금마타리(Infinite Love)
Lu Yim

GALLERY III

Lu Yim, nostalgia is a killer, 2025, sound, dimensions variable.

April 26 – May 25, 2025

Opening reception: Saturday, April 26, from 6–8pm

Sunday, April 27: Open studio performance, from 2–4pm

Wednesday, May 14: Performance, from 2–4pm

Saturday, May 17: Performance, from 2–4pm

Sunday, May 25: Closing performance, from 2–4pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce 금마타리(Infinite Love), an exhibition of new work by 2024–2025 A.I.R. Fellow Lu Yim. Through an installation of light and sound and movement-based performance, 금마타리(Infinite Love) counters the weaponization of sound and voice at the Koreas’ Demilitarized Zone by building choreographies that seek to speculatively convey the activity of wildlife inside the divide. This is Yim’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Antipersonnel landmines leftover from the Korean War have rendered stretches of land within the border between the Republic of Korea (South Korea) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) uninhabitable by humans. Because of this, endangered plant and animal species have been able to return to the area and flourish within the demilitarized zone that divides the peninsula. Yim’s installation imagines a virtual kinship with these entities, who cannot be seen directly unless surveilled by unmanned cameras or drones. Yim responds to the absence of the human and the lingering shape of violence attached to this region to consider the sacred and insidious dimensions of these invisible forms. Through choreographic methods, they transform the gallery into a theater for somatic research, extending their inquiry into a metaphysical realm.

Yim’s research into the ontology of sound considers how the disembodied voice has been historically used in psychological warfare in this region. During the 1950–53 war, female Korean soldiers fighting alongside the U.S. military were taken up in low-flying planes to broadcast anti-communist doctrine, often in the form of nostalgic love stories, to incite homesickness that could lead to surrender from the North. Placed along the gallery walls are re-wired versions of the LS-454 loudspeaker, which was utilized by the U.S. military during the 1950–53 war and various other Cold War conflicts. Emanating through them is the cry of a red-crowned crane, one of the endangered species thriving within the landmine-laden sanctuary. This crane appears to have hacked the speakers in the absence of human intervention. 

Accompanying this voice is an arhythmic consonance of light and color on the gridded carpet lining the gallery floor. Hues of red and blue initially evoke the flags of the two Koreas, as well as a variety of other associations, including yin and yang, communism, blood, ocean, and sky. But these human meanings are soon supplanted by a meditation on the colors as sheer optical phenomena. As red lights hit red squares of carpet, or blue hits blue, the colors seem to intensify. But because red and blue absorb each other, blackness is created when red light hits blue carpet, and vice versa. It is within the seams of these transitions that the red and blue frequencies of light transform from meaning into bodily shapes of feeling, a choreographic experience of absence as invisible matter.

The articulations between the installation’s elements of sound and light serve as the grammatical backdrop for the accompanying performances, which seek to “hack” the archive by privileging somatic engagement with knowledge over cerebral acquisition. Yim choreographs from a consumed place, asking their performers to engage with material from found and fictional archives surrounding the 38th Parallel as if it is matter to be swallowed and digested on a cellular level. As each performer moves from assimilative knowledge toward sensation, they also move from the conscious realm to the unconscious, the hard to grasp, and the virtual. Utilizing somatic inquiry and embodied disability practices, they consider how bodily dissociation might serve as an analogue for the experience of virtuality to interrupt and disturb a disembodiment shaped by U.S. militarism within a global past that continues to unfold into the present.

Moment of waking carries that moment of leaving.

faceless pressing makes an imprint thermodynamic

what is this bending anything receding from sinking into a surface

every encounter of bone. holding. tension. 

A voice becoming what it invokes in you, 

She says da-du-du. Bird says du-du-ri. 

(So close) 

Bird says, Geummatari is good for anal bleeding, dry and powder it, mix it with makgeolli and drink.

She says, Geummatari means infinite love, swallow and wait for your perverse thoughts to return.

– Lu Yim¹

Lu Yim (b. San Diego, CA) is a second-generation Korean-American artist working with experimental sound, dance, and sculpture to situate pain and sensation within a queer and contemporary conversation. Their work has been co-presented by Queer|Art and Performance Space NY, Pageant (NY), Center for Performance Research (NY), and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, amongst others. They have shown work at Sargents Daughter (NYC), Linfield Gallery (OR), The Holding Project (NYC/OR), and in digital spaces, Form IV, and EarWave. Since 2013 Yim has co-organized with queer and BIPOC-centered collective Physical Education alongside Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Takahiro Yamamoto. They are a personal trainer and somatic movement facilitator and host a virtual mutual-aid class titled Action & Rest made for their queer, trans and disability communities. Yim is a 2024-2025 Fellow at A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn) and a 2024-2025 Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research (NYC).

1. This text is an excerpt of a score for the performance and compiles language from family archives and other sources. It references Geummatari, a plant used as a remedy in Korean folk medicine, which translates to “Infinite Love” and gives the exhibition its title.

View Lu Yim’s page here.

View the Press Release here.