Anormalous Fantasy is a performance piece which re-imagines yeoseong gukgeuk (Korean all-female traditional theatre) from the perspective of contemporary art. Similar to Korean traditional operas, yeoseong gukgeuk began to be performed toward the end of the 1940s, reaching a peak in popularity from the 1950s through the 1960s before a gradual decline. It is a genre that combines singing and dancing based on the traditional Korean music form of Pansori in a retelling of stories from popular myths or novels. Yeoseong gukgeuk may ostensibly appropriate characters performing in conventional gender roles in typical melodramas; however, it is significantly and uniquely subversive in that women perform all of the characters. Even though yeoseong gukgeuk has such a short history and only few historical accounts remain, it has nevertheless achieved a brand new form of modern theatre with its radical gender politics in specific period of Korean modernization. The study and analysis of yeoseong gukgeuk has been limited to a handful of interviews with surviving first generation performers and some faded personal photographs. This performance is indifferent to these normative methodologies of understanding; instead, it attempts to create a technology of imagination that approaches yeoseong gukgeuk in an image of absence. This technology is activated through the management of anomalous modes of rejecting previously accepted myth of historical truths and traditional origins, while simultaneously positing the inherent possibilities for minority politics in yeoseong gukgeuk through a critical intervention of  the established hegemony of the so-called 'written history'.

This performance is a new version made for Taipei Biennial 2016 adapted from the original piece premiered in October, 2016 at Namsan Arts Center, Seoul. Supported by Taipei Biennial 2016 and Namsan Arts Center, Seoul.