Relaxation is difficult to pin down. Even in those rare moments when we believe ourselves to have experienced it, it remains merely fleeting. At those times when we sense ourselves relaxing briefly amid profound tension, there is a different layer of tension that pervades. The relaxation that once seemed granted to us as naturally as breathing now feels strange and unfamiliar. No longer something that visits us on its own, it is a state that can just barely be achieved through conscious training and repeated practice—drifting off toward a horizon of complete unattainability.

Today’s massage industry bills that receded sensation as a product available for immediate consumption. Expensive massage chairs and various other massage devices confidently promise us relaxation, but even that pledge remains trapped in a cyclical equation of “tension > resolution > returning.” The underlying assumption is that there is a predetermined “original” state that we should return to, where relaxation operates not as liberation but as a returning mechanism. The origin in question is a body capable of working, and “relaxation” is standardized amid the demands of the capitalist timetable and productivity.

The exhibition Massage Platz aspires to the deconstruction of this narrow pathway. The “Platz” is a place where the individual can briefly set themselves down, as well as a provisional place for people to gather and scatter without purpose. Stripped of function and goals, this empty space harbors a sense of indeterminacy and pure potential, seeking a way of sliding outside the familiar order and stripping away the surfaces of schematized relaxation.

Rather than sidestepping the layers of tension and oppression that inhibit relaxation, Yorgos Agrotes confronts them directly. He looks at discomfort and pain not as things to be removed but as signs whose weight the living being is obliged to shoulder. His canvases are psychological landscapes formed through the layers left behind by the clashing of emotions, memories, and materials. Rejecting an immediate resolution of the tension here, he lingers instead in an indeterminate moment where choice, regret, bitterness, hesitation, and irony all intersect. This represents an act of observing the possibilities for change that are in the loose spaces formed by disorder. As Agrotes searches through the unfamiliar world pervading those spaces, he seeks out the new sense of relaxation that only emerges on the structure’s edges.

Sojung Park encounters a sense of release within the flows that materials themselves unfold. She hangs her materials and then spends a long time observing the process as they flow, twist, and swell, perceiving the alternation between balance and imbalance. Materiality manifests here not through simple objects but through unpredictable events that unfold across time and space. In her encounters with these materials, she yields the place of the subject and summons inner memories and images based on sensory strata that cannot be captured in language. In this exhibition, she appropriates systems that generate pressure and flow—massage devices and circulation mechanisms—decontextualizing them into media through which materials release their own rhythms. Through this shift, she explores relaxation as a process unfolding through ongoing relations and continual change.

Agrotes and Park share similarities in that they do not strip away tension or instability but instead trace the trembling and flows that emerge through them. One of them explores the signs of relaxation that appear with trembling under the weight of pressure; the other welcomes relaxation as an event as she yields herself to matter’s indeterminate flows.Their work rejects restoration to a better functional existence, as it inquires into the meaning of life that only arises amid tension and transformation. This shakes our trust in fixed forms and defined subjects, revealing the conditions of a world that is constantly forming and disappearing.

As a result, relaxation is no longer simply a moment of rest or recovery. As familiar orders are upended, fixed boundaries are loosened, and unfamiliar rhythms permeate us, we find ourselves at the threshold to a different way of being. What Massage Platz ultimately seeks to show is not a moment of relaxation but relaxation as a liberating and transformative experience. These are the foundations for a new life that blossoms amid indeterminacy—the possibility of encountering the truest self while straying the farthest.'

text & cutrated by Haram Kang
ranslation by Colin Mouat
space design by Shampoo
leaflet design by Eunji Lee
technical support by 채종혁
photography by Joseph Lee
supported by Art Council Korea (ARKO)