Seunghan Paek

This article explores the aesthetic dimension of contemporary South Korean urbanism by reading suspended judgment and formal analysis, which could generate a new way of seeing the city. Suspended judgment means ways of relating oneself to given situations without being preoccupied with prior knowledge or conventions, thereby prompting an openness towards the external world. With the claim that such a concept is crucial in rereading the historiographies of 20th-century architecture and urbanism, this paper aims to conduct the following. The first is to critically review Aron Vinegar’s I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (2008), which entails an in-depth analysis of Learning from Las Vegas (1972), the classic text on postmodern architecture. And, the second is to expand Vinegar’s book in the context of Korean urbanism to conduct a case study on Choi Jeong Hwa’s 2006 installation entitled Anybody, Anything, Anyway. It is a work the artist installed a number of discarded commercial banners in the Arco Art Center (1979) designed by Kim Swoo-geun. This article claims that, despite the authenticity inherent in Kim’s architectural work, the installation prompts an urban atmosphere that is at once familiar and idiosyncratic in positive senses. It also brings forth a sense of community that is fragmentary and ephemeral, as well as one that mediates given aesthetic criteria and thus releases an assemblage in which both private affects and public discourses coexist.

This paper proposes a new model of urbanism which is not limited to what I call ‘environmental moralism,’ through which to investigate some of the key debates around the ongoing plan of the Gadeokdo Island and its Anthropocenic implications. In doing so, I will focus on discussing the following two. The first is to explore two strands of architectural and urban studies in relationship with the Anthropocene. This includes a recent movement known as ‘climate urbanism’, and its corresponding trends in architecture such as sustainable architecture, biophilic design, and some individual works which refashion the spirits of the 1960s’ environmental avant-garde. Second is a critique of the Anthropocene beyond moralism, which entails the works of Donna Haraway who explores ways of living together with environmentally troubled situations, Gay Hawkins who pays attention to making relationship with plastic as a new material, and Mick Smith and Jason Young’s claim of ‘earthly indifference’ which reconsiders Earth as a nonhuman agent beyond its moralistic and religious force. This theoretical overview brings forth an opportunity to examine the new airport plan for the Gadeokdo in new lights. By examining the debate between developmentalism and environmentalism around the ongoing mega-project, I argue that both camps have limitations in dealing with the ineffable aspects of the island, as well as its entanglement encompassing both human and nonhuman agents as discussed in the Anthropocene literatures.

This paper provides an overview of the work of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, often abbreviated as ds+r. It aims to explore the intricate relationship between ‘the politics of seeing’ and ‘the democratization of space’, which are two fundamental concepts embodying the firm's design philosophy. The politics of seeing reflects its focus on activating architecture by assembling various elements such as materials, ideas, images, and experiential dimensions. This approach challenges existing criteria and promotes institutional critique. On the other hand, the democratization of space, as articulated by Elizabeth Diller, addresses the architect's role in the neoliberal context. The firm's projects, characterized by their public engagement, including parks, lobbies, and squares, demonstrate their ongoing commitments to making architecture accessible to the public. While these two agendas may seem interconnected, this paper argues that this is not always the case. Some recent projects, such as The MoMA Renovation and The Shed, aim to achieve both dimensions but tend to lean towards conservatism or practicality. As a result, the criticality that was prevalent in their earlier works before 2000 is sometimes compromised in
ways that are not fully able to release their intricate capacities of mediating the neoliberal world.

