As a cultural form, Minjoong Art used images that were produced collectively and instantaneously to expose the contours of reality and enact demonstrations of change. Comrades, friends, lovers, family, and neighbors threw themselves all too willingly into manifesting that particular type of image, their collective existence itself a testament of revolutionary potential. They were more a keenly practical fiction than replica of actuality. On the other hand, to become image at our juncture of history is to be subject to coding and informatization and thereby transform into the paltry object of surveillance and identification. When representation itself threatens life, humankind metamorphoses and eliminates and regenerates. In this moment, we find ourselves unable to envision precise faces. We are mere exigent spectators to the emotions and actions of “fury, exposure, elevation, proliferation, and congregation” which our Internet-based culture has thrown into such stark relief. People, the Next People consequently attempts to come to terms with the legacy of 1980s Minjoong Art from current perspectives on the relationship between image and reality. At the same time, the work interrogates the possibility of digital environments - our most influential cultural wellspring - fueling the eventual revelation of the paradoxes behind a world that cannot be shared. Within such a venture, the young performer, both digital native and constituent of the future generation, sings the song of old anew and placidly carries out shamanistic rituals of his own. Any new shift in culture has its roots in the most secular forms, at the fore or on the heels of which will emerge our ensuing faces. (Courtesy of the artist)
