I Created a Competition for Doing Nothing, and People Found Meaning in It: Woopsyang's "Space-Out Competition"

Woopsyang begins by explaining the name, which is not their real name. "Oops" is the English exclamation people make when they slip up or are startled. "Yang" is a Korean word roughly equivalent to "lady" in English. Woopsyang says they chose the name because they wanted to make work that surprises people in a slightly offbeat way.

Since 2013, Woopsyang has been running the "Urban Play Development Project." The project treats the city as one giant playground and develops forms of play that can be done there without spending money, experimenting with them in the language of art. Woopsyang stresses that the "without spending money" condition is important. Children can play endlessly without money, but today's adults can't play at all without it, and that struck Woopsyang as strange. So they decided to develop the city into a new play space for adults, and say they had a lot of fun playing in it themselves.

Woopsyang started out as a painter. But at the time, the paintings weren't selling well. So instead of going to galleries, Woopsyang took the paintings to a traditional market, where more people gathered, and sold them directly, becoming a street vendor and shouting "Fresh paintings for sale!" the way one would sell fish.

Next, Woopsyang gathered people in a redevelopment zone to play war. According to Woopsyang, if you actually visit a redevelopment zone in Korea, it really does look like a war-torn ruin. So they decided to wage "a different kind of war" there: a war of throwing paint bombs to add color to the ruins, with Woopsyang playing the commander.

There was also a project about fashion. Woopsyang says they came to feel that fashion has become a kind of power these days. Dressing is supposed to be simply a means of self-expression, yet people have to worry about how the world sees them and about money. So Woopsyang created a fashion show where people dress in a complete mess for a day, and walked in it as a model. In the photo, the man standing beside Woopsyang is wearing women's clothing, while Woopsyang has tied a T-shirt into a skirt and is wearing a ballet tutu on their head.

Another project involved creating a virtual world. It started from the thought that in the distant future, if people formed tribes based on shared values rather than nations, the Earth might become more peaceful than it is now. Woopsyang even became the "god" who created five tribes in this virtual world. Through all of these projects, Woopsyang says they are still a painter as well. And on this day, they took the stage as the founder of the Space-Out Competition.

The Space-Out Competition was first held in 2014 on the lawn plaza in front of Seoul City Hall, and Woopsyang says it became a big topic of conversation in Korea from the very first event. The match lasts 90 minutes. No one may speak during the competition, and that includes Woopsyang, the organizer. So Woopsyang runs the competition silently, holding up long banners with whatever needs to be said written on them.

Only one person is allowed to speak: the announcer. Like a sportscaster calling a soccer match, the announcer gives the audience a play-by-play of the competitors on the field. For example: "Player No. 3 looks like they're about to fall asleep," or "Player No. 10 has just shifted position."

The rule is simple: just do nothing. But disqualifying behaviors are clearly defined. Laughing, talking, looking at your phone, getting up and dancing, and sleeping all lead to disqualification.

Why spell out such specific disqualifying behaviors for a competition where all you have to do is stay still? Woopsyang recalls buying flat-pack furniture long ago and assembling it. The instructions said "Do not eat the screws," which struck Woopsyang as odd. Looking into it, they found quite a few similar instructions: "Do not eat body lotion," "Do not grab the blade of the chainsaw," "Do not iron clothes while wearing them."

Woopsyang found these warnings so amusing that they deliberately added "Do not get up and dance" to the competition rules. So far, though, no competitor has been disqualified for dancing — just as no one eats body lotion.

The person in white at the venue is Woopsyang, who serves as the head referee, as in soccer, with two assistant referees behind. Once the match begins, if a disqualifying behavior is spotted, Woopsyang holds up a yellow card. If the same competitor receives a second warning, they get a red card and are dragged off the field. Woopsyang draws laughs from the audience by saying the faces of competitors being dragged off look like people being hauled off to hell, then adds that it's not a scary sport.

Since competitors can't speak, they communicate with the operations staff using colored cards. Holding up a red card gets a massage, blue gets water, and yellow gets fanning. The black card can be used for various purposes, such as forfeiting or going to the restroom. Competitors request the service they want by raising the appropriate card above their head.

As a fun anecdote, Woopsyang describes the 2022 Seoul competition, where one competitor held up all four cards at once — something Woopsyang had never seen in all the years of running the competition. That competitor received a massage, water, and fanning all at the same time. Woopsyang described it as being "just like a king."

