Fake Love & Institutional Longing (BTS) (2025-) is a poetics project investigating how Orientalism interfaces with diaspora, memory, longing and institutional life. The project begins in the Royal Asiatic Society archive in London, threading documents of Orientalist fantasies and colonial bureaucracy across centuries.
Fake Love... constellates a series of poems written in response to archival documents, such as a menu from the 1889 Congress of Orientalists, conversations within and about institutional spaces and philosophical texts. Interspersing these inspections of archive, documents and space is K-pop choreography and BTS' (방탄소년단 ) Fake Love (2018) as a kinetic cipher of Orientalist longing.
K-pop stages the paradoxes it circulates within: hyper-Orientalist fantasy and its own effacement, an idol industry whose auratic machinery is entangled with US military occupation, neoliberal desire, and a disciplined, spectacular will to global recognition. The song's lyric of frustrated, effacing, unrequited love, of giving everything to something that cannot love you back, sweats with the archive's serialised misattributions and the false promises of institutions.
The work manifests as poetry, transposed prints of metabolised archival documents, fancam focuses on BTS choreographic gestures, and poetry, alongside warped AI-generated and remixed K-pop songs that dispatch the project's meditation on deep fake love and epistemic longing across time.