Join us for performances by Jahye Khoo, held in conjunction with Spectrosynthesis Seoul.

Jahye Khoo, Exi(s)t Strategy, 2026, performance, 30 min

Concept & Director: Jahye Khoo
Performer: Saekja
Typography: rojotype
Voice: Sooki
Exhibition Technician: Hyojin Lee

Thomas asks his teacher to slap him ten more times.
This is on behalf of the future Charles, who hopes to become Jasmine.
He then says to Charles, “Charles, living without being slapped cannot be all there is to life.”
The line becomes the title of a monodrama by Saekja, a 70-year-old trans woman:“You can’t make a life out of not getting slapped in the face”

Much like the scene in which one person is slapped, speaks, and stands in place of another, Saekja’s body appears across others’ times and memories. The body moves through the corridor on Art Sonje Center’s first basement level, lingering in brief silence between the men’s and women’s toilets before arriving in the women’s space, where voices and texts fill the room. Through this movement, the artist shows who is permitted to appear in which spaces and from which they are made to withdraw. The body that enters amid the words stands there without being fully read. Within this “unreadability,” erased presences emerge once more. Taking place in a setting where entrances and exits intersect, the performance quietly and gradually destabilizes the conditions that authorize and exclude presence.

Jahye Khoo
Jahye Khoo (b. 1982, Korea) is a theater director who explores ways for language to address social reality beyond theatrical illusion. For Khoo, theater is a medium of resistance against tragedy, censorship, hate, discrimination, and exclusion. Their practice creates spaces of mourning for those erased from society and for those who have died without a name.