Project by Kai Sangbum Park

“A team of ten spends several days on a desert island, living as actors in a theater where life and performance are one. Beds become solitary viewing spots—or sites of introspection when turned to the sea. Kitchens, tables, toilets, and showers all serve the island’s continuous dramaturgy, supported by a system of lights and sound.

This project proposes the construction of an allegorical installation that reinterprets Plato’s famous cave from The Republic, situating it within the context of contemporary metropolitan life. At once a conceptual commentary and a protocol for real inhabitation, the installation invites participants to live temporarily within a constructed environment where daily life becomes indistinguishable from performance. The island is organized as an open-stage apparatus. Its architecture does not offer shelter but frames experience. Ten elevated, fixed beds function both as resting platforms and observational devices. Each bed faces a central zone—partially visible, partially obscured—illuminated by natural sunlight during the day and artificial projectors at night. The movement of bodies through the elemental registers of water and fire—via showers and kitchens—generates an evolving visual field. At times, sound is captured and amplified, composing an additional acoustic layer. At the core of the installation lies a communal area: a Table flanked by exaggerated, fully visible curtains. These are deliberately exposed, oriented toward the audience-beds, and strategically lit to produce strong silhouettes. Shadows from steam, fire, movement, and gesture are projected onto constructed surfaces, forming a live shadow theater. Unlike Plato’s prisoners, who see only illusions, the participants here both generate and perceive the shadows—they are subjects and objects of the projection. There is no script, yet structure dictates form: whatever takes place becomes image. There are no designated actors, yet all who enter inevitably perform. The installation transforms necessity—eating, bathing, sleeping—into spectacle. However, beyond the involuntary performativity of everyday actions, participants may also choose to initiate or collaboratively compose deliberate theatrical sequences. In this way, the piece oscillates between passive exposure and conscious dramaturgy. Participation is non-coercive but structurally unavoidable. To inhabit the space is to be drawn into its logic of display. Privacy is dismantled by spatial framing; repetition, light, and geometry construct a grammar of symbolic life. The Platonic cave is here not only evoked but re-materialized as a spatial mechanism—no longer a metaphor alone, but a lived condition. Each inhabitant assumes a dual position: simultaneously actor and audience, both producing and observing the spectacle. Groups of ten participants book multi-day residencies on the island. During this time, they inhabit the installation as a living performance, their trajectories, gestures, silences, and voices constituting an emergent dramaturgy. Sound is transmitted through scattered loudspeakers; their presence unfolds as both environment and event. The beds offer moments of solitude—thresholds between observation and introspection. Oriented toward the sea, they permit a retreat from the shared theater without fully escaping it. Kitchens and long communal tables act as sites of performative ritual, while toilets and showers—ordinarily private—are reintegrated into the aesthetic order of the installation, contributing to its temporal script. A dispersed system of lighting and ambient sound anchors the theatrical condition. The island is not a backdrop—it is the play itself: inhabited, composed, and enacted continuously.”