SETS

160 photo(35mm) slides projection, 15 min, 2000

A. Movie sets resembling buildings and streets of Seoul at the Korean Film Studio in North Korea. 

B. Set constructions for exercise of simulated street warfare in the South Korean army bases.

C. Movie sets for the "Joint Security Area(JSA)"(South Korean feature film) in South Korea. The sets have the landscape and construction precisely simulating Panmunjom at the DMZ.

 At the National Film Studio of North Korea(A), there are constructed sets standing for South Korean streets, buildings, and universities. They look like certain spots of Seoul but not "exactly" so. They look much older than contemporary Seoul. The different time setting embed in the movies sets, may make it more similar to North Korean cityscape than South, or rather to the places designed for the simulated street battle exercises in South Korea(B). We know that sets are in general signs and mirror images in a physical space. They are already photographic. In this photo work, they index the other half of Korea(A), possible half of Koreas(B), or two Koreas' joint territory(C), but only filtered by artificial signs of them. One might lose the fixed sense of one's locale in this room of mirrors which is hidden behind its own physical extension. With the sets, one could see the ghosts of enemy, the 'living dead' from the Cold War whose absence is identical in the New World Order. These sets have been constructed for producing mass experience through movies(or at least group experience since military training is obligatory in both Koreas), and giving influence mainly on their historical memory. Like what we find in movies on historical events, we are getting to realize that history deploys itself in part by intensely fictionalized, militarized and deeply masculinized narrative. In this aspect, the sets could become an emblem of the modern Koreas' nation-state as absurd invention, as a theatre. In a sense, 50 years of both Koreas are filled with sets, or maybe they are the sets in both governments' intelligence and their spies' eyes. The sets are 'ideological state-apparatuses' par excellence, but now in deep dilemma. The dilemma resides in double condition between the World now and the local Cold War, traumatic memory and rising optimism, bloody contradiction and peace process.