With a newspaper held outstretched, a man with a white chin beard, black ponytail, and gray fedora stood on stage. In a declarative voice, he read an article aloud in Korean, then placed the spread on the table before him and cut out a rectangle. He repeated the sequence: lifting the paper up and reading, cutting out a section, and holding the paper in front of his face. Next it was our turn. Lights illuminated rows of tables where more than 100 of us—all non-Koreans—as we stood and mimicked him, reading articles in our native languages, then cutting them out. The German exchange student next to me giggled, mid-Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article, after I read a quote from politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in The New York Times; the Shanghai art journalist beside me read from Wenhui Daily. When the lights dimmed, the audience in the hall on the fringe of Seoul applauded and we paraded up a hill to a space where we were photographed holding our cut-out pages in front of our faces. 

This was not Sung Neung Kyung’s only performance over the course of several September days in Seoul. When he gave an exhibition tour at Gallery Hyundai 24 hours later, he recited a poem written on a partially burned fan mounted in a frame, and then sang for us. When I interviewed him with Hyundai’s communications director, the three of us were intermittently clicking at a remote to revive the air-conditioning that spontaneously switched off, and we would jump up to kill mosquitos that had slipped into the room—creating a slapstick-style routine of beeping and whirring, standing and clapping, that Sung conceded was worthy of a performance.