DMZ art show reframes Korea's divided landscape
DMZ Open Exhibition: Staging opens in the former U.S. Camp Greaves and at Imjingak Pyeonghwa Nuri in Paju, turning a once‑military site into a field of artistic inquiry. Curated by Kim Sun‑jung of Art Sonje Center, the show gathers 26 works by 14 Korean and international artists to probe how division shapes relationships among people, objects, and the landscape itself.
Ahn Kyu‑chul’s installation Nine Chairs arranges a broken circle of chairs, each rendered unusable, as a metaphor for the liminal state of the Demilitarized Zone. By dismantling eight intact chairs and recombining the fragments into a ninth, he visualises the shared incompleteness felt on both sides of the border.
Veteran artist Park Chan‑kyong revisits Cold‑War memory in Black Box: Memory of the Cold War Images, a photo‑based work that overlays Hollywood spy imagery with scenes from former U.S. bases, reminding viewers how geopolitical anxiety seeped into everyday life.
In a repurposed restroom, Yeon Jin‑yeong juxtaposes military uniforms, latex and a bead‑adorned urinal, linking collective discipline with the contemporary ‘looksmaxxing’ culture. Lee Ye‑eun documents the everyday resilience of residents in Tongilchon through photographs of precarious towers of plastic containers in her series People of Baegyeon‑ri. Meanwhile, North Korean defector Sun Mu paints a hopeful tableau in Spring Outing, borrowing North Korean propaganda aesthetics to imagine young people from both Koreas sharing a riverside picnic.
The curatorial framework of Staging, drawn from Bruno Latour’s philosophy, treats the DMZ not as a static symbol of conflict but as a stage where histories, ecosystems and human lives intersect. The exhibition invites visitors to see the border as a dynamic space of potential coexistence, lingering until late November.