WoongYong Kim’s new work titled, WAKE , begins from a film roll that captured an incident that happened in 1996. Three different incidents unfold as the film is developed into photographs and reveals what was captured. As a result, audiences are left confused about the truth of the utterance of each person by the repetitive clash between the voices of people who want to prove the fact about their experiences and the images, of the process of pursuit, evoking the incident. The suspicion and misgivings on the truth of the incidents call to the mind of the viewers today’s reality where people believe to experience things firsthand even when the only things they experience are images containing virtual information and senses that may be even clearer than the real.

Since the 1980s, when the Korean media art began to take form, Haemin Kim has tested the boundaries of reality and virtuality in his work using the medium of video and sound performance, and continued to produce artwork in which the images played on TV gain materiality to stimulate one’s senses. In Two Shadows , a “shadow” — that (seems to) reflects an “image” of a child whose nationality is indiscernible — is shown repeatedly. The “image” disguised as a three-dimensional (reality) is eventually transformed into shadows of parents of a disparate nationality. At the end of the insensitive gaze of the viewers who uncritically accept the binary logic made by the machine, are the suggestive situations that the child would go through as a stranger, and the questions about that future are left in the form of a shadow that surrounds the child.

JaeOon Rho, one of the first generations of web artists, has produced artworks —revolving around the concept of “Universal Cinema ”— in diverse mediums such as on/offline exhibitions, painting, sculpture, as well as digital images, video, and publications. Rho’s new work titled, Universal Cinema 2019 , shows web-based videos and objects within a grid space representing today’s social media environment. Moving images, objects, and images begin within the media environment that broadly includes film and the web; they have ambivalence of either becoming ambiguous or clearer as audiences approach them closely; they also are connected and compatible with one another in the space, beyond their original contexts. As audiences experience the images changing to their movements, they would record the scene on their mobile phones or share them on their platforms. Encompassing all these processes, Universal Cinema 2019 is a space of augmented reality for realizing and observing the way today’s images are employed and consumed, as well as a creating moving theater environment.

Viral Lingua is a work made from a collaboration between musician Minwhee Lee and artist Yun Choi. The work consists of six acts that showcases the phenomena highlighting today’s Korean society by using re-appropriated grammars from ASMR, popular music, and sentences from advertisements. Behind the intense performance and costumes are satire and metaphors of today’s substantive issues of today seen through songs and scenes: doubt on the educated patriotism, the dark side of viral marketing that spreads leaving the truth behind, hopes towards the future full of languages of illusion, and forced sacrifice on the pretext of survival. The audiences can either sing a song for each act by reading the score produced in the form of advertisement flyers or distribute it so that they serve a role to deliver the contradictory scene inherent in a society that is concealed by images.

Artist collective Part-time Suite’s work titled, Wait For Me In a Crashing Airship , is created in VR, but is different from usual VR works that offer illusionistic amusement through a virtual world. While the video was shot in a new town, or a reconstructed neighborhood that is intended to embody the hopes to realize one’s splendid values of the future, audiences are thrown into ruins situated at the opposite end of the expectations one may have from such sparkly names. The scenes showing images of places where society does not call into the value of the future—such as an underground bunker, digital dumpsite, public square, backside of the construction site, and goshiwon [translator’s note: micro-housing for low-income urban tenants in Korea]—and they float around the in-between spaces where layers of virtual and real places are roughly stitched, in contrast with the high-tech medium of VR. “You” or the audience, are constantly called throughout the video to experience from various perspectives each of these places laid in front of their eyes and join the trajectory of an endless new narrative that is nonchalantly broken away from the project of a “bright future” someone has longed for.

The Prayer (performance ver.) by Jeongsik Ham, a film director and video artist, is a performance sequence of Ham’s work of the same title, The Prayer. The work captures a performer disguised — in a mediocre manner — as the character symbolizing “death” in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal holding a tool that resembles mirror ball and carrying it around to nimbly spotlight every corner of the alleys in Imun-dong, a neighborhood under reconstruction. The content of the video is hard to make sense of the connections among contrasting elements — such as a hymn arranged in the style of pop music, an alleyway where every corner has folk religion places, and a performer’s cheerful movement that symbolizes death. After all, The Prayer less reveals the artist’s take on certain subjects, but rather causes a clash between strongly symbolic images and images that generate certain beliefs. By doing so, the work continuously raises questions on contradictions and the derived meanings.