Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) (2025-) is a multimedia poetry project about how Orientalism, the West’s destructive imaginary of the ‘East’ changes form across centuries. Orientalism masks itself across forms, from contemporary popular culture, museums, to love and longing within diasporic experience.
The project begins in the Royal Asiatic Society archive in London, a colonial‑era institution of imperial knowledge‑extraction across East, South, Southeast, and West Asia. It threads documents of Orientalist discourse, fetish and colonial bureaucracy from 18th century to K-pop fancams and fandoms.
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 and more. This iteration uses BTS’s hit song ‘Fake Love’ (2018) and ‘Blood, Sweat & Tears’ (2016) as kinetic cyphers and sonic companions of cultural analysis.
︎Listen here︎to a series of poetic episodes on the project.
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.
John Hansard Gallery 28 April - 5 September 2026
Credits
Editor: Kate Briggs
Sound: Tzekin (Justin Tam)
Music: BTS (방탄소년단); & AI generated: ‘Deep Fake Love,’ ‘Blood, Sweat and Theory’
Many archival documents displayed and collaged are credited to The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. All images are original artworks created using transformed elements from BTS performances, and fan made media. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the original rights holders.
