尚|sheung-king|敬

Displaced Nostalgia

How can durational performances, where representations of time are removed from the setting, create space for individuals to express their feelings of displacement and nostalgia through creative writing?

JeeMin Kim and Sheung-King form a duo whose project, Displaced Nostalgia, was initiated in Seoul, South Korea, in 2024. The project uses long-form performance, intersecting art-making, creative writing, and audience participation.

Each performance is accompanied by a booklet: Displaced Nostalgia 2026

Displaced Nostalgia: Temporality (Hong Kong International Literary Festival) | 10 am-5 pm, 25 March 2026

HKU Black Box, Room 54, LG/F, Centennial Campus, Hong Kong University

Sheung-King, a Canadian-Chinese novelist, and JeeMin Kim, a South Korean artist, join us for the durational performance Displaced Nostalgia: Temporality. In the performance, time follows JeeMin Kim’s rhythm, with live writing from Sheung-King, and audience participation. The audience is welcome to drop in freely to observe and take part at your own pace. This session is presented with the Hong Kong International Literary Festival. Click here for more information.

Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch | 29 October - 29 November 2025 | InterAccess, Toronto, Canada

We live with a restless discomfort just under the skin—an itch that keeps the thumb scrolling, the eye refreshing, the body performing. Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch frames that feeling as the trace of a system built upon the attention economy, exploiting our attention by promising relief it cannot deliver. Anchored by Byung-Chul Han’s “aesthetic of the smooth” and Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, the exhibition reads today’s digital feeds—mukbangs, thirst traps, frictionless shorts—as surfaces engineered for instant legibility and circulation. Smoothness gratifies on contact but withholds depth; optimism binds us to visibility and arrival that platforms continually defer. Six new media artists offer tactics that edge rather than scratch: veiling vision with abstraction, slowing information exchange, staging conditional performance, challenging reward loops, misusing technical tools, and stretching AI’s generative flatness into durational inquiry. Almost counterintuitive to our consumer habit, 2025 IA Current Curator Lingxiang Wu invites us to interrupt fast consumption by sitting with these artworks and with ourselves. Click here for more information.

Displaced Nostalgia: Itch 2025 | AI Current Closing Performance 11 am-6 pm, 6 December 2025 (Sat)

InterAccess, Toronto, Canada

To edge is to leave the itching body behind In this performance, no phones are permitted. No watches. Performers do not talk to each other. With every feeling of an hour passing, JeeMin begins her labour, which prompts Sheung-King to write. At the end of his writing, he leaves a prompt for the audience to respond to. Between each feeling of an hour, performers rest. Viewers are invited to attend the performance at any time throughout the 7-hour runtime. Movement occurs roughly once every hour, roughly on the hour. Between these times, viewers are invited to participate in the live writing prompt or the act of waiting. This performance is presented as part of the 24th Annual IA Current Exhibition, Edging the Unscratchable Digital Itch, curated by Lingxiang Wu, and alongside "Narratives to Contextualize Feelings", a conversation with the performers held at Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy on December 3 from 2 – 4 PM. Click here to register.

Narratives to Contextualize Feelings: Conversations with author & artist Sheung-King/JeeMin Kim | 2 pm, 03 December 2025
Room 208, North House, 1 Devonshire Place, Toronto, ON, M5S 3K7

The first half of this talk will feature the author discussing the novel’s ability to capture the social and political effects of place. The second half of the talk will focus on performance. Presented in Seoul, Hong Kong, and now Toronto, JeeMin Kim and Sheung-King’s interdisciplinary art project Displaced Nostalgia uses multiple media: performance, writing, and installation, to create time spaces where audiences can begin to articulate feelings of displacement.

Throughout this talk, the author will invite the audience to respond to writing prompts, an integral part of how his characters communicate with one another in his novels, as well as how JeeMin and Sheung-King engage with audiences during their performances. The event will conclude with a conversation between the audience and the creators of Displaced Nostalgia, JeeMin Kim and Sheung-King, who will be performing at Inter/Access on December 6th, 2025, from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Click here to register.