In this paper, I analyze the installation piece entitled Spring that Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen made in 2006 which is located at the starting point of the Cheonggye Stream, through which to explore the possibility of enacting the politics of things. While the work reflects Oldenburg’s style which provokes exaggeration, humor, and a sense of the extraordinary, it brought forth a number of criticisms due to the fact that it is not tightly woven together with its site and thus remains a cliched landmark. Attentive to such aspects, I question if such criticisms about the work could be sustainable in proposing an alternative politics, and if refashioning Oldenburg’s early experimental works before his commitment into large-scale installation could suggest new perspectives and ways of doing in speculating about the political in the present tense. In order to answer to these questions, I aim to conduct three units of research. First is to examine Oldenburg’s work in the 1960s in which he mediated the streams of contemporary art such as installation, performance, and pop art. During this period, he focused on expressing his critical perceptions about the lives of the metropolis such as New York and London with humor and exaggeration. Second is about the process in which Oldenburg met van Bruggen and Frank Gehry and then tried to expand his ideas about the relationship of object and monument. As Oldenburg already suggested various versions of large-scale monument through a number of sketches, encountering with those two colleagues worked as crucial opportunities to materialize his ideas in public space. However, it seems that such a process deprived Oldenburg of the politically radical attitude that he once had and rather made him focus on objects that look depoliticized. With such a transition in mind, in the last part of the investigation I will read Bruno Latour’s concept called Dingpolitik. His concept aspires to search for an alternative form of politics by proposing an assembly made by both human and nonhuman actors. By activating Dingpolitik in rereading Oldenbrug and van Bruggen, I aim to explore the present value of their work which is not limited to the artists and their thoughts, thereby embracing the dispersed and heterogeneous nature of things being assembled from the scratch.

The objective of this study is to explore the concept of flagship stores, focusing on what is deemed the affective brandscape. These flagship stores stand apart from regular retail stores by emphasizing the experience economy as a pivotal factor. Instead of merely being landmarks, these stores introduce fresh ways of experiencing commerce, blurring the distinctions between local and global, original and symbolic, and authentic and artificial. This blending of elements often referred to as hybrid or hyphenated designs, serves as a means to convey brand identity. To comprehensively understand how flagship stores function and engage potential customers, it is essential to examine how companies combine diverse elements related to the physical and intangible aspects of a store, including its location, ambiance, and historical context. These hybrid commercial models prompt an exploration of how flagship stores are intricately woven together, creating combinations that are both distancing and emotionally impactful. Through case studies, including a detailed analysis of the 2002 OMA-designed Prada Epicenter, this study also compares and analyzes four selected flagship stores of the globally popular cosmetic brand Aesop. This study aims to uncover how disparate elements are harmonized to create a branded world that extends both physically and conceptually beyond the store itself.

In this article, I explore the intersections of the Anthropocene, animal studies, and visual culture through the investigation of theories and case studies of the cat. I aim to implement a claim that looks at the relationship between Stanley Cavell’s other minds, Graham Harman’s object, and Eileen Crist’s representation. First, Cavell’s other minds explores philosophical skepticism and the ordinary via the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is then put into conversation with Jacques Derrida’s speculation about cats’ gaze, and Donna Haraway’s criticism of Derrida. Second, the concept of object originates from Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology. It acts as a critical perspective to overview Haraway who focuses on the symmetrical relationship between human and nonhuman agents, as well as offering an opportunity to rethink issues of making relationships and communicating with the cat, which accompanies perception and sensation in a broader spectrum. Third, as a way to connect the notion of representation with Harman’s object, which is about imperfect knowledge of the object being encountered and remainders with which one cannot fully communicate, I will review Eileen Crist’s animal studies that cut across ecology and ethology, and the skepticisms of Cavell and Wittgenstein. If a cat does not know the fact that it is being drawn or photographed, how would one be able to claim that people and their cats are attuned to and communicate with each other? Rather, would one need a more rigorous way of investigation based on scientific understandings and facts? By critically reviewing the scientific approaches which ethology inspires, this article explores cats as other minds articulated through ordinary language and the object. In doing so, I will focus on analyzing the following two cases: a series called magazine tac that highlight discussions of various aspects of the cat, and The Moving Dunchon Cat, which deals with cats’ migration caused by the redevelopment of the Dunchon Jugong Apartment Complex.

