This ongoing project, "How Green Was My Valley," is a cityscape observation work about Seoul, where I was born and grown-up.
Seoul, the capital of South Korea since the 14th century, has undergone chaotic modernization through historical vicissitudes like colonization, war, dictatorship, military regime, democratic revolution, and urbanization. The city's identity has never been defined by one word clearly but fragmented; Chaotic, dynamic, competitive, oppressive, isolated, and so on.
This body of work is an eloquent study of remains; an elegy for traces, emptiness, memories, beauties out of destructed and abandoned places, lives that once existed.
This ongoing project is also a political and social geography study of the metropolis, a requiem for urban milieu, urbanization, destructive development, conflicts, and chaos that keep feeding the city.
These two pillars, two narrative streams collide and intermix with each other, seeking an answer to a question: Who changes the city's change for whom and for what? Then who has the authority to deal with the life of the town and lives in it?