Choreographer Ahn Eun-me redefines dance in media art

Today, dance is not solely an art to be enjoyed on stage or through videos.

The movements of dancers can be a source of many different online media, said choreographer and contemporary dancer Ahn Eun-me.

A one-day exhibition presenting seven media art pieces in Ahn’s six-month project, “Eun Me Pong Festival,” was held at Insa-dong, central Seoul, on Friday.

“We wanted to celebrate and have an offline exhibition to have them all in one place,” said Ahn.

The celebrated choreographer, whose eponymous dance company debuted in 1988, has taken her innovative and unconventional projects around the world including the US, France, UK and Hong Kong.

This year, Ahn collaborated with seven artists from different media arts fields such as video, animation, webtoon and VR, hoping to push the boundaries of how audiences experience dance.

The artists channeled their own impression of dance, reinterpreting them into online media art.

Visual artist No Song-hee created a virtual exhibition space through her video “Rainbow Cube.” No selected 17 of Ahn’s works from 1990 to 2022 and arranged them into a rainbow-colored space. The series of videos explores the female body, sexual identities, and East Asianness that Ahn highlights in her work.

In the 15-minute video “Follow,” video artist Lee Tae-seok tags along with Ahn in a foreign city. Later in the film, Ahn dances with a ghostly figure in a hotel room. In “Moon,” Kim Kyung-mook reinterprets Ahn’s “White Moon,” which premiered in New York in 1995, as a VR video. Cha Ji-ryang’s “Wire Dancing (feat. Fairy)” is a performance video featuring music performed on a moving chair.

Some artists visited Ahn’s dance studio to get inspiration from Ahn and her dancers.

Woo Sasha’s animation “Apophenic Tea Time” tells what came to the artist’s mind from observing the movements of the dancers. Webtoon artists Lee Uin’s “Eun Me Pong” and Byunchun’s “Finding Eunme’s Lost Treasure” depict stories of dancers at Ahn’s dance studio.

“Working with different artists was so exciting,” said Ahn. “I was surprised and dancers were surprised as well to see how their characters came out in details, as in webtoon format. The artists’ works also gave us a lot of inspiration.”

The “Eun Me Pong Festival” is part of “Art Change UP” -- an online media content development project -- supported by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Arts Council Korea.

The videos are available on Ahn Eun Me Company’s official website.