This paper explores Learning from Las Vegas, the classic text of architecture and postmodernism written by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown first published in 1972, through Scott Lash notion of technological phenomenology. Lash claims that technology is not so much an externalized apparatus but rather a form of life in the sense of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy called language game. Inspired by Lash’s theories of technology and experience, this study argues that Venturi and Scott Brown’s book illustrated ways in which one experiences the city with various technologies such as the automobile, billboard, neon sign, photography, and street map. In elaborating the argument, this study defines the term technological phenomenology with the articulation of two strands of experience known as erfahrung and erlebnis; thereby addressing how these two concepts coexist in today’s information-saturated society. Additionally, this study takes Learning from Las Vegas as a threshold to investigate the relationship between the diverse forms of technology and experience to explore how the city is experienced in generative modes of perception and sensibility. Lastly, Neil Leach’s recent studies of architecture and artificial intelligence (AI) are read against the grain. Leach addresses a flexible notion of technology on one hand, which is however in part formed based on the dualism between technology and experience. By reading how Leach elaborates theories of technology with some of his examples, this study can glean from Learning from Las Vegas without heavily relying on either classic ontology or technological determinism.

This article analyzes Maya Lin’s “last memorial” project entitled Ghost Forest (2021), through which to explore how one can make relationships and “stay” with the climate crisis without supposing smooth and immediate resolutions of the Anthropocene. As the most recent work in the What is Missing? project, Ghost Forest consists of 49 dead cedars moved from New Jersey to Madison Square Park in Manhattan for around six months. Lin installed the trees in a busy public park, and thus generated an irony that people come across so-called ‘corpses’ as part of daily life, whether they are conscious of it or not. Meanwhile, Lin also conceives her project in terms of a linear temporality and causal relationship regarding climate change, which is conflicted with her speculative approach toward trees. The fact that Ghost Forest is rationally driven but also deeply affective is not easily resolved in her work. In order to rethink such a conflict, this article takes Donna Haraway’s claim of “staying with the trouble” as a threshold, thereby highlighting the instances of partial recovery and speculative practices with trees that are inherent in the work but not further articulated by the artist.

This article explores a new model of urban practice that is not limited by environmental moralism by investigating theories of plastic, which is today’s prevailing environmental problem and also a ubiquitous strata of everyday life. In doing so, it investigates the following two things. The first is to speculate about the ontological dimensions of plastic. Often thrown away after a single use and thrown into the ocean in the form of microplastics, plastic is rubbish and also a toxic material influencing climate change on a global level. It is both a problematic material and an object to overcome. However, such an objectification is a result that does not pay enough attention to its ubiquity. By considering plastic as a crucial form of life, this article pays close attention to its ontological dimensions. The second thing is to examine “assemblage urbanism” as a new form of urban model that could be further explored in relation to the plastic ontology. Assemblage urbanism brings Gilles Deleuze’s notion of assemblage into urban discourses, thereby trying to rethink the conventional theories of the city, represented by its counterpart known as “critical urbanism” that highlights an analytical approach. This article examines the debate between those two camps, which appeared in serial issues of the journal City in 2011, as well as paying attention to the weak points of assemblage urbanism. What this article derives through the investigation is a theory called “plastic urbanism,” a new form of urban practice that is not subjugated by the Anthropocene as a grand narrative, but offers a microscopic and diagrammatic model of the city.

In this article, I claim that everyday encounters with the strata of digital culture may evoke a sense of wonder and anticipation but also give rise to instances of hesitation and uncertainty, which places the individual on rough terrain where he or she stumbles around painfully seeking a firm ground. In examining these types of experiences, I analyze four videos made by artist Kang Jungsuck (1984–). What is interesting in Kang’s work is that he neither defends nor naively embraces the pervasive character of digital culture. The videos reveal the ways in which he mediates everyday life as a digitalized realm, capturing its euphoric and fascinating atmosphere as well as its pessimistic and lethargic moods. Kang’s works open up an inflected world where forces and rhythms of the post-internet generate various forms of life. The constant back- and-forth movements between the digital and the ordinary and their stuttering audiovisual qualities reflect his hesitant mind, which seeks neither to completely negate nor passively acknowledge the inescapable character of the digitalized world.

