@CICA Museum, South Koreea (2026)
“The Sculptor Sleeps Tonight” borrows the historical convention of the self-portrait and reroutes it through a contemporary system of scanning, automation, and delegated fabrication. The work also reflects on the artist’s own formation in a traditional sculptural education, based on modeling, casting, stone, clay, and direct material engagement. In this sense, the performance can be read as an act of unlearning the inherited figure of the sculptor as manual maker.
The work was an eight-hour sleep performance realized as part of the group exhibition “Outsourced Practices II: Endless Extractions”. During the performance, the artist slept inside the exhibition space while a 3D printer integrated into the installation continuously produced a sculptural self-portrait generated from a LiDAR scan.
The self-portrait became less the result of direct manual action and more the output of a chain of delegation: body, scan, file, machine, material, repetition.By linking sleep, automation, self-representation, and outsourced labor, the performance tests the unstable boundary between work and rest, author and system, presence and productivity. Its eight-hour duration refers both to the convention of a full night’s sleep and to the standardized working day, while the printer’s uninterrupted activity evokes a 24/7 economy in which production continues beyond the limits of the body.
The work also echoes, at a distance, the Surrealist investment in dreams and the unconscious, but redirects it through a technological apparatus: the “working subconscious” is no longer expressed through automatic writing or imagery, but externalized as automated fabrication.An intimate biological act is made public and transformed into an experiment on the invisible processes of artistic production, questioning whether rest can still remain outside work when even inactivity is redirected toward an artistic outcome.