K-DIALECTIC

Currently Ongoing, 2025-2026

Media: Animated Documentary Fantasy, Archival Photo-Collage Installation

K-DIALECTIC is a multidisciplinary archival project that explores the violent legacy of Japanese colonialism in Korean diasporic memory through a multimedia installation of archival photo-collage and animated documentary fantasy. Rather than treating time as a linear progression, the project approaches history as fractured, cyclical, and shaped by rupture. Grounded in archival materials shared through collaborations with Korean archives, activist networks, and cultural institutions, the installation reactivates historical materials through a dual-media investigation.

Using an experimental image-making technique referred to as Split Photography, the photo installation presents archival photographs that are sliced, interlaced, missing, and cut together and apart—evoking a sense of rupture and discontinuity inherent in traumatic memory. The work explores how trauma shatters a sense of holistic identity and reveals in its place an unnamed and unspeakable gap that escapes articulation and direct confrontation. As an impossible image, the split photographs disable viewers from grasping the entirety of an image and experiencing it as a whole. Viewers must navigate indirectly—through fragments of visible moments that emerge between the gaps—gradually gathering the pieces together to form a narrative centered around a fundamental split. What emerges is not clarity, but a violence that resists representation.

The second component turns to the fragile but powerful ways survivors of Japanese forced labor camps and military sexual slavery have carried memory forward. Their hand-drawn testimonial sketches—revealing wartime atrocities deliberately erased from official archives —are reinterpreted into an animated documentary fantasy. The animation translates these personal testimonies into a cyclical, layered narrative that moves from colonial exploitation and the imperial ideologies that sustained it, to the emergence of a decolonial imaginary and movements of resistance. Instead of simply depicting historical events, the animation traces the ideological fantasies that gave form to social violence, built into the physical and institutional systems of oppression. It unpacks the utopic visions of advancement and modernization within imperial Japan and its production of dystopic realities and “death-worlds” for colonized Koreans. Out of this devastation, the animation follows the rise of a decolonial imaginary, where the haunting accumulation of the suffering of the oppressed breaks through into a collective recognition and social movement that unsettles the dominant narrative of the present. 

Together, the hanging photo-installation and animation film construct a dialectical portrait of Korean history, where suppressed truths resurface and the ghosts of the oppressed are not passive remnants but active agents of transformation. Their haunting presence resists erasure, compelling a reckoning that reshapes the social order. The silence created by historical violence is reimagined as a site for new forms of collective memory and decolonial agency. Rather than affirming progress as a linear march toward inevitable improvement, the project shows how the past endures, resurfacing in the present to confront the meanings constructed through historical violence. History is not experienced as steady continuity but as fractured and recurrent, a field of interruptions where suppressed struggles can re-enter and create possibilities for transformation. The project asks how artistic practice can navigate inherited pasts of historical violence—not by completing the story or offering closure, but by re-engaging what is incomplete, silenced, or lost.