Empathic Audition

Jaewook Lee’s Empathic Audition (2017) is a video piece that records the brainwaves of two actors as they confront the camera, performing as student soldier Lee Woo Geun who died after he finished writing a letter to his mother during the Korean War. While the actors imagine and embody the severe situation of the war, an EEG machine scans their brainwaves, revealing how empathy works when feeling the pain of the other. In the video, the actors read the letter, and each sentence is followed by a short sequence of pictures of the Korean War being projected on smoke. The dimly reflected images on smoke resemble imperfect human memories: one cannot clearly remember events of bygone days. Presented along with the video is an installation featuring an explanation of the mirror neuron, a popular topic related to empathy in the field of neuroscience. The actors try to find their historical roots by situating themselves in the war and empathizing with the soldier.