Where are you flying /Somewhere in a place of nothing/
From when did you depart/From everything/ - Bertolt Brecht -
It began around when I was 20 years old. Such situation is soon remembered to me as an event, and it continues for a long time. It has been there with you and me for a long time. The story I am going to tell is also a long story. I clearly know about it, but I maybe write about it with some imaginary noumenon remained in my memory. It is named in several different ways. Many people understand about it with words like the division of territory and the cold war. I will not mention here what had happened a long time ago, though it was just a beginning. I made efforts to confirm what real is about for more than 2 years, and my behavior could be possibly done because of the change of society. I know some people who had worked on this kind of subject with strong purposes not long ago. However, my aimless action of present time could be the aimful reason to be caught by the censorship if it had happened in the past. Although all the artistic attempt did not lack in its purpose, at least to me, the beginning of this work had started without clear reason since I simply began the action as an observer. I might purely enjoyed the new and cool feeling by observing the landscape where a function and a purpose stay in total harmony.
The most of recessed military facilities aims at the national defense against possible wars. I have mainly observed the bunker, secret agit, protective wall, and protective line, which Korean males are quite familiar with because of the compulsory military service. Those lists of military facilities can be replaced by some descriptive words such as camouflage, construction, and arrangement. The military facilities disguise themselves, disclose a sort of a fictitious facade from viewers, and try to hide their real nature, as keeping the traditional methods of camouflage for military facility. In addition, the use of solid concrete reveals the decision making for a functional purpose; when the concrete is explored, the protective wall is able to block the road in emergency status. However, the protective wall is enduring the same position, in solid tension without actual functioning. It has lost the sense of real time and has been constructed as a separate space underneath the military concepts of camouflage and concealment. The same paradox is applied to the bunker and the secret agit, and occurs me an impression of that they are already adopted by the environment; nature, which becomes the utility camouflage. Nevertheless, such impression upon the prolonged space gives me a sense of beauty regardless its actual representation. This impression about beauty must be greatly different from the sentiment of a soldier whom from an art university, serves his military and draws a map in the bunker. The soldier even thinks of himself as expressing the paradoxical beauty he had felt through out the wall drawing of a map in the bunker.
Such paradoxical beauty is gradually disappearing under the desire of economic development. The Eunpyung New Town, which is one of the nation's significant economic development in peripheral areas has reveal the hidden military facilities by digging land and mountain for construction, and the workers of the construction site seem as archaeologists in the excavation site. The military relics disappearing by the desire of developing New Towns indicate the political and social changes upon the North Korean Policy. This can be a process for re-constructing new desire as well as for deconstruction the established time, and its landscapes are always showed just as in an orderly arranged protective line. The development is another kind of camouflage and concealment of the territory where gifts wealth to certain groups of people. The military facilities which went beyond the original duty of national security, disappears by the desire of national economic development, and calls for the end of cold war without completing their missions. Although they were born to be destroyed in anyways, they are about to be destroyed by another force/purpose instead of the original force/purpose. Moreover, every elements about the past including the ideology and political change are seeping out through the cracks in the solid-looking concrete walls. The facilities were made for fulfilling certain necessity and are now moving toward to somewhere in nowhere, and I am not sure if it is happening because of the transcendental force or of the slowness of time stream. I only acknowledge that the emptiness after disappearing would be replaced only by newly created meanings, and the emptiness would come back again.
* UNDERCOOLED : Chemical term of the liquid statement, when it remains in liquid below the freezing point without solidification, in other words ‘supercooled’.
By Onejoon Che
