CPR Practice

The works of South Koran choreographer and performance artist Geumhyung Jeong are characterised by bizarre interactions between the human body and the physical objects surrounding it.

“CPR Practice” stands for “cardiopulmonary resuscitation”, an exercise to reanimate heart and lungs by cardiac massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. In a simulated emergency, Geumhyung Jeong attempts to reanimate a dummy that is apparently no longer able to breathe. The medical exercise then blends into a sensual and paradoxical game of love and desire, loneliness and death, subject and object. In Geumhyung’s world, the human body and the objects it comes into contact with are of equal value. CPR Practice was created in 2013 and honoured with the Zurich Cantonal Bank’s Acknowledgement Award at the 2014 Zurich Theater Spektakel festival.

Geumhyung Jeong studied acting at the Hoseo University in Cheonan, South Korea, dance and performance at the Korean National University of Arts and animated film at the Korean Academy of Film Arts in Seoul. In her film Munbangu (“stationery”), which she showed at the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign, the objects become main actors in a scenario of erotic fantasies.