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Ludic Cartopgrahies
489 Years
489 Years shows the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea through the narration of a soldier who entered the DMZ, one of the most dangerous and heavily armed places in the world. Because only authorised personnel can enter the DMZ, Hayoun Kwon uses animation to reconstruct the space and play on the fiction and fantasy of a forbidden territory, offering the viewer an indirect experience.
The former soldier featured in 489 Years tells Hayoun Kwon various stories of his experiences in the DMZ. Among his many accounts, the artist was touched by his story of the landmines and flowers, realising that she wanted the viewer to experience the DMZ as a paradoxical place where intense anxiety and subliminal beauty coexist. In creating her imagined landscape, Hayoun Kwon addresses the geopolitical realities of the peninsular division and its violence.
Originally shown through a Virtual Reality device, the fictional constructions let the artist film what cannot otherwise be shown. Animation affords her the freedom to theatricalize, exaggerate, and push the frontiers of representation, and even to exploit the fantasmatic potential of her subjects. Reflecting on identity and the notion of the border, Hayoun Kwon interrogates how individual and historical memory are constructed, and their ambiguous relationship to reality and fiction. Kwon‘s work leads the viewer to experience the DMZ through human emotions of anxiety and wonder.