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What should we do if the Earth’s ecosystem completely collapses, and humanity faces extinction? Shouldn’t we come up with a way to move to another planet before that happens? It is likely a thought that crossed our minds at least once. Many of us are worried that these ominous scenarios may become real, as the world suffers through climate change, pollution, and the recent pandemic. Numerous sci-fi films have captured such imaginations and concerns on the silver screen. One of the most widely known examples is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). In this film, humanity is on the verge of extinction as the earth slowly decays because of climate change and food sources run out one after the other. As a result, a space mission team sets out to use a wormhole that appeared behind Saturn to find habitable planets. It is not entirely fictional, as many scientists including those at National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have been trying to search Earth-like planets beyond the solar system. Candidates range from Mars to star systems billions of light-years away from the Earth.

What can art do in these trends? To answer this, the Asia Culture Center (ACC) organized an exhibition with a peculiar title: “Migration to a New Earth Planet.” Coordinated by curator Jo Joo-hyun (Adjunct Professor, Yonsei University), the exhibition reports the outcomes of the 2021 1H ACC ACT Studio Young Artist Residency Program. The featured works are set against a hypothetical story wherein humanity leaves the now inhabitable Earth and moves to a new planet that diverse beings call home. In general, the exhibitions tied with residency programs show the projects within the themes of the artists’ respective interests. However, “Migration to a New Earth Planet” consists of artworks aligned with a clearly defined theme. It was made possible by the fact that the residency program selected eight teams (amounting to nine artists) based on their interests within the specific theme at the outset. More interestingly, the artists worked with anthropologists, scientists and engineers, and ancient art historians to discuss each research theme and advance their projects. Readers must then be curious to find out what the outcomes of such a process look like and the stories that they convey. Let us discover by going back to the CURVE exhibition hall in Space 2, ACC Creation, where the exhibition was held from November 24 to December 5, 2021.

Shin Jae-eun, Twins, composite media, variable size, 2021

The first thing you will see as you enter the exhibition hall are monitors of various sizes placed on the floor or hanging in the air, the latter showing an eye of an animal. The video was recorded ten minutes before the pig was slaughtered. A large monitor below blatantly shows a man dissecting a pig, analogous to a surgeon operating on a patient. In a smaller monitor at the back, the artist is seen cutting off and eating chunks of flesh from a pig’s nose and ears, devoid of emotion. In addition, a wall nearby features a video of pork being processed into sausages, and a scenario book, where a pig is a protagonist, is found sitting on a table in a corner. This media installation piece is Shin Jae-eun’s Twins. The artist sees a pig, a highly intelligent animal with genes similar to humans, as twin brothers of humanity. At the same time, the artist reminds visitors how the animal is consumed for dietary, medical, and industrial purposes. The images of humans and pigs also work as a testament to the asymmetrical relationship between humans and nonhumans.

Kang Min-hee, u:m, composite media, variable size, 2021

Placed next to Shin’s work is Kang Min-hee’s u:m. Installed in an independent cube-like space, this interactive media art piece reacts to how visitors move. To experience the work, you need to walk into a space surrounded by cloth, with a sensor that looks like a microphone. On a screen hanging on the side of the interior, you can see a video of small particles moving randomly. All you have to do is stand in front of the screen, put the sensor in front of your mouth, and breathe in and out. Then, you can see the particles in the video changing abruptly, which look like mountain ridges in flux. The sensor converts the viewer’s breath into data, which are then translated into the particle movement in the video. The artist was inspired by the Pangu myth from China. In the primordial chaos, Pangu separated the sky from the earth. When he died, his body changed into various elements of the universe and nature such as the sun, the moon, mountains, and rivers. His breath became the winds. Just as the myth of Pangu, Kang’s u:m reveals how people and nature are connected.

Park Ji-soo, Hz Stalagmite, soundscape of Gwangju, 2121, composite media, variable size, 2021

Going further into the exhibition hall, you will see two sculptures on the floor surrounded by assorted noises. As you listen to the noises carefully, you will find that they are not as strange as they seem. The piece is Park Ji-su’s Hz Stalagmite, soundscape of Gwangju, 2121. In this project, the artist takes note of noise pollution, an invisible phenomenon that impacts us in fundamental ways. Like how a stalagmite grows in a dark cave over thousands of years, the artist imagines that the noises created by humans will keep accumulating until they become visible and destroy the environment. The artist took noise samples from various places in and around Gwangju: the Mudeungsan Mountain, the Gwangjucheon River, Yangdong market, and Gwangju Airport. Then, she used their soundwave graphs to create 3D sculptures. One of the sculptures plays the noises collected from specific places. The round-shaped sculpture on the side looks like the first sculpture but in an unsettlingly bizarre fashion. It represents the stalagmite of noises 100 years from now. As the title suggests, the piece creates a soundscape of noises in and around Gwangju.

