a score by using Kinetography Laban notation… The organ’s elements are mirrored like a body, representing its different parts. This was important for me because it’s like physically operating parts of a body through breath, spread across the space, turning the archive back into something corporeal." Yang concludes on the sociopolitical ambitions of the exhibition’s "’Ensemble,’ the title of both this installation and the exhibition, refers to a group of musicians making music together, addressing the broader question of how we can live together in society. It is not about producing a cohesive documentation of Choi’s work and legacy, but a hallucinatory, momentary, fragmented experience. I wanted to look at bodies and archives that have historically been exoticized and objectified in order to translate them through my own perspective and moment in time." Implications Mira M. Yang’s Ensemble carries profound implications for contemporary art, archival studies, and post-colonial cultural critique. By resurrecting the specter of Choi Seung-hee—a figure whose brilliant career spanned Japanese colonial rule, liberation, and eventual marginalization within North Korean state cultural apparatuses—Yang refuses the easy binaries that often govern the art world’s engagement with non-Western histories. Deconstructing the Imperial and National Archive Mainstream Western art history has frequently relegated artists from the Global South or the former Eastern Bloc to footnotes of derivative modernism or exoticized curiosities. Choi Seung-hee’s history is fraught: she navigated Japanese imperialism, adapted her craft for Western audiences seeking stylized "oriental" performance, and later became a tool of North Korean socialist cultural diplomacy. Rather than sanitizing or erasing these contradictions, Yang embraces them. By routing her inquiry through Chris Marker’s mid-century Parisian gaze and utilizing distorted magnifying lenses, Yang highlights how historical documents are never neutral; they are heavily mediated artifacts shaped by the politics of looking. Corporeal Translation and the Living Archive A major implication of Yang’s methodology is her insistence on somatic and spatial reenactment as an alternative to passive historical consumption. By transforming choreography into Laban notation and subsequently routing those movement scores through a pneumatic, wall-embedded pipe organ, Yang literalizes the concept of the "body politic" and the archive as an anatomical entity. The resulting exhibition space does not present history as a static monument behind glass; instead, it breathes, rattles, and vibrates, forcing the viewer to experience the archive as an active, living organism. As Ensemble prepares for its transit from the institutional framework of Kunsthalle Friart to Paris’s Fondation Pernod Ricard in November 2026, the exhibition itself performs the exact process it critiques: circulation, translation, and adaptation. In doing so, Yang provides a vital blueprint for contemporary artists seeking to liberate marginalized historical figures from totalizing narratives, offering instead a fractured, poetic, and deeply resonant meditation on transnational memory. Post navigation The Alchemical Suspense of Sophia Huitema: An Exploration of Prussian Blue The Forensic Eye: Mastering the Art of Reverse-Engineering Lighting
