Performance Laboratory on a Yellow Picnic Blanket
Walking down Canal Street in Manhattan, the senses are the first thing to be overtaken: under the red awnings of Hung Kee Fish Market, shimmering fish rest on ice glowing with a cold blue light; next to greens wrapped in plastic bags, long strips of white paper with scrawled prices are tucked in. You might already be mentally sketching out three different ways to cook that bok choy.
However, if you look up, past the bustling streetscape, you’ll find a marble portal stretching four stories high on a reddish-brown brick building. A small green awning marks the entrance—this is the Kam Man Building. For decades, this building served as a longtime dental hub of New York’s Chinatown. Countless children who grew up in the neighborhood were led here by their parents, lying in dentist chairs under bright surgical lights, mouths open, experiencing a faint vertigo born of pain, fear, or simply not knowing.
Now, we enter the Kam Man Building to witness or participate in a different kind of gamble—the one that involves the body, duration, and risk.
Dentist Chairs, Cigarette Ice Cream, and Doraemon
gmtc (Golden Monkey Trading Company) is a performance space founded in Chinatown by Sunmi Yong in 2025. In Sunmi’s philosophy, the space carries a simple belief: performance is a form of "Care," something practiced collectively by living beings and moving objects.
Having missed gmtc’s grand opening, I walked into the room on an ordinary Saturday when no events were scheduled, accompanied by my friend Junlin. In the absence of performance, the space returned to its default state: on the iconic yellow floor sat a lone dentist’s chair. A wooden broom leaned against the corner. This "calm sense of the absurd" creates an illusion—as if the room itself were an art installation left behind after a show.If performance is the art of the "present tense," then space is its vessel. Yonghyun described the opening day to us:Canal Research presented a ‘cigarette-flavored ice cream’ that used images of discarded cigarette butts collected from the street as its visual representation. That afternoon, we were suddenly tuning the karaoke machine, sharing a corded microphone, and shouting the lyrics to Party 4 U off our phone screens. We shared the same bottle of beer from soft, transparent plastic cups and ate snacks poured from a giant clear tub while imagining the process of making cigarette ash-flavored ice cream. In that moment, gmtc exuded an atmosphere reminiscent of Doraemon—like Nobita and Doraemon in a secret base, lost in a kind of reckless, pure, and joyful pastime.
This yellow room allows everything to happen. Energy flows freely through the gaps between the microphone, the dentist’s chair, and the floor.
“Work-in-Progress”: Performance as a Dynamic Process
This energy extends into gmtc’s residency programs. The inaugural residency series, "gmtc sessions," initiated by critic and curator Jenny Wu, seeks to provide a site for rehearsal and response for works-in-progress. From September to October in 2025, seven performances were staged in succession. For each session, Jenny paired the artists with a visiting critic. The audience sat on the ground; there were no high-handed authoritative critiques, but rather something resembling a late-night tea party in an artist’s studio, where everyone simply decided to share their thoughts on the creative process.
In gmtc sessions #3, artists Tianyi Sun and Fiel Guhit presented a participatory performance based on computational logic. They pieced together strips of white paper printed with fragmented stories on the floor, forming a long, winding "white snake."
The work attempted to give shape to algorithms through the concept of "adding feet to a snake" (a play on the Chinese idiom hua she tian zu 画蛇添足). Software was no longer just a tool for input and output, but a restless force. At one point in the performance, a fan behind the scenes suddenly began to oscillate. The wind instantly dismantled the arrangement of the paper, shattering the snake made of words. "For a long time, the snake lay caught, not in fear but in a strange, sweet pressure, like prey that has already given in."
gmtc is like a yellow picnic basket, or a yellow picnic blanket, bringing together everything grotesque, interesting, and unfinished. The performance time turns into "Playtime."
Bouldering, Falling, and a “Sponge”
To delve deeper into this "playfulness," Sunmi and I met for an unconventional interview at VITAL Climbing Gym in the Lower East Side. We had no set outline; our hands were covered in chalk and our feet squeezed into tight climbing shoes.
We chose the climbing gym because we realized that the most fascinating part of performance art—the uncontrollable unknown—shares a profound synergy with bouldering. Bouldering is directional; you follow specific colored holds to start. But because everyone’s physical reach, core strength, and mental path differ, the "beta" (the sequence of moves) is entirely different for each person. Even if you fall, you can restart countless times.
While navigating a traverse line that required horizontal balance, Sunmi told me that before founding gmtc, she also went through a long period of "pathfinding."
She almost caused friction with her family when she decided to study Art History. After completing her studies in South Korea, she wanted to explore the world.
She described it as "three years of doing nothing in Berlin." I asked her, "Do you feel that was a waste of time?"
“It was the most meaningful time of my life.” said Sunmei. Most days pass like a rushing river, but sometimes, a person becomes a sponge, trying to retain some moisture.” Before leaving Berlin, she interviewed twenty friends and wrote a book titled Berliner. Carrying these memories, she returned to Korea and later came to New York to study and work in major art institutions. However, the "commodification of the individual" within institutions and the barriers of being an "outsider" prompted her to build her own system—to support artists who are also at an "emerging" stage.
An essay written in Korean of the interviews of 20 young Berliners living, working and surviving their vigorous times in Berlin, Germany.
Photo by Florian Bongil Grosse
In the middle of our conversation, we attempted a route but got stuck in the middle, unable to ascend. Yet, standing on those holds, we felt strangely at peace. We always have the option to jump down, but in that moment, we just wanted to stand there for a while. To change our perspective and see things from a higher vantage point.
Warm Yellow Lights on a Snowy Night
gmtc is not a shelter; it is a playground. Here, anyone can bring their own games and find companions.
In climbing, you must constantly ask: Do I make the next move? Where do I put my foot? How do I shift my center of gravity? If I fall, can I take the risk? This mirrors the logic of performance. When you curate a performance, you face the same questions: What do you want to convey? Can you accept the possibility of a misunderstanding? Are you willing to establish a communication that might not succeed, just to reach for the next "hold"?
This is the significance of independent art spaces. They are like streetlights on a snowy night—on a corner where snowflakes drift, illuminating a small area with that signature yellow floor.
It allows everything to happen.