The winner is determined by an artistic score and a technical score. The artistic score is decided by audience vote: spectators place stickers on the competitor with the best space-out performance. The technical score is heart rate. Competitors' heart rates are measured every 15 minutes during the 90-minute match. First, the few competitors with the highest artistic scores are selected. Among them, the one whose heart-rate graph steadily declines wins. The exact number of finalists is not confirmed in the subtitles.

Looking at the competitors mid-match, their outfits are unusual. All competitors enter wearing clothing related to their occupation. Woopsyang introduces the competitors in the photo one by one. The person in orange is a firefighter, and the one in a black tuxedo is a film actor — Woopsyang got laughs by saying the actor was so handsome in person that their heart was pounding. The person in a strange outfit that's hard to identify is dressed as a bird, because they're a bird keeper; according to this person, that bird is very good at spacing out. There are also a soldier, a teenager, and a police officer, and in the very last row, even a "watermelon." In this way, a wide range of the city's occupations take part in the competition.

Woopsyang explains that the competition is not only a sporting event but also visual art and performance. It is visual art because it places a group of people doing nothing in the middle of a busy downtown, creating a visual contrast with the busy people rushing around them. It is performance because of the work attire. If 100 people take part, for example, 100 occupations gather in one place, and Woopsyang saw this as symbolizing a small city. The competitors become both athletes and performers who bring that small city to a standstill.

At the front of the frame is a person in a black hat holding a puppy: the famous Korean singer Crush, who took part in the 2016 competition and won.

At first glance, the winner's trophy looks like Rodin's The Thinker. But look closely at the right hand propping up the chin, and it's different: it takes the hand gesture of the Gilt-bronze Pensive Bodhisattva, a Korean national treasure. The trophy is a blend of The Thinker and the Pensive Bodhisattva. Woopsyang explains that this is because spacing out, thinking, and realizing all ultimately look the same from the outside. So, Woopsyang says, even if someone looks like they're spacing out, don't nag them — they might be in the middle of a realization.

The trophy also wears a gat, a traditional Korean hat. The gat was worn by people of high status back when Korea had a class system. Woopsyang says they thought that in pre-industrial class-based societies, time to space out or do nothing might have been a privilege granted especially to the nobility. This is presented as Woopsyang's own interpretation.

Woopsyang also shows a photo from last year's Seoul awards ceremony. The winner was a three-piece punk rock band. The fun of the photo, Woopsyang says, is that a rock band that plays the loudest music in the world won the quietest competition in the world.

Woopsyang says people might think they simply created a fun competition. But the Space-Out Competition is the title of the second work in the Urban Play Development Project.

Woopsyang says that because of smartphones, people today receive countless stimuli from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until just before they fall asleep. The world moves fast, so people must constantly increase their own value, and now they even have to compete with AI. That's why Woopsyang thinks the present may be the most stressful era since industrialization began. Even so, Woopsyang adds, the competition wasn't created simply to tell people to rest.

The competition grew out of Woopsyang's own experience in 2012. At the time, Woopsyang was working as a painter and wanted to make their voice heard in the world through art. But the paintings just went up on white gallery walls and came back down again and again, without making any voice heard at all. Woopsyang fell into burnout, growing increasingly anxious and feeling guilty. A week, a month, two months passed in which they couldn't do anything, and they sank deeper and deeper into a sea of depression.

But even the deepest sea of depression has a floor, Woopsyang says. Kicking off from the bottom and rising back up, Woopsyang concluded that the burnout had come from living without any plan. So they made a perfect daily schedule and followed it diligently. Suddenly, the anxiety and guilt disappeared. Even without painting, Woopsyang ate delicious lunches, bought coffee, and even bought cake. Woopsyang says they became "a very well-planned person" and were happy.

But before long, the anxiety returned. One day, on the subway home, the people around Woopsyang came into unusually sharp focus: a high school student studying English, a college student reading a textbook, an office worker on the phone with a client even on the way home, a working mother heading home after shopping at the market — everyone looked busy. In that moment, Woopsyang realized that those busy people were the reason for the anxiety, and thought: I have to stop these people.

Woopsyang offers the audience a familiar scene. When you're catching the subway and someone suddenly checks their watch and starts running toward the platform, the person behind them runs too, then the person behind them, and in the end you also get anxious and run along. Woopsyang sees our era as similar to this, and says the realization was possible only because they had stopped, alone, at that time.

