Hayoun Kwon KR, b. 1981

Hayoun Kwon first began working with video between 2006 and 2008, and has since developed a practice in which the digital medium is utilized in all its diversity to transgress the definite limits imposed by contemporary political situations.

Animation affords her the freedom to dramatize, exaggerate, and push the frontiers of representation, and even to exploit the fantasmatic potential of her subject matter. She explains in the following terms her decision to animate her own version of the DMZ rather than documenting the real-life territory: “We often hear politicians talk about the DMZ but I don’t believe they really know much about it. It was important for me to have the subjective vision of someone who truly knows the DMZ. By speaking to a soldier who had spent many years there, I was able to access this space indirectly, visiting it through his eyes. So it is a lived experience, albeit a reinvented one, of a forbidden zone where nature and the risk of death cohabit. Animation allowed me to invest and to explore the zone’s fantasmatic character.”

Two recurring elements in Kwon’s work are present here: on the one hand, the border, and on the other, the immaterial story, the purely human production, the creation of fictions. Of particular interest to her is the border that divides North and South Korea, which she perceives as a kind of mirror that reflects similar images back to both the watcher and the watched, or as a theatre stage whose limits the spectator cannot transgress. The border becomes a conceptual one that poses the question of the physical and mental limits of the induvial. A sensitive reflection on identity and borders runs throughout Kwon’s work and leads her to interrogate the construction of historical and individual memory, as well as the ambiguous relationships that link memory, reality and fiction.