Date: 2025-26 (currently ongoing) 

Media: animated documentary installation of hanging collage and experimental animation (no AI) 

K-DIALECTIC is an animated documentary installation that explores colonial histories of forced labour and wartime sexual violence during the era of Japanese occupation of Korea. Grounded in materials shared through collaborations with Korean archives, activist networks, and cultural institutions, the project reactivates archival sources through a hanging photo-collage and experimental animation. 

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. 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.

Central to the installation is animation that moves between documentary and fantasy to excavate the ideological and social imaginaries that produced, justified, and sustained colonial violence. Historical imagery, colonial iconography, and spectral figures form a phantasmagoric landscape that shifts in its representation of “the monster,” using “Monster(ed) and the Monstrous” to think through the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Monstrosity initially belongs to the colonized subject, produced through a colonial gaze that casts the colonized as backward or irrational to justify domination and assimilation. The monster is then inverted, rendering the colonial system itself monstrous: beneath ideals of progress and civilization emerge forced labour camps, military sexual slavery, and the accumulated suffering of the oppressed. 

What began as an attempt to reconstruct my grandfather’s missing biography as a forced labourer in a Japanese mining camp, has since evolved into a larger psycho-historical inquiry into how colonial violence is never fully erased, but persists as a form of historical afterlife—returning in displaced, fragmented, and recursive forms across generations. Drawing on a Walter Benjaminian understanding of history as rupture rather than continuity, the project approaches the past as something that does not recede but accumulates, resurfacing as traces, absences, and interruptions within the present. In this sense, colonial violence does not remain contained within its historical moment; it persists as a haunting structure that continually resists symbolic closure and destabilizes dominant narratives of the present.  

The project is a part of a larger documentary trilogy tracing key historical ruptures in modern Korean history: from Japanese colonialism (1910–1945) in K-DIALECTIC; the Korean War (1950–1953) in K-PARADOX; and the rise of industrial capitalism (1965–1980) in K-CAPITAL.