Performance Art Land Jeju 2026
PAL Jeju
Performance Art Land (PAL) is a flagship project initiated by International Visual Arts Exchange (IVAE). In this ongoing initiative, we invite creative minds and bodies to develop site-specific projects. Working closely with the IVAE team, they realise contemporary art performances in a distinctive landscape, engage meaningfully with the local community, and reinterpret local culture for broader audiences.
Building upon the resounding success of the first edition of PAL in Wales produced in 2025, we are delighted to announce our support for an art project, specifically the commissioning of a new performance artwork, by artist Jisoo Yoo, on the island of Jeju in 2026, which extends PAL’s exploration of site-specific art. PAL Jeju 2026 is produced by IVAE and supported the 5th Jeju Biennale Team, with its premiere taking place at the 5th Jeju Biennale from 25th August to 15th November 2026.
Theme
The PAL Jeju 2026 project will be closely aligned with the theme of the 5th Jeju Biennale, Iyahong: The Art of Metamorphosi. We encourage artists to collaborate closely with local residents and communities, as well as local artists or professionals, to make a contemporary performance artwork. This work will be developed, performed, and filmed in May and premiered at the 5th Jeju Biennale.
Jeju Island, known as the home of 18,000 deities, is characterised by its volcanic landscapes, rich local culture, and a history deeply intertwined with myth, nature, and ancestral legacies. It serves as a vital source of inspiration for contemporary art and creative practice. PAL Jeju 2026 promotes Jeju’s customs, history, culture, and distinctive features to a wider audience. We invite artists to explore the innovative and expressive potential of contemporary performance art within this ancient cultural landscape. We anticipate that artists will develop site-specific contemporary performance art concepts and plans centered on one or more natural landscapes in Jeju—landscapes that reflect Jeju’s culture and history and resonate with the 5th Jeju Biennale’s theme. Our aim is to forge meaningful connections — between Jeju’s geology and ecology and the sense of contemporary urgency; between local communities, everyday life, and deeply rooted cultural traditions — in order to amplify unheard voices, highlight resilience, and ignite cultural sparks that resonate with global audiences.
PAL Jeju 2026 Artist
Jisoo Yoo
Jisoo Yoo will present her latest site-specific performance art piece, A moment of wind, at the upcoming 5th Jeju Biennale.
About the Project
A Moment of Wind is a performance in which people carry lightweight bamboo modules and translucent fabric, creating temporary architectural forms through movement.
Rather than building a fixed structure in one specific place, the performers repeatedly walk, stop, connect, and dismantle the modules. Through this process, the modules momentarily come together to resemble doors, walls, roofs, corridors, houses, or even a temple.
The fabric moves with the wind, blurring the outline of the structure, while the bamboo frames become traces of a space that appears briefly and then disappears. This structure is not built in a permanent way. It appears only for a short time while people move, gather, and arrange themselves together.
This project understands architecture not as a fixed structure, but as a temporary state that emerges between bodies, wind, light, and time. The form does not remain as a completed result, but exists through the moment of its appearance and the process of its dispersal.
All forms come together temporarily through relation and circumstance, and then scatter again into the wind. A Moment of Wind follows the act of building something together while knowing that it will disappear, and the sense of space that emerges within that brief moment.
About the Artist
Jisoo Yoo is a Korean contemporary artist based in France. Through installation, performance, video, sculpture, motion capture, 3D scanning, and interactive works, she has explored the body, space, home, memory, and structures that appear and disappear.
She has been active through major art institutions in France, including Le Fresnoy and Fondation Fiminco, and has presented her work through exhibitions and projects in Korea and internationally.
Her work focuses on things we often perceive as real, ordinary, or self-evident, and explores how these can reveal themselves to be fragile, conditional, temporary, and sometimes almost illusory. Familiar spaces, repeated gestures, and light, transparent structures are transformed in her work into unstable states that briefly appear and disappear, rather than remaining as fixed realities.
This new project, A Moment of Wind, is a video performance that creates a temple-like structure which briefly appears and disappears within the wind and landscape of Jeju, through bamboo modules, translucent fabric, and the movements of the participants. Participants will not simply appear as performers, but will be recorded as co-performers who help shape the form and rhythm of the artist’s new biennale project.
