Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings

Scene #1 Tangerine Dream Museum
by Juhyun Cho & Hyunseon Kang
Scene #2 Ecology for the Non-Future
by Unmake Lab
Scene #3 Between Mokpo and Wageningen
by Chihyung Jeon & Cheolwoong Shim, Hanna Park

2022. 12. 9 Fri – 12. 18 Sun
Framer Framed

Curated by Juhyun Cho
Produced by Drifting Curriculum (ARKO International Joint Fund, 2021-2022 Korea-Netherlands International Exchange and Cooperation Program)
In partnership with Framer Framed
With support from Arts Council Korea, DutchCulture

Mobile Scenarios for the Metamorphic Beings is an exhibition that presents research contents of Drifting Curriculum’s joint research project over the past year produced in three scenarios. This research/collaboration project, with keywords of “drift”, “migration”, and “metamorphosis”, explores the relationship between technology and the ecological environment under the theme of “Anthropocene Marine Space and Post-colonialism”.

The mobile scenario, consisting of three completely different scenes in collaboration with three teams of researchers and artists, is a niche in the history of colonial imperialism in the Age of Discovery. It closely links the accidental drift of Dutch East India Company’s explorer Hendrik Hamel and his party, stranded on the coast of Jeju Island in 1653, to the political and ecological problems arising in the present Anthropocene marine space and to the planetary-level disasters that occurred in various time and space and the countless possibilities of futures.

The contemporary speculative landscape that unfolds as we drift and move into the fictitious marine space between the Netherlands and Korea is a space of our lives where climate change, fear of infection, and threats of human existence are common beyond specific disaster events. Those who live there constantly change and reorganize their position as boundaries for viruses, migrants, refugees, Asians, others, and non-human individuals.

Humanity, which is drifting away from the state of the settlement will have an identity as refugees, migrants, and minorities on this planet and experiences anxiety, fear, isolation, and frustration in the face of survival problems. Inhabitants of the planet Earth, whose hegemony in the previous world has been lost, are constantly in a state of “metamorphosis” by changing their positions frequently in new relationships with other beings.

The mobile scenario, which unfolds unstable, self-contradictory, and temporary events in the global environment, land, sea, and base after the pandemic in weightless time and space where historical time and literary imagination are intertwined, predicts a “totally different world” for the coming future, neither dystopia nor utopia.


Scene #1. Tangerine Dream Museum
Research Scenario: Juhyun Cho / Artist: Hyunseon Kang
Cooperation in curating: Hyunjoo Byeon
Project assistance: Seoyoung Jeon, Won Jo

Tangerine Dream Museum is a space of time and space preserved by Jeju Forest Gotjawal, traces of Jeju Island residents’ lives in modern and contemporary history, and a space where future animal and plant ecosystems coexist. It is a scenario that builds a non-existent museum by reconstructing history from the perspective of the forest. Museum founder Juhyun Cho borrows the character “Lucy,” who has been representing artist Hyunseon Kang’s identity, to serve as a curator. The teaser video introduces the lives of Jeju’s indigenous people with various animals and plants under the unique ecological topography of Jeju Forest Gotjawal, located on the opposite side of the Western imperialist botanical classification, as well as nature and human life that have been variously related to this forest.

Scene #2. Ecology for the Non-Future
Research Scenario / Artists: Unmake Lab
Cooperation in research & Production: Green Korea
Research assistance: Sunghee Lee

Consisting Binna Choi and Sooyon Song, the artist collective Unmake Lab’s scenario, <Ecology for the Non-Future> starts with a sense of incompatibility between the catastrophic ecological environment and the future promised by technologies such as generative neural networks against the backdrop of burnt mountains. In their scenarios, ‘non-existents’ appear as photographs made from generated neural networks. These ‘non-existents’ are based on a dataset of the colonial/modern era stuffed animals, lost wildlife, unidentified animals, and synthetic photographs.

Scene #3. Between Mokpo and Wageningen
Research Scenario: Chihyung Jeon / Artists: Cheolwoong Sim, Hanna Park
Cooperation in research and production: Henk van den Boom, Vitor Ferrari, Rinnert van Basten Batenburg

The research scenario Mokpo to Wageningen by Professor Chihyung Jeon of KAIST, who is a member of the Comprehensive Report on the Social Disaster Committee, reconstructs scientific facts that are revealed as data extracted from the MV Sewol hull mounted at Mokpo New Port has been moved to various places at home and abroad. Data on MV Sewol reached Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) in Wageningen, Netherlands. In 2018, MARIN was commissioned by the Sewol Ferry Hull Investigation Committee and experimented to determine the cause of the sinking by making a model that scaled down the MV Sewol to 1/25 (model No.9929) and 1/30 (model No.9930). In this scenario, media artists Cheolwoong Sim and Hannah Park approach reality by collecting and reconstructing data left in pieces to find clues that reveal unexposed truths and scientific facts.