Minjun Shin
About
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Online exhibition, forum and publication
2022
Orginized - Seongbuk District Office, Seongbuk Foundation for Art&Culture, Seongbuk Cultural City Centre, Korean Artist Welfare Foundation
Sponsored - Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism
Credit
Exhibition
Curatorial: Minjun Shin
Artist: Suhwa Kim, Daeun Kim, Minjun Shin, Serin Oh
Morderator: Huiwang, Bori, Cola
Interview: Jaemini Kim, Taehyun Kwon, Kiryung Nam, Sunho Park, Yunmi Jang, Kihwang Jung, Jieun Joe
Public Debate
Host: Jangho Ha
Presenter: Yoojung Jang, Minjun Shin
Pannel: Eunbi Kwon, Youngbong Yoo, Kihwang Jung
Design
Booklet Editing: Daeun Kim
Desgin&Print: Hill & Villi Co-op
Minjun Shin (Artist, Cultural Activist)
In earlier times, art approached collective memory through monuments and epics, seeking to reinforce social homogeneity. Contemporary art, however, tends to privilege diversity over uniformity—at times deliberately exposing the conflicts and hidden scars within communities, aiming to provoke reflection rather than cohesion. From this perspective, art becomes a practice of uncovering the unrecorded micro-histories that exist beyond officially sanctioned narratives, and of sensorially evoking discord and inequality within a community.
The neighborhoods of Gireum-dong and Hawolgok-dong—once known as “Outside the Dongso Gate”—were historically settlements for the urban poor and, over time, became the site of Mia-ri Texas, a red-light district that emerged as part of Korea’s turbulent modern history. The transformation of this landscape began with the city’s expansion and redevelopment. In the early 2000s, the Gireum New Town project turned Seoul’s so-called “original hillside slum” into a large-scale apartment complex, bringing new residents into conflict with long-term locals who had worked or lived in the area’s sex trade zone. However, with the Seoul Urban Master Plan 2030 and the Seoul Light Rail Dongbuk Line Project, these traces of the past are soon to be erased through another wave of redevelopment.
Redevelopment, also erases the memory of a place, replacing its particularities with a homogenized landscape. Before this erasure occurs, our aim was to remember this area and to explore what such an act of remembrance might awaken within our broader community—not to fossilize the past, but to raise questions through sensation, through art, about life in a society increasingly marked by antagonism and dissonance.
2021: A Sort of Preliminary Research Phase
This project originated in 2021 through the Arts in Community Residency Program, a public art initiative. MTS, which operates the art space SAGA in Samyang-dong, Seongbuk-gu, proposed an artistic investigation into the complex interests surrounding illegal sex trade venues along Samyang-ro. Starting from questions about the meaning of community and publicness amid urban regeneration and the survival struggles of those dependent on these establishments, the project sought to explore these tensions through a public art approach.
Through the program’s matching process, artists Da-eun Kim, Su-hwa Kim, Minjun Shin, Serin Oh, and Yoon-mi Jang came together. They began by researching books, academic papers, magazine articles, and interviews related to Mia-ri Texas and the adjacent Samyang-ro district. While united by the same premise of engaging with local issues, each artist developed distinct methods and focal points—ranging from modern history and urban topography to feminist discourse, public art, and documentary practice. The research unfolded through diverse methodologies including literature reviews, fieldwork, and interviews. If the overarching theme of the project served as a general theory, the artists’ individual inquiries could be understood as the particular theses that together composed it.
Daeun Kim, initially approaching from an architectural and urban studies perspective, traced the chronological transformation of the Mia-ri area. She examined how the district’s public image was constructed through media discourse—academic papers, archives, and news texts—revealing how external narratives have historically shaped its identity.
Suhwa Kim conducted fieldwork and discovered that the area was again slated for redevelopment. This realization led her to explore Marc Augé’s concept of place and non-place, recognizing how megacities are increasingly rendered non-places through urban planning.
Her research gathered visual traces from the Mia-ri Texas zone where place and non-place coexist in a state of transition.
Minjun Shin, drawing on his long-standing engagement with the relationship between art and the public sphere, expanded the theme of “public art approaches to local conflict surrounding brothels” into broader research on sex work, feminism, publicness, documentary, and the archive. He examined meeting minutes from local councils related to Mia-ri Texas and conducted interviews with residents, administrators, and politicians, investigating how public discourse operates in real social contexts.
Yoonmi Jang, as a documentarist, focused on those excluded by urban redevelopment—urban refugees and sex workers. She sought to move beyond stereotypical or binary representations imposed by media and social structure, conducting on-site interviews centered on the micro-histories of local residents to trace the layered history and present of Mia-ri.
