Sung Neung Kyung: More Beautiful When Botched
By HG Masters

Portrait of SUNG NEUNG KYUNG, at the Reading Newspapers performance at Seoul Art Night, September 6, 2023, organized by Gallery Hyundai. Photo by studio idea & jw studio. All images courtesy the artist and Gallery Hyundai, Seoul.
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.