About

Archaeology of the Senses: Surviving Traditions Archaeology of the Senses: Surviving Traditions is a comparative research project asking how traditional performing arts have survived — and how they keep surviving now: what they change, keep, and lose. This research began with traditional performing arts communities transmitted from body to body, but adopts UNESCO's concept of 'intangible cultural heritage' as an internationally shared language, calling them intangible cultural heritage communities — because transmission that leaves no documents is hit most directly by upheaval. Supported by the 2026 Arts Council Korea International Cooperation Network, it compares three regions: Jeju, Okinawa (Ryukyu), and Taiwan. Directed by SEMI CHOI — performing arts producer and researcher.

4COP is a project group that researches the senses of things that move. Starting from the sensibility of Korea's travelling performing arts, we explore the survival strategies of wandering things, identity in motion, and the future of art that does not settle.

Ryukyu survived a 450-year independent kingdom before annexation by Japan and the Battle of Okinawa. Taiwan's sixteen indigenous tribes were pushed from the plains into the mountains. Jeju was scattered to the mainland by the April 3rd Incident. Their traditional arts survived even while being driven out. We excavate this duality — between touristification and preservation, between extinction and transformation — through the lens we call 'Archaeology of the Senses' — our research method is sensory ethnography (Sarah Pink).

We focus not on 'preservation' but on 'survival.' Tradition is not a preserved heritage. It is something that changed to survive — sometimes narrowing, sometimes expanding — and endured. The very modes of that endurance are the subject of our research.