Sojung Jun, Green Screen

Few landscapes embody the contradictions of the twentieth century more completely than the Korean Demilitarized Zone. Created in the aftermath of war, fortified through decades of political division and largely inaccessible to human life, the DMZ stands as one of the most heavily militarised borders on earth. Yet within this scar of history, nature has quietly reclaimed its ground. Over seventy years of absence have transformed a landscape of conflict into an accidental sanctuary, where endangered species flourish across a territory suspended between two nations, two political systems and two competing visions of modernity.

For her CIRCA commission, Seoul-based artist Sojung Jun approaches this extraordinary territory not simply as a geopolitical boundary but as a site where multiple temporalities coexist. History, memory, ecology and imagination intersect within a landscape that remains unresolved. Rather than documenting division, Jun asks what forms of life, thought and possibility emerge in the spaces that division produces.

Broadcast across London, Seoul and Tokyo, the exhibition brings together two major works separated by six years: Green Screen (2021) and Early Arrival of Future (2015). Together they form a meditation on borders, not only as physical structures but as psychological, cultural and temporal conditions. Both works are concerned with what exists between fixed positions. Between past and future. Between memory and aspiration. Between separation and coexistence.

At the centre of the exhibition is Green Screen, filmed along the edge of the Korean Demilitarized Zone shortly before its presentation. Drawing inspiration from Mongyudowondo (Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land), the celebrated fifteenth-century painting depicting a prince’s dream of an ideal landscape, Jun transforms the DMZ into a contemporary site of projection. Through shifting perspectives, digital distortions and luminous passages of colour, the work moves between documentary observation and dreamlike speculation. The border appears simultaneously real and unreal, tangible and imagined. What emerges is not a portrait of a fixed territory but a vision of a landscape in constant negotiation with history.

The title itself is significant. A green screen is traditionally a surface onto which alternative realities can be projected. In Jun’s hands, the DMZ becomes precisely such a space: a screen for competing narratives, unresolved futures and collective desires. The work asks whether a place historically defined by separation might also contain the conditions for imagining new forms of connection. Nature becomes central to this proposition. Unconcerned with ideology, wildlife has crossed boundaries that humans continue to enforce. Ecological systems operate according to principles of interdependence rather than division, offering a quiet counterpoint to decades of political deadlock.

If Green Screen explores the landscape of division, Early Arrival of Future considers its human dimensions. Presented as a special screening during the month, the work stages a collaboration between North Korean pianist Kim Cheol-woong and South Korean pianist Uhm Eun-kyung. Through music, the artists enter a dialogue shaped by histories they did not choose but nevertheless inhabit. Their performance unfolds as an act of negotiation, where harmony and dissonance exist side by side.

The title derives from a phrase used by North Korean defectors living in the South to describe reunification. It is a striking formulation. The future is imagined not as a destination but as something that occasionally appears in advance of itself, arriving momentarily before disappearing again. Embedded within the phrase is both hope and uncertainty. Reunification remains imaginable, yet perpetually deferred. The future exists, but remains difficult to reach.

Throughout her practice, Jun has been drawn to individuals and places that occupy thresholds. Her work resists linear narratives in favour of layered experiences where personal histories, collective memories and political realities overlap. Here, the Korean peninsula becomes both a specific geography and a broader metaphor for contemporary life, where inherited divisions continue to shape the present even as new possibilities emerge.

Presented at a moment when political, social and ideological fractures continue to define global discourse, these works remind us that borders are never simply lines on a map. They are lived realities that shape perception, identity and imagination. Yet they are also provisional. By moving between documentary observation and speculative vision, Sojung Jun reveals how art can inhabit spaces that politics often cannot. Rather than offering solutions, she creates temporary conditions for reflection, asking us to consider what forms of coexistence might become possible when we learn to see beyond the boundaries that history has imposed.

In this sense, the exhibition is not only about Korea. It is about the persistence of hope within divided worlds. It is about the possibility that landscapes marked by conflict might one day become landscapes of encounter. And it is about the role of artistic imagination in making futures visible before they arrive.

Sojung Jun is a South Korean artist whose films, installations and research-based works explore the relationships between history, memory, language and political boundaries. Through a practice that moves between documentary, fiction and poetic speculation, she examines how individual experiences become entangled with larger social and historical forces, creating works that challenge linear understandings of time and place.

Born in Busan and based in Seoul, Jun studied sculpture before expanding her practice through moving image, writing and installation. Her work frequently focuses on people and places situated at the edges of dominant narratives, drawing attention to overlooked voices, fragmented histories and the invisible structures that shape everyday life. Combining interviews, archival research, performance and storytelling, she creates layered works that weave together personal memories and collective experiences, often exploring how political realities are lived through the body and transmitted across generations.

In 2021, Jun collaborated with CIRCA on Green Screen, a major public commission presented in partnership with the Seoul Museum of Art and the Korean Cultural Centre UK. Broadcast across public screens in London, Seoul and Tokyo, the project explored the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as both a site of division and an unexpected ecological sanctuary. Filmed along the border separating North and South Korea, Green Screen proposed a dreamlike vision of coexistence and reunification, drawing inspiration from Korean art history to imagine futures beyond geopolitical conflict. Accompanying the commission was a presentation of Jun’s landmark work Early Arrival of Future, a musical collaboration between North and South Korean pianists that reflected on the possibility of reconciliation through artistic exchange.

Widely recognised as one of the leading voices in contemporary Korean art, Jun is the recipient of the Hermès Foundation Missulsang, awarded to some of Korea’s most promising artists. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is celebrated for its ability to connect intimate human experiences with broader questions of history, ideology and collective memory.

Through a practice grounded in empathy, imagination and careful observation, Sojung Jun creates spaces where past and future, reality and possibility, can briefly coexist, inviting audiences to reconsider the boundaries that define both places and people.