Abstract

This paper deals with Dalo Hyunjoo Kim and Kwanghee Cho’s project (2019-2022) at Ppeppeorl, Euijeongbu City, where Camp Stanley existed over the last seven decades until 2017. The emphasis will be placed on the heterogeneous nature of Ppeppeorl in light of what Marianne Hirsch has described as the ambivalent historical experience of post-memory generation artists. As Hirsch and Aleksandra Szczepan, the author of “Landscapes of Postmemory” (2016), have concurred that the places after traumatic historical events often bear conflicting references to past and present or the tragic and the ordinary. While traditional ways of remembering tragedy evolve by displaying historical materials in museums or building memorials on sites, I argue that Kim and Cho’s ‘mourning practice’ stays away from defining the history of the Ppeppeorl solely based on its traumatic past. By closely examining Kim and Cho’s participatory project of Dear My Today (2021) and their media installation Ppeppeorl: The Montage of Time and Space (2022), I will highlight the fractured and skewed images of digital photomontages and media installation of Ppeppeorl’s main street—as a means of ironically representing the distinctive historical condition of the postmemory generation on the one hand and the obscured presence of the people who used to occupy small studio rooms, called Jjockbang on the other. At Jjockbang, female sex workers for American soldiers had lived and worked during the heydays of Camp Stanley. This paper, thus, aims at mediating upon the role of postmemory generation artists who explore the discordant yet dynamic relationship between the past and present, remembrance and forgetting—while working with the community, place, and memories.