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In this article, I claim that the issue of the ordinary/everyday cannot simply come to a conclusion, because one’s way of encountering the surrounding world always produces differences, which is most often entangled with his/her ever-shifting perceptual and affective resonances that exist beyond imposed representations and are left autonomous. The term ‘ordinary/everyday’ has been one of the contending issues in architectural studies, in which it is often used in reference to the Marxist critiques that emphasize the spectacular and alienating conditions of the city in the postwar capitalist society. However, the everyday is a more complex phenomenon in which one is at once skeptical and receptive, resonating with the myriad affective and perceptive instances in aleatory but consistent ways. In this respect, this article investigates how the seemingly chaotic cityscapes might actually be the terrain where meaning unfolds. In doing so, I take Aron Vinegar’s book entitled I am a Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (2008) as a threshold to explore the multiplicity of the everyday in contemporary South Korean cities. Vinegar’s book is not a simple review of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’ book on Las Vegas originally published in 1972. Instead, it offers an opportunity to rethink the implications of the ordinary in commercial environments with new lights. What follows is a case study of a roadside commercial building located in the Sinchon commercial district of Seoul, which this article refers to as ‘Seodaemun-gu Changcheon-dong 33-9 Building’ according to its administrative address. By analyzing the building that represents a typical keunseng typology in urban Korea, the article explores how one resonates oneself with the commercially saturated field of everyday life that is at once spectacular and ordinary, rule-following and deviant, and alienating but still sense-provoking.

(co-authored with Dai Whan An, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Chungbuk National University, Korea)

This article explores the changing values of heritage in an era saturated by an excess of media coverage in various settings and also threatened by either natural or manmade disasters that constantly take place around the world. In doing so, we focus on discussing one specific case: the debate surrounding the identification of Sungnyemun as the number one national treasure in South Korea. Sungnyemun, which was first constructed in 1396 as the south gate of the walled city Seoul, is the country’s most acknowledged cultural heritage that is supposed to represent the national identity in the most authentic way, but its value was suddenly questioned through a nationwide debate after an unexpected fire. While the debate has been silenced after its ostensibly successful restoration conducted by the Cultural Heritage Administration in 2013, this article argues that the incident is a prime example illustrating how the once venerated heritage is reassembled through an entanglement of various agents and their affective engagements. Methodologically speaking, this article aims to read Sungnyemun in reference to the growing scholarship of actor-network theory (ANT) and the studies of heritage in the post-disaster era through which to explore what heritage means to us at the present time. Our synchronic approach to Sungnyemun encourages us to investigate how the once-stable monument becomes a field where material interventions and affective engagements of various agents release its public meanings in new ways.

By examining the architectural debate set off by Xi Jinping’s 2014 remark, “no more weird architecture,” the article explores contemporary Chinese architecture – which has been marked by the coexistence of discipline and expression, order and disorder, ordinary and spectacle – through the notion of weirdness. It analyzes a series of debates on one particular project: the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing designed by Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Its idiosyncratic form, consisting of two towers standing at an askew angle, has drawn significant criticisms since its inception. The Municipal Government of Beijing had allowed foreign architects to pursue highly experimental designs in preparation for the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games. Meanwhile, the debates are not unrelated to the practice of contextualism and regionalism in Chinese architecture which, since the 1980s, has been aspiring to explore a “true” architectural identity fitting local needs and everyday lifestyles. This article claims that those debates rely on a set of clichéd binaries of weird and unweird, and regional and global. By challenging such binaries, as well as questioning whether it is ever possible to pursue ‘unweird’ architecture, the article contends that the strata of architecture, visual culture, and cityscapes in contemporary China have been shaped with tensions and dissensuses.