Woopsyang says it takes tremendous courage to stand still alone while everyone else is running fast — because Woopsyang, too, felt the anxiety again. But calling themselves not a brave person, Woopsyang came up with another approach. We each become the "busy background" for one another. So what if everyone gathered in the same place on the same day and did nothing together? That's how the words "Space-Out Competition" came to mind.

Woopsyang was especially drawn to the word "competition," and decided to make it like a real match. People don't consider sporting events worthless, and winning an Olympic medal can even make someone a national hero. So, as Woopsyang explains, they decided to "trick" people by turning doing nothing into a sporting event.

Twelve years have already passed since the competition was created. It has been held not only in Korea but in major cities in many countries, including Beijing, Rotterdam, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, and Melbourne.

Among them, Beijing is special to Woopsyang, because it was where the first international competition was held. The young people who took part in the 2015 Beijing competition were very cheerful and lively, but once the competition started, they became as serious as Olympic athletes. When Woopsyang gave one participant a red card and tried to lead them off, the participant protested that it was unfair and got very angry. Looking back, Woopsyang says that back then they probably lacked charisma as a referee.

Woopsyang says they created the most useless, worthless competition in the world and simply invited people to try doing nothing. But from 2014 until now, "a very strange thing" has happened: newspapers, the media, and neuroscientists began talking about the competition. Woopsyang says it was a completely unexpected response. They had made the most worthless thing, yet people found meaning in it, the way they find meaning in a work of art.

So, as a work about "spacing out," did it succeed or fail? Rather than answering this question directly, Woopsyang shares the stories of competitors met at the competition.

The first are the runners-up of the 2016 Han River competition. What they said became a big topic at the time: people say that if you do nothing, nothing happens — and because nothing happens, it's wonderful.

The second is the winner of the 2024 international competition held in Gwanghwamun. She had been a doctor in Chile, but after marrying a Korean man and moving to Korea, she could no longer work as a doctor there. While considering her career path, she began studying psychology. Still feeling anxious and wanting to sort out her thoughts, she entered the Space-Out Competition. But after winning, she suddenly became famous in Chile, with interviews in every newspaper. Woopsyang says that, building on that fame, she was able to start counseling patients in Chile online and finally established herself as a psychological counselor.

The third is a participant from Hong Kong who won the Taipei competition. An engineering student at the time, this participant started an IT business related to mental health after the competition. But Woopsyang says that's not the important part of the story. A few years ago, this person became seriously ill and spent a long time in the hospital. Still young and with so much left to do, they became deeply depressed — and the memory of winning the Space-Out Competition helped them regain their confidence. Woopsyang says they were deeply moved by this story and felt a great sense of reward as the person who started the competition.

The fourth is the winner of last year's Melbourne competition. Woopsyang brought her photo because she wore the strangest outfit in the competition's history. She made and wore a fountain-shaped dress. She brought a small bathtub barely big enough for her body, filled it with water, and sat in it, while a motor pumped water through a hose so that it poured continuously from above her head. She wore the outfit because the fountain she used to see at her grandmother's house made her feel very calm. Throughout the competition, she spaced out while thinking, "I am water." Woopsyang joked that while she may have won that way, she might also have distracted the people next to her — so it may have been strategic.

The fifth is a person who received a special award at the 2024 Tokyo competition. After the competition, this person sent Woopsyang a letter. It said: I thought I was an ordinary person who wasn't good at anything, so I was happy to receive an award just as I am. It feels like the best thing I've ever done in my life, and I think I'll be able to live with confidence from tomorrow on. Woopsyang says that receiving this letter moved them deeply once again.

When participants enter the competition, they write their reasons for taking part on a voting board. Among them, Woopsyang found the sentence: "A competition where you're applauded even for doing nothing." Through the competitors' stories and this sentence, Woopsyang says they came to understand that the Space-Out Competition is, in the end, a competition that celebrates existence itself.

Woopsyang tells the audience that they, too, deserve applause just as they are. Then Woopsyang suggested that everyone applaud together for the existence of the person next to them, and applause filled the room.

Closing the talk, Woopsyang said that if a Space-Out Competition were someday held in Guangzhou — a city even faster-paced and faster-changing than Beijing — it would probably be a competition with yet another meaning for them. Woopsyang ended the talk with the hope of meeting the audience again at a real competition then.