K-DIALECTIC

Currently Ongoing, 2025-2026

Media: Animated Documentary Fantasy, Archival Photo-Collage Installation

K-DIALECTIC is a multidisciplinary archival project that explores colonial histories of forced labour and wartime sexual violence 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 narrative that moves from colonial exploitation and the imperial ideologies that sustained it, to the emergence of a decolonial imaginary and movements of resistance. 

Together, the hanging photo-installation and animation film construct a dialectical portrait of Korean history, where suppressed truths resurface and the silenced past emerges as an active agent of transformation. What began as an attempt to reconstruct fragments of my grandfather’s missing biography as a forced labourer in a Japanese mining camp has since evolved into a broader psycho-historical inquiry into how historical violence persists as traces within cultural memory, shaping identity through suppression and splits. 

The project is a part of a larger trilogy work tracing key historical ruptures in modern Korean history: 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. Conceived as a psycho-historical inquiry, the series trace the rise and fall of ideologies that shaped collective identity and examines the violences they inflicted—violences that continue to haunt the present. The trilogy envisions a paradoxical economy of power unfolding across history, where the suffering of the oppressed resists closure and returns as ruptures within collective memory, demanding reckoning within present and ongoing structures of power. The series approaches artistic practice as a form of critical historiography, seeking to give visual and spatial form to historical absences while exploring how the past is never truly left behind, but persists within the present as its hidden ground.