This article aims to explore the ontological dimension of urban experience that is most often exploded by a plethora of neon signs through the lens of new materialisms. What follows is an in-depth analysis of the online exhibition called <neonsigns.hk>, which is run by the M+ Museum located in Hong Kong. New materialisms is an interdisciplinary strand of research that investigates the world where we live, in which both material and immaterial aspects are complexly entangled. Instead of relying on a set of strict binaries between material and immaterial, human and non-human, nature and artifice, reality and virtuality, and figure and ground, new materialisms pays attention to their mode of coexistence and imbrications. According to new materialisms,  neon sign is considered not only a means of advertising but also a threshold enabling us to look at the phenomenological dimension of the city. While neon sign has most often been criticized due to its visually distracting and flickering qualities especially during the nighttime, this article highlights that such urban strata evoke the past urban memories and senses of nostalgia, although fragmentary and temporary due to its unstable but dynamic materiality.

This paper aims to explore the spectacular forms of life in the digital environments and their ontological dimensions, by calling such conditions as ‘an ethics of flatness.’ What follows is an in-depth analysis of the Japanese experimental art collective known as teamLab (2001-current), which can be subdivided into three stages. The first is a survey of teamLab’s art historical contexts. teamLab represents a generation that has undergone a series of events which include the economic rise and downfall of the postwar Japan, and natural/social disasters such as earthquakes and the subway gas attack in the 1990s. Second, by analyzing the select works of teamLab made in the last ten years, this paper claims that their work prompts an unstable sense of community. Third, this paper proposes a theoretical framework with which to explore a world of flatness without being subjugated by its negative connotations. Bringing forth such a framework accompanies the following set of discourses: the concept of body raised by Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, a new materialist approach to the world of experience by John Frow and Yuk Hui, and theories of the spectacle raised by Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Luc Nancy that read the Debordian idea against the grain.

This article explores how philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the fold is extended to architectural design, and how such an extension prompts ‘event’ in both the conceptual and realistic senses. In doing so, this article conducts two case studies: 1) the Rebstockpark Master Plan (1990-1991), and 2) The Aronoff Center for Design and Art (1988-1996). These two projects have similarities in that both were influenced by a Deleuzian theory of the fold in one way or another, which highlights that the world we live in is not so much homogeneous and fixed but rather multiple and in a perpetual process of becoming. While one can detect the influence of Deleuze’s theory in these Eisenman projects, it becomes more prominent in the latter case—the Aronoff—given that it is a built project in which the architect’s design conception provokes a multitude of events through the entanglement of various individuals’ fabrics of everyday life. By looking at both the conception of the fold proposed by Eisenman, and my habitual encountering with his built project where his theory is actively implemented, I claim that the Deleuzian event is not just a spectacular kind prompted by Eisenman himself, but unfolds in more subtle ways.

This article explores the interrelationships between media facade, interactivity, and the public in contemporary Korean cities. A specific case that follows is the comparative approach to British media artist Julian Opie(1958-)’s two works of media facade located in Seoul. First, Opie’s Crowd (2009) is characterized by a visual spectacle unfolding in the city. It appears upon the facade of the Seoul Square, an office located across the Square of the Seoul Station, and activates it as a public sphere that is beyond simple representation. Whereas Opie’s another work Sara Walking in Bra, Pants, and Boots (2003), is located at the center of the Daehangno commercial district, and imbricated with the surroundings in more subtle ways. It is perceived at the level of pedestrians, and experienced not so much as a prominent spectacle but as part of everyday life. By paying attention to differing moments of interaction brought forth by various groups of people’s activities, events, or habitual encounters around Opie’s work, this article claims that one can explore the public (but most often private) nature of media facade by looking at its complex patterns and modes of experience that operate at multiple levels.

