YOUNG & EMERGING

HAYOUN KWON

How deep into the unknowable can art take us? Using digital animation and virtual reality, Seoul-born artist Hayoun Kwon leads viewers into physical locales that we cannot otherwise access. Her early works explored a site central to the collective imagination of South Korean society that is nonetheless forbidden: the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two warring halves of Korea. Her interest in portraying this buffer area started with the project (2013), when she was refused permission to record the Joint Security Area where soldiers from the two sides face each other. Instead, she created an animation that initially simulates filming with a thermal-imaging camera, appearing to show soldiers on their patrols, before becoming an absurdist choreography of marching that blurs real and imagined, and one (2015–16), which was based on the testimony of a South Korean soldier known only as Mr. Kim, who had conducted covert nighttime patrols inside the DMZ. Rendering Kim’s descriptions in a CGI animation viewable on virtual-reality headsets, Kwon opens the barbed-wire gates of the DMZ and guides viewers inside this forbidden zone that is paradoxically a wondrous nature preserve, and deadly military hunting ground littered with mines.