Seonjeong Hwang, Tanhamu Project, composite media, variable size, 2021

Placed behind Park’s project is Tanhamu Project, an installation series by Seonjeong Hwang. Tanhamu is a proper noun coined by the artist herself, combining the ancient Sanskrit word Tanhā, meaning the bodily or spiritual desires or thirst, and mu (舞), a Chinese letter for “dance.” Throughout her projects, the artist reexamined the issue of communication and connection between humans and other species. To do that, she has studied microbiome systems and tree networks for a long time. During her research, she realized that just as humans share information and connect through the World Wide Web, plants coexist through a system that can be described as a Wood Wide Web. For this exhibition, Hwang has created new species by combining mycelia with humans. The images of the new species are created by artificial intelligence (AI) trained with various images of mycelia and humans. These bizarre images look like sceneries from a strange planet.

Na Hye-soo, Pintment, panel, 6,500 × 1,600 × 2,000 mm, 2021

Moving to the center of the hall, you will see Pintment, a project featuring new architectural images motivated by the theme of the program. Na imagines how the current crises will change architecture, which, to the artist, is a more serious issue than the need to wear masks to keep out dust and virus. Going through these crises, humans will be more inclined to create safer and more pleasant spaces and live exclusively with people from identifiable backgrounds and in good health. These inclinations evolve into highly imaginative architectural designs, and these buildings, which resemble open umbrellas, consist of various facilities catering to human needs connected by networks of tube-type corridors. Each building is connected underground, allowing people to move from one place to another. The designs highlight the importance of air, a substance that we tend to take for granted, and how humans’ lives, as well as their breathing, are sensitively affected by air.

Eunha Jang, Invasive Species Behind the Notoriety: Multi-directional Narratives for Abundant Futures, composite media, variable size, 2021

Eunha Jang’s Invasive Species Behind the Notoriety: Multi-directional Narratives for Abundant Futures can be found behind Na’s architectural images. In this exhibition, the young artist contributed videos and essays showcasing the outcomes of her research project. The project revisits the negative perception toward foreign species as the “destroyer of ecosystems” and examines how we can change such perceptions. The featured videos convey stories about two foreign species introduced to Asia as food sources: “bullfrogs” in Korea and “giant African land snails” in Taiwan. Jang regards the distinction between foreign and native species as a fiction invented by humans and asks how humans and foreign species can coexist meaningfully. Then, she finds her answer from a video project created by Chang En-man from Taiwan. The artist’s video shows how a Taiwanese tribe uses foreign species in traditional dishes and accepts the rejuvenation that the species provides to their lives. Jang provides a positive take on the relationship between predators and preys from the perspective of an ecosystem that tries to always maintain homeostasis.

Any group, Heart of the city, complex media, variable size, 2021

Opposite from Jang’s project, you can see Heart of the city created by the artist team Any group. The plastic sheets and chairs are placed in front of a screen showing a performance video. Here, the objects create a somewhat derelict and empty atmosphere, with the latter element being related to the content of the performance video. The black and white video begins with a man’s narration and an unfinished building. The man returns home after a long time, only to find out that he cannot find the key to the house, which he had buried in an empty lot because a building has been erected there. At a loss, the man makes a series of phone calls to resolve the issue. However, he has no way to authenticate himself as his ID is in the house. He can’t even remember the address of the house. It seems that he is doomed to become homeless. The fictional story is an invitation to think about those who fell behind the coming of new environments who live in an inevitable or voluntary state of isolation and exclusion.

Yunjae Lee, Only True Voyage – part.2, composite media, variable size, 2021

The last stop of our exhibition tour is Only True Voyage – part.2 by Yunjae Lee. A pair of monitors and another pair of large screens show abstract images of light moving slightly, coming from cars driving on roads. The six videos look similar, but a closer examination reveals their differences. The artist had to wear glasses since he was young. In 2018, while walking along a road without glasses, he felt the lights from the cars moving on a flat plane. He shared this special experience with a friend and realized how different persons perceive the same object in slightly different ways. Since then, the artist has studied eyes and worked on projects related to visual senses. During the residency program, he created camera lens filters shaped like human corneas, which he used to record videos of the same type. The resulting videos show us how people with different corneal shapes visually experience the world in their unique ways. They also remind viewers of the need to accept and understand others and their differences.

Research Materials of KAIST Researchers

In the middle of the exhibition hall, you can look at the research materials used by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers participating in the program to see how they are related to the featured works. Their research projects include Rewilding - Experiment for the Future of the Anthropocene (Myungae Choi), No Breath to Breathe Alone: Science to Endure the Air Crisis (Jeon Ji-hyeong), and Anthropocene and Survival Architecture: Postwar Japanese Architecture and Disasters (Hyunjeong Cho). You can find more about them by accessing the videos from the Online Research Show held on November 27 and 28, 2021 with the artists and the researchers.