<Fur-Princess>, 30min 51 sec, Guest House Gong, Seoul, Korea, 2020
<Fur-Princess>, 30min 51 sec, Guest House Gong, Seoul, Korea, 2020
In Fur-Princess, Lim appears on stage as an alien figure whose body is extended through long strands of armpit and pubic hair. Originating from a planet where all body hair is revered, the Fur Princess encounters Earth as a site of contradiction—particularly in the cultural taboo surrounding women’s body hair.
Structured as an audience-directed performance, the work invites viewers to issue commands to the Fur Princess: “Raise your arm!”, “Lift your leg!”, “Cut your hair!” Through this participatory format, the audience becomes implicated in directing and regulating the performer’s body. As instructions accumulate, overlap, and contradict one another, the performance exposes how bodies are shaped through external demands, expectations, and systems of control.
Within this structure, body hair emerges as a critical site of tension. Often associated with animality, primitiveness, and excess, body hair is culturally coded and unevenly distributed across genders. In many contexts, women’s body hair is subjected to intensified scrutiny and removal, framed as improper or uncivilized. Through this lens, the regulation of hair becomes a mechanism through which femininity is produced—by erasing what is marked as “animal” within the body.
As the performance unfolds, the Fur Princess—initially responsive to the audience’s commands—becomes increasingly disoriented. Eventually, she ceases to comply, ignoring all instructions and laying down on the floor. This act of refusal marks a critical shift: the body, once positioned as an object of direction and control, withdraws from participation and reclaims its autonomy.
<Synthetic Armpit Hair in making for poor Earthlings>, human hair, silicon, 4 x 3(cm), Guest House Gong, Seoul, Korea, 2020
Extending beyond the performance, the Fur Princess imagines Earthlings as deprived of body hair and establishes a fictional system to restore it—producing and distributing synthetic armpit hair. This speculative gesture reframes absence not as cleanliness, but as loss, and repositions hair as something to be shared, cared for, and desired.
Operating between humor and critique, Fur-Princess exposes how bodies are disciplined through norms of beauty, hygiene, and gender, while also proposing alternative ways of inhabiting the body—where what is marked as excessive, animal, or improper can become a site of agency, resistance, and care.