DO YOU FEEL? — The Phenomenology of Cultural Otherness, Well-Being, and Liminality

Do You Feel? / 느껴지시나요?

Tomas Lagūnavičius

July 5, 2026, 8:25 AM

Seoul–Busan High-Speed Train, South Korea

Tomas Lagūnavičius’s performance DO YOU FEEL? (Do You Feel? / 느껴지시나요?) is a conceptual and phenomenological experiment in which the journey by high-speed train from Seoul to Busan becomes a space for exploring inner experience.

During the performance, the artist contemplates his own state and asks: What do I feel being in another culture? Do I experience curiosity, otherness, anxiety, or culture shock? Or perhaps I do not feel at all what I think I am feeling?

At the center of the work is the question “Do you feel?”.

It is first directed toward the artist himself and becomes a kind of examination of consciousness. In this sense, the performance is close to a phenomenological understanding of art: what matters is not the representation of South Korea, but the subjective experience of the world and the attempt to understand one’s own response to cultural difference.

South Korea is not presented here as an exotic object. Instead, it becomes a mirror that allows the artist to notice his own cultural conditioning. What in our behavior is universal, and what is merely a habit learned from our culture? What would happen if a temporary journey became emigration? Would a person’s understanding of their own identity change after living for a long time in a foreign culture?

The train becomes a liminal space — a place “between” two cities, but also “between” two cultural and existential states. The artist exists between tourist and potential immigrant, between observer and participant, between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

Therefore, DO YOU FEEL? speaks not only about culture shock. It raises a more universal question about the human capacity to know and understand one’s own experience.