Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) (2025-) is a multimedia poetry project about how Orientalism, the West’s destructive imaginary of the ‘East’, changes form over time: from masking itself in contemporary culture and institutions within neoliberalism to love and longing within diasporic experience. The project unravels within the magnetic aura and altar of K‑pop, choreography, and sonic artifacts, using BTS’s (방탄소년단) Fake Love (2018) as a kinetic cypher, or key, for the project’s poems and archival research.
︎Listen here︎to a series of poetic episodes on the project.
It begins in the Royal Asiatic Society archive in London, a colonial‑era institution of imperial knowledge‑making across East, South/Southeast, and West Asia, and threads documents of Orientalist discourse, imaginaries, and colonial bureaucracy across centuries. The project centres on a multi‑lingual banquet menu from the 1889 International Congress of Orientalists in Stockholm, where poems about European cuisines are written in languages of so-called ‘Orient’ from Chinese, Arabic, Javanese, to Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
The installation features vinyl, cyanotype prints with video-essay style poems that oscillate between a voice note-like correspondence to an unknown lover, and archival analysis, as well as two songs (깊은 가면) DEEP FAKE LOVE and 피, 땀, 이론 (BLOOD SWEAT THEORY) by musician Tzekin (Justin Tam) that heavily re-process the vocal stems from K-pop tracks written and musically generated from the project's poetics.
Currently on show at John Hansard Gallery from 28 April - 5 September.