Mira M. Yang
Ensemble
with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
Mira M. Yang develops work that engages with cultural transfer, memory, and belonging from a diasporic perspective. It emanates from something performative or staged, which holds the image of a transmission. To perform, in this sense, means to transmit signals, energies, and affects. It is often a performing body that acts as the transceiver, although more recently M. Yang has also used animated sculptures made from machine parts as surrogates for absent human bodies.
For the exhibition Ensemble, which will be presented in two chapters at the Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and the Fondation Pernod Ricard in Paris, M. Yang has developed new sound assemblages and a film, which are being shown in varying configurations.
To stay with the image of transmission, this also harbors the danger of a disturbance, interruption, or noise in which the signal is lost and becomes inaudible. M. Yang’s work marks moments of historical amnesia and absence, giving them a form that, although unable to restore what is lost, puts something else in its place. Various surrogate bodies and substitutes emerge in the exhibition, in which cultural heritage reverberates as an echo, a trace, or a sediment. The unresolved codings and images they contain demand a nuanced reconsideration.
At the center of Ensemble lies an exploration of the artistic legacy of the dancer and singer Choi-Seung Hee (1911–1969), the first performer from colonial Korea to appear on stage in Europe. Her choreographies fused influences from Korean, Chinese, Indian, and European modernist traditions, propagating a non-conformist and hybrid form of movement. Her legacy is not only sparsely documented but also distorted by violent marks inflicted in the contexts of colonialism, imperialism, and socialism. M. Yang does not approach this complicated heritage by claiming objectivity, but rather by reimagining it and by submitting it to a transformation. This considers that what is lost cannot simply be reconstructed, but needs to be imagined from the present. In Ensemble, this translates into different forms of recording, translation, and scoring movement.
The film Transmissions presents a fictionalized translation and restaging of Choi-Seung Hee’s choreographies based on incomplete documentation, with the parts that are missing and remain unknown replaced by new interpretations. M. Yang uses historical settings from the time of Choi-Seung Hee’s performances in Paris in the 1930s as backdrops for the film, including the Jardin d’agronomie tropicale René-Dumont, the Musée Guimet, the Théâtre national de Chaillot, and a karaoke restaurant in the 13th arrondissement. Almost a century later, Choi-Seung Hee appears here in altered form through the body of the dancer Paula Pau. Through the ways in which the camera reveals, conceals, and renders the body (il)legible, the work sensitively reflects on mechanisms of objectification. Here, the body is not a neutral carrier that disappears behind the score, but rather comes with its own logic, opacity, and resistance. This touches on an ethical question that the exhibition repeatedly raises: Where does external control begin and self-control end? How is movement guided, through an external structure or an inner dynamic?
The engagement with scores and instructions is continued in a sound assemblage that fills the space. It is composed of different sound- and noise-producing elements, which, as a whole, form a dismembered, atomized body of sound. Again, it is an absence that prompts the work: Neither Choi-Seung Hee’s voice nor the music that accompanied her performances was ever sufficiently documented. Using Labanotation, a modernist system devised by Rudolf von Laban that allows the movements of the human body to be analyzed and recorded, Choi-Seung Hee’s choreographies are translated into machine-coded signals that the sculptures perform as breathing, humming, vibrating, and droning sounds.
In its reflection on control and agency, the exhibition gains additional weight through a series of historical marionettes on display. On loan from the collection of the Swiss Puppet Museum in Fribourg and of different provenance, they rest in carefully lined vitrines and cases alongside their props, as if waiting to be activated. Their passivity stands in contrast to the restless animation of the machines, which endlessly continue to perform the score until instructed to stop.
A work by the Korean American artist, filmmaker, and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) is presented in dialogue with Mira M. Yang’s works.
The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive program of events, including an artist talk with Mira M. Yang and curator and lecturer Filipa Ramos (October 10, 2026), and a concert by the South Korean artist and sound producer bela (November 7, 2026).
Curated by Kathrin Bentele
With generous support from: État de Fribourg, Loterie Romande, Agglomération de Fribourg, Ville de Fribourg, BCF | FKB, Kunststiftung NRW
