21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

MOON Kyungwon
Born 1969 in Seoul, South Korea (left)

JEON Joonho
Born 1969 in Busan, South Korea (right)

Artist duo made up of Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho. In recent years, their practice has focused on the collaborative project “News from Nowhere”, which centers on creating an interdisciplinary platform. Their first site-specific collaborative work was presented at documenta in 2012. Selected solo exhibitions include “News from Nowhere” at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2013; Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, Zurich, 2015; “The Ways of Folding Space & Flying” at the Korean Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2017; “Freedom Village” at SCAI the Bathhouse, Tokyo, Japan, 2017; “News from Nowhere” at the Tate Liverpool, 2018-2019; “News from Nowhere: Freedom Village” at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea, 2021; and the Oku-Noto Triennale 2020+, Suzu, Ishikawa, Japan, 2021, among others. At the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Moon & Jeon have participated in Culture City of East Asia 2018 “Altering Home,” the 15th anniversary of the museum’s opening in 2019 with “Where We Now Stand—In Order to Map the Future [I],” and the 2018-2019 JICHIKU Region AIR Kanaiwa-Ono Art Project.
https://moonandjeon.com/

El Fin del Mundo (2012)

This is one of Moon and Jeon’s representative works, which was presented at dOCUMENTA(13) (2012) and has since been shown at numerous international exhibitions, including the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2015). The images projected on these two screens depict the activities of a male artist in the “present” and his life in a new, post-apocalyptic world. The “future,” in which a woman goes off to investigate civilizations from the old world, unfolds in parallel, and the woman in the “future” comes into contact with the “present” through vestiges of the artworks created by the man. Here, Moon & Jeon deploy the dual projection technique to its fullest, and the different time axes before and after the apocalypse and the connections between them are elaborately depicted as a world of images.

News from Nowhere: Eclipse（2022）

This is a new video installation, presented for the first time at this exhibition. A man lives in danger on the deserted open seas with only a lifeboat as his home. The work depicts how the human will seeks out a fundamental degree of freedom, even as it longs to be liberated from the domination of the world of virtual reality to which it is beholden. In a space that resembles a cage of light, viewers are immersed in the world of the work, where the boundary between the real and the metaverse dissolves through images on large LED panels projected in sync with sound and lighting.

Silent Planet（2020-2022）

Through images shot in the Kanaiwa area (in the suburbs of Kanazawa City) by the artists, who participated in the museum’s artist-in-residence program (JICHIKU: Kanaiwa Ohno Art Project), the video work depicts an “absent village where everyone has disappeared,” an examination of forgotten histories and lost lives, of compassion and skepticism for the world.
Architectural plans created through their research will also be shown, making reference to the expansion of the town’s functions and the transformation of its landscape while making the most of its characteristics.

MYOHYANGSANGWAN（2014-2017）

This film flows like a dream.
The background of this film is a fictional North Korean restaurant in the city where long standing feuds and divisions, ideological differences, indifference and distrust are suspended. A conversation that has risen between two artists one summer night at the table crosses between arts and ideology, reality and ideality as well as the ego and superego.
At this special venue, neither North nor South Korean, the contradictions and discrepancies of human existence and the pretentiousness of the world around us are exposed. The artistic imagination and intense passion that lurk in the depths of the mind are developed through quiet camerawork.

News from Nowhere : Freedom Village（2021）

The residents of a village located in the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea — a village that exists in reality but is, so to speak, invisible — and characters living in the future intersect across time and space to depict two worlds created by an ideological dichotomy. The artists call this work “an introspective look at institutions and social systems” and “a metaphorical space that opens up new perspectives in order to evoke richly imaginative concepts.” In addition to video images projected onto both the front and back sides of large LED panels, this large, complex installation is also composed of sound, painting, photography, and text.

for the project “MMCA Hyundai Motor series NEWS FROM NOWHERE”
Co-organized by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
Co-curator Joowon Park
The work commissioned by MMCA, Korea & Hyundai Motor

Freedom Village（2017）

There, overflowing with experiment equipment that seem old and antiquated, happen strange incidents. What kind of experiment could it be? Inside the laboratory, thunder-like electricity is generated, and the indicators of the dashboard shudder like crazy. It is at this moment that a documentary of the Korean War is turned on, on the old television. War atrocities and strange experiments continue, and time and space – ambiguous in that it is unknown whether it is in the past or present – cross over each other. This film examines the political anxieties and conflicts that occur due to the division of the Korean peninsula, establishing itself as a space for metaphor and a horizon of imagination by correcting the mistakes in human history as well as revealing the world of contradictions.