This article explores the complex modes of experiencing the modern city that are engaging and disengaging by nature, which thus negates any simple ways of understanding what it means by ‘the urban’ in a Manichean comparison. What follows is an in-depth case study of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 film titled City Slivers. Influenced by the countercultural practices prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, Matta-Clark produced a number of works roughly grouped together under the rubric of “building cuts.” Among many others, City Slivers is distinctive among Matta-Clark’s extensive cutting projects, in the sense that he actively utilizes film as a primary expressive medium and poetically reassembles fragmentary images of cityscape in order to bring forth an alternative urban scenario where the tension between institution-bound urbanization and dispersed daily urban practices is highlighted. Instead of simply being critical against the changing urban conditions of Manhattan in the 1970s, Matta-Clark aims to actively grasp ambivalent instances of urban life that are at once attractive and alienating, thereby excavating the subconscious terrain of contemporary urbanism that is prevalent but often dismissed over glamorous urban projects.

Forthcoming at the journal, Trans-Humanities 11.1 (published by Ewha Womans University) ///

In this article, I take French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussions of the city as a threshold, through which to propose a “singularly plural” model of urbanism that could reflect the complexity and multiplicity of the 21st-century urban environments. In doing so, I pay particular attention to four concepts that are derived from Nancy’s ontological explorations: 1) community; 2) spectacle, 3) everyday life, and 4) the public. Followings are the summaries as to how I articulate each concept in its relationship with urban discourses. First, what Nancy means by the term ‘community’ does not necessarily mean a mode of being together that leads to a complete harmony and stasis. What arise instead are forms of life that enable the modes of being together in given urban settings in fragmentary and non-hierarchical manners. Second, Nancy critically reinterprets Guy Debord’s influential theory of the spectacle, through which he claims that the materialist urban conditions work as a crucial ground where one is able to speculate about and build the sociability and senses of community. Third, in a similar vein, Nancy explores the multiple meanings of the everyday in the capitalist urban world, in particular being attentive to its ‘singularity’ that cannot simply be represented or appropriated by other means of expression. Such a claim of the everyday is based on his critical overview of the scholarship of everyday life, which has long been the subfield of ‘Urban Studies’ in particular schools of thought; furthermore, it urges us to explore the multiplicity of urban life that operates through the entanglement of consumerist behaviors and media-driven practices. Fourth, Nancy’s ontology also encourages us to explore the meaning of the public (or publicness) in broader senses; ordinary experiences of urban infrastructures such as subway, airport, and shopping mall might look trivial in its semantic dimension, but nevertheless bring forth modes of ‘being separate but together’ in a loose sense. Nancy’s discussions of the public also resonate to the phenomenological surveys of ‘place’ in the age of globalization which has been the prominent zeigeist since the 1990s. By taking Nancy’s ontological explorations as a crucial impetus in exploring the ontological possibilities of city space under the overriding moods of globalization and consumer culture, as well as critically reviewing the key urban discourses of the late capitalism that are represented by the theories of ‘alienation’ and ‘commodity fetishism,’ I propose a more resilient model of urbanism.

This study aims to explore the meaning of square in the context of 21st-century urban Korea. A specific case study that follows is the Gwanghwamun Square, a 600-years-long civic space in which aspects of natural and built environments coexist in a palimpsest manner. Based on the in-depth analysis of a single square, which is inarguably the most representative public space in the country, we bring forth three key characteristics of the Square with the following coinages: (1) Physical Feature; (2) Transformative Environment; and (3) Expositional Space. First, the Gwanghwamun Square has established the country’s symbolic axis that cuts across the key locations of the milieu, including Seoul City Hall, Cheonggye Stream, Gyeongbok Palace and the Mount Bukak, as well as having functioned as the main street of the Joseon Dynasty called ‘Yookcho Geori’ since the 15th century. Second, the entire realm of the Square is activated by various practices and events, in a way that it functions as the ‘networked’ square which connects to other milieus and to various agents of power both physically and affectively. Third, through the compearance of new technologies and products that unspecified groups of individuals comes across in daily life, the Gwanghwamun Square provides opportunities for both citizens and visitors to experience new kinds of landscape that are not limited to 'Korean' sceneries in a traditional sense, although our study reveals that the role of Koreans is still more influential than others in defining the identity of the Square. One might argue that the Gwanghwamun Square is an elusive square type compared to other representative ‘Western’ exemplars, but the way that it is formed and experienced in the South Korean urban contexts does make it a distinctive case. Hence, we claim that the Gwanghwamun Square is a new urban typology which reflects the multiplicity of city space in the neoliberal Korea.

