Exhibition view of 'MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2021: Moon Kyungwon&Jeon Joonho-News from Nowhere, Freedom village' / Image courtesy of MMCA
MMCA Hyundai Motor Series 2021 was held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, until 20 February. The series is a ten-year art project that has organised an annual exhibition of an esteemed Korean artist or team since 2014. Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, who have been working together since 2009, have been selected as this year’s featured artist. They presented their first exhibition at MMCA in nine years, with their last work exhibited as part of the Korea Artist Prize 2012.
The exhibition consists of videos, installation works, archival documentation, photography, large-scale paintings as well as a mobile platform on which to perform related programmes. ‘News from Nowhere, Freedom Village’, a video played via two screens, is placed at the center of the exhibition. This is an extension of 'News from Nowhere', a long-term project on which the two artists have been working throughout various international locations and contexts over the past decade. In their project, the two artists address issues such as tragedies in our shared global history and the climate crisis. The Freedom Village, as witnessed in this exhibition, is the only village that lies on the South Korean side of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), which has spent the past seven decades without designation as a part of South nor North Korea since the signing of the Armistice in 1953 after the Korean War. The artist views this as evidence of a deformed world created by human confrontation and conflict. With their backs facing each other and overlapping sound, two screens show a video featuring two characters; A who was born in the village of freedom and never went out to the outside world, and B who has never been out of their living space. It is as if A is from the past and B from the future, and organic time and space in which B responds to the sound made by A's actions. The scene where B wears a mask is reminiscent of our present pandemic situation, and at the same time, of all the epidemics that have influenced lived experience in the past. ‘Landscape’, a large-scale painting, helps to expand the artists’ world into a reality by expressing the seemingly polluted forest in a hyper-realistic way. ‘Mobile Agora’ invites experts from across various fields such as architecture, science, design, and humanities, to explore the causes of the crisis we are currently experiencing and to draw an alternative future together. Yoo Hyunjoon (principal, Hyunjoon Yoo Architects) and Choi Jaecheon (professor, Ewha Womans University) as experts in architecture participated in the discussion ‘Forecast of our Future after Disaster: What is True Solidarity and Coexistence?’. The video was released on the official YouTube channel of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.