Serin Oh, during her fieldwork, became interested in the “No Entry for Minors” signs that mark the boundaries of Mia-ri Texas. Seeing these signs as paradoxical guides that publicly announce what is officially forbidden, her research questioned the community’s binary moral codes through these “official” fourteen signs.
Despite these efforts, the 2021 research did not yet culminate in concrete artistic production.
Several factors contributed to this:
(1) The participating artists were temporarily involved and not embedded in the local community;
(2) Many were unfamiliar with art practices grounded in locality;
(3) The issues surrounding Mia-ri Texas—ranging from feminist debates to real estate interests—were highly contentious, making visible artistic engagement difficult;
(4) The horizontal structure of the residency lacked a central curatorial leadership to synthesize outcomes.
Given these conditions, six months proved too short for artists who had never previously met to overcome such challenges and produce finished work.
2022: Artistic Research and Practice on Spaces of Development and Renewal
After the completion of the Yesulro Programme, the participating artists continued their relationship through a community study group supported by various cultural institutions under the theme of “Art and the Public.” Feeling a sense of incompletion from the 2021 project, the artists proposed to the Seongbuk Cultural Foundation—which had previously participated in their interviews—to further develop the research into a new collaborative project. The proposal was accepted, and the project was reorganized as a joint initiative between the Foundation and the artists, positioned both as a continuation of the Yesulro programme and as part of the “Cultural City of Seongbuk” initiative.
The 2022 phase used the research from 2021 as its foundation. The artists shared their findings, developed tangible artistic outputs, and designed a project capable of stimulating public dialogue within the community. The theme also evolved—from “a public art approach to local conflicts arising from illegal sex trade establishments” to “artistic research and practice on spaces of development and renewal.” This shift reflected their deepened awareness of the area’s ongoing redevelopment issues.
Due to personal circumstances, filmmaker Jang Yoon-mi and artist Oh Serin, who had participated in 2021, were unable to remain fully involved. However, their connection to the project persisted through indirect participation, such as interviews and roundtable dialogues.
Daeun Kim moved beyond a positivist understanding of history as a neutral transmission of “truth.” Drawing on Michel Foucault’s structuralist historiography—which regards history as a product of selective approval—she collected documents and texts excluded or emphasized by structures of validation. Using archival art methodologies such as appropriation, editing, and reconfiguration, she created a web-based work that randomly generates sentences describing Mia-ri Texas. Through this process, she sought to virtually subvert the social framework that had defined the area as a “displaced, excluded space—a place to be beautified or erased.”
Suhwa Kim focused on Marc Augé’s concept of the non-place while grounding her work in bodily sensation, a central element of her artistic language. Through fieldwork in the Gireum–Mia-ri Texas area, she perceived how redevelopment transforms spaces of memory and context into non-places—sites where only signifiers remain after identity, history, and relations disappear. Unlike conventional community archives that record individual micro-histories, she documented the area through its sensorial qualities—landscape, smell, and tactile impressions—creating a video work that captures the embodied perception of a disappearing place.
Minjun Shin continued his critical inquiry into the relationship between art and the public, and between society and art. Rejecting a purely object-based notion of the artwork, he employed the documentary medium as a means to pursue social effect. Unlike traditional documentaries that follow linear, explanatory narratives centered on social critique, Shin created a film that connects his personal experiences of class and exclusion with the landscape of Mia-ri Texas. Through this, he explored the scars formed where social structures intersect with individual lives.
As the works neared completion, the team organized activities to foster public discussion around their research. Recognizing the tendency of archival or site-specific community art projects to become formulaic—especially within the policy framework of “Cultural Cities”—they initiated critical conversations about alternative directions. Artists, curators, critics, and researchers were invited to a series of dialogues under the shared keywords of city, art, and archive.
Following these exchanges, the materials and discussions were compiled, leading to a roundtable event titled “Seongbuk DocuMenta Public Forum: Why Do We Record the Local through Art?” At the forum, Minjun Shin presented the overall process and outcomes of the project, making the activities—until then somewhat opaque—visible to the local community. Yoo-jung Jang, curator of the Seongbuk Museum of Art and a lead figure in previous Seongbuk DocuMenta projects, reflected on the project’s origins, progress, and remaining challenges, emphasizing its significance as a local archival practice. The discussion also featured theatre director Young-bong Yoo, researcher Ki-hwang Jeong—who studies urban issues through practice-based research—and artist Eun-bi Kwon, who curated the public art forum “May I Erase This Mural?” in Yeongdo Cultural City. Together, they engaged in an open conversation about the meaning of archival art, the relationship between art and the city, and the intersections between recording, art, public dialogue, and the public sphere. The discussions were later documented and published in the project’s accompanying book.