Media artist duo MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, who have consistently garnered attention in the Korean and international art worlds, have been exploring fundamental questions about the role of art and the power relations surrounding art in the face of humanity’s crises and rapidly changing world, and have expressed problematic issues such as the contradictions of capitalism, historical tragedies, and climate change through videos, installations, archives, multidisciplinary research and workshops, and publications.

MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho started collaborating in 2009, when they were thinking about contemporary art and its meaning, the expendability of exhibitions, and the absence of criticism in their own work, and decided to make art that is practical and gives them a chance to reflect on themselves.

MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho have been working on their first long-term project, News from Nowhere, since 2012, based on their concerns about the social role of art. The project functions as a collaborative platform. Artists, designers, architects, and experts from various fields, including education, economics, politics, culture, and religion, have participated in in-depth dialogues to reflect on society as a whole and offer visions for the future.

The video work El Fin del Mundo, produced as part of the News from Nowhere project, raises questions about the meaning and role of art in a post-apocalyptic future where all social values and order have been lost. El Fin del Mundo consists of two videos, one about a male protagonist just before the apocalypse and the other about a female protagonist in the future who survived the apocalypse.

The two protagonists are separated in time and space but are connected through the art. Their time and space overlap when the female protagonist discovers the studio of the male protagonist, who has been working on art until just before the apocalypse, in the distant future.

The artists were invited to the Documenta (13) in Kassel, the first Korean artists to participate since Nam June Paik and Keun Byung Yook, and presented the project News from Nowhere, which shows the process of their reflection, much research, and collaboration with other genres, with the question of what is the social function and role of art, including El Fin del Mundo.

In addition, the MMCA’s Artist of the Year exhibition presented the idea that ‘art is a project for the change of human perception’ based on the collective statements encountered through the project, and rather than defining the nature and role of art, it boldly provides historical facts that art has played a role in changing the horizon of human perception, and was selected as the winner of the Korean Artist Award 2012.

Selected as the artists of the Korean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho presented The Ways of Folding Space & Flying, a work that explores the past, present, and future of the Korean Pavilion, as well as the historical narrative of the Venice Biennale beyond the boundaries of the national pavilion. It also connects to the artists’ exploration of the true role and meaning of art in today’s era of uncertainty and instability.

The seven-channel video installation, which utilizes the structural characteristics of the Korea Pavilion to encompass the entire space, begins with the premise that after an apocalyptic catastrophe, most of the land is underwater, leaving the Korea Pavilion floating like a buoy. In the limited space of the Korean Pavilion, a character’s strange experiences and intended encounters unfold.

MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho viewed chukjibeop (축지법; The Ways of Folding Space) and bihaengsul (비행술; Flying), which are mental exercises to overcome human limitations through imagination, as creative expressions of the human desire to transcend the barriers and structures that bind us, and thus closely aligned with the roots of artistic practice. The two artists envision the future of art by revealing aspects of the human desire to constantly explore new territories and challenge the self.

Freedom Village is a video project on Daeseong-dong, the only civilian neighborhood in Korea’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Those who played a leading role in the truce reestablished a village here, even though people could not live here because it was too close to the military demarcation line, and then named it “Freedom Village.”

Created politically and artificially during the Cold War in the aftermath of the Korean War, ‘Freedom Village’ still exists within the DMZ as a territory that is both inside and outside of Korea’s rapidly changing contemporary history. Through examination, tracing, and imagination of ‘Freedom Village’, this project reveals the fiction and errors of a manipulated and concealed history.

The artists’ work on ‘Freedom Village’ continues with News from Nowhere: Freedom Village (2021). This is a two-channel video work that reflects on human life and the role of art in the aftermath of disaster. Through this series of projects, the Freedom Village in Daejeon-dong is revealed as a collective human life that recognizes the absurdities and contradictions of the world around us, free from the ideological perspective of a particular political situation in Korea.

In 2022, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho presented their solo exhibition “Seoul Weather Station” at Art Sonje Center, which explored the social role of art through a multifaceted approach to the rapid environmental changes that have come about through global weather phenomena and natural disasters through artistic imagination and collaboration.

To Build a Fire (2022), a new work by MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho that is featured in this exhibition, is an audience-immersive installation presented from a non-human perspective that unfolds the story of climate in an unknowable time and space. Alongside the video, the installation sculptures, sound, lighting, and robot Spot that make up the space interact organically to immerse the viewer in a virtualized world of the unknown.

With this, Mobile Agora: Seoul Weather Station (2022), a participatory platform for discourse production and creative collaboration, provided the opportunity to share the artists’ critical examination of issues related to carbon dioxide with audiences and experts from various fields, and to positively consider the social role of art once again.

“I think the meaning of art is to break a fixed frame of thought, a frame of perception, and have an expanded experience. The expansion of perception, which is different before and after the artwork, is the positive function of art.” (Marie Claire, interview with MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, September 8, 2023)

MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho have been invited to create and exhibit site-specific projects including videos, installations, archives, and publications at Kassel dOCUMNETA 13 (2012), Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2015), Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2015), Tate Liverpool, UK (2018-2019), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Seoul (2021-2022), and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2022).

They were awarded the 1st Multitude Art Prize (2013), Noon Award at Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the MMCA Korean Artist Award 2012. They are actively exhibiting at leading institutions around the world and are currently holding a solo exhibition “Weather Station” at Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing, until February 9, 2025.

References

• 문경원 & 전준호, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho (Artist Website)
• 문경원 & 전준호, 갤러리현대 (MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, Gallery Hyundai)
• art1, 문경원·전준호 영상설치작 ‘축지법과 비행술’전시…베니스비엔날레 한국관, 2015.04.10
• 국립현대미술관, MMCA 현대차 시리즈 2021: 문경원 & 전준호 – 미지에서 온 소식, 자유의 마을
• 아트선재센터, 문경원 & 전준호: 서울 웨더 스테이션