Displaced Nostalgia: Impermanence (Platform-L Live Arts Program 2025) | 1pm-6pm, 09 August 2025, 10 August 2025 | Live Hall (B2), Platform-L, Seoul, Korea

As part of Platform-L's Live Arts Program, JeeMin Kim and Sheung-King will be showcasing their performance Displaced Nostalgia: Impermanence. The performance at Platform-L will take place over two days, on August 9th and 10th. Reservations can be made through the Platform-L website. Click here to reserve your seat.

Displaced Nostalgia: Not So Personal | JeeMin Kim & Sheung-King
28 March 2025
WMA Space, Central, Hong Kong

The contemporary overflow of information prioritizes the immediate over analysis or mediation, leading to a life that lacks reflection and focus. Amidst the dynamic bustle of March’s cultural events, can we carve out a space where the audience can breathe and immerse themselves in contemplation? WMA invites artist Jeemin Kim and novelist Shueng-King Aaron Tang, who has lived in multiple locations, to present a durational performance titled “Displaced Nostalgia: Not So Personal,” interpreting and responding to Anson Mak’s “No Such Person.” The performance invites audiences to lay aside their devices and enter, wander, and exit freely in a realm where time and space blur. With a fresh perspective, they can attune themselves to the fluidity of time and ponder the intricate connections between displacement and the notion of home. As Kim rearranges and projects household objects, Tang responds through the act of writing, inviting participants to immerse themselves in a shared experience that is both deeply personal and collectively resonant. 

*Over the course of the performance, which lasts for 7 hours, registered audiences are free to enter or leave the space at any point. Click here for more information.

Bad Timekeepers | 20 November - 24 November 2024 | TINC(This is Not a Church), Seoul, Korea

𝘽𝙖𝙙 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙠𝙚𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙧, a series of public events where our invited Bad Timekeepers explore labor, time, technology, and decolonial strategies, challenging and dismantling the oppressive systems inherited from colonial rule. They focus on reclaiming cultural practices, knowledge systems, and narratives that have been erased or marginalized. Through the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ communities, these strategies aim to reimagine power structures, promote self-determination, and center voices historically excluded. Our narrative is an insurgent tapestry woven from speculative yet familiar alternatives.
The program will feature a constellation of visionary thinkers and creators, including Nobutaka Aozaki, Julie Chen, Sun-ha Hong, Hobin Kim, Kwang-Suk Lee, Inkang Lee, Seam Lee, Yutong Lin, Casey Mecija, Ying Sze Pek, Ryan Persadie, Sarah Sharma, Mindy Seu, Su Yu Hsin, Asmita Bustani Vij, Choonhee Woo, Yufeng Zhao, Sheung-King Aaron Tang & JeeMin Kim, and Diasporic Futurism (Vanessa Godden and Adrienne Matheuszik).

Our journey begins in Toronto and Seoul, with a constellation of thinkers and creators shaping these new temporal realities. Grateful for the support of InterAccess, Charles Street Video and the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto that make this work possible.

Displaced Nostalgia: Ritual | 23 November 2024 | TINC(This is Not a Church), Seoul, Korea

As part of 𝘽𝙖𝙙 𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙠𝙚𝙚𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙨, 𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚𝙙 𝙉𝙤𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙜𝙞𝙖: 𝙍𝙞𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡 uses the ability of rituals to escape accelerated time to interrogate nostalgia. The artist begins by laying bricks on the floor to create a sandbox, with a light hanging from the ceiling. The artist’s structure, influenced by ancient Roman compluvium and impluvium,  represents time, mimicking how sunlight shines through the roof and onto the sand. But our ritual takes place at night. There is no sun. Here, JeeMin Kim is the “Badtimekeeper.” When she feels an hour has passed, she adjusts the light that hangs from the ceiling. The positioning of the light that shines on the sandbox reflects the artist’s perception of an hour. Each hour, the writer composes a piece of writing on nostalgia, which is projected onto the sand. This process will be repeated five times. Accompanying the performance are wall texts and booklets responding to the term "𝘿𝙞𝙨𝙥𝙡𝙖𝙘𝙚𝙙 𝙉𝙤𝙨𝙩𝙖𝙡𝙜𝙞𝙖."