This article explores community in contemporary South Korea's commercially saturated urban environments by investigating a recent government-run city improvement project in which the entanglement of institutional power and local commercial forces created a peculiar form of community that is fragmentary and heterogeneous rather than organic and harmonious. The case study involves an attempt by the city government in Gunpo City, South Korea, to collaborate with private enterprise to regulate the dense signage on one specific commercial building, Kwangrim Plaza. The meetings and conversations between the government officials in charge of regulating urban signage and the plaza's forty-five shopkeepers were recorded in a four-part documentary series that was televised on the Seoul Broadcasting System in 2007. The documentary was intended to exemplify the government's effectiveness as well as civic participation in producing an attractive cityscape. Though the film emphasizes reconciliation and synthesis following the shopkeepers' strenuous objections to the renovation project, its scenes reveal a series of conflicts and disagreements among shopkeepers and between shopkeepers and government officials. Though the narrative of the film treats those conflicts as temporary obstacles to the inevitable achievement of this ambitious project, the author argues that interruptions, suspensions, and instances of dissensus in the smooth narrative are the critical moments in which a sense of community manifests itself in everyday urban life.

In this article, I explore ways in which one can make relationships with the commer- cially saturated environments of contemporary Korea in nuanced ways, by taking the term “the Ganpan Republic” (literally, “the signboard republic”) as a threshold. In doing so, this article offers three bodies of work: first, an introduction to the theories of enchantment; second, an analysis of the recent mega-scale urban project called Design Seoul with an emphasis on the ganpan; and third, a comparison of Design Seoul with French artist Manoël Pillard’s nightscape paintings of Seoul. While Pillard, as a non-Korean, pays full attention to the minute details of the signscapes with curiosity and revitalizes them through his painterly practice, Design Seoul strives to remove it from the domain of everyday life, thereby establishing a clutter-free cityscape. Instead of simply taking up the position of either Pillard or Design Seoul, I argue that reading the two together through the notion of enchantment encourages us to be attentive to the multiple sensorial dimensions of the ganpan, thus addressing the nature of the materials that are simultaneously distracting and sense-provoking.

An article to be published at: The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art, June 2017:

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This article explores issues of mood and atmosphere in contemporary
art and architecture through the following two cases: 1) “The 21 –century
Museum of Contemporary Art” (2004) designed by a Japanese architectural firm known as SANAA; and 2) an installation project called “Pour Your Body Out” (2009) made by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist. Both are cases in which the mood, or an atmospheric dimension of everyday space in the contemporary world is activated. However, it is noticeable that each case brings forth mood and atmosphere in different ways. SANAA considers atmosphere (instead of using the term ‘mood’) to be something that can loosely controlled and programmed, also a means to overcome the self-disciplined nature of modern architecture that does not fully respond to the fabrics of everyday life. Meanwhile, Rist’s installation shows how mood arises in improvisational and aleatory ways. In other words, while atmosphere in the 21st–century Museum tends to be reduced as a design element, in Rist’s work it becomes an affective driver that sets out a field in which various participants are passing through each other and entangled together without forming coherent senses of community.

Under the final revision to be published at the Journal of Architectural Institute of Korea (Korean):



This article examines what the term ‘good’ means in the 『Seoul Good Sign』 exhibitions, a vital constituent of the Design Seoul project led by the former city mayor of Seoul Oh Se-hoon. In doing so, it focuses on examining one particular work of sign design titled “Skyflower” (2008), through which to explore ways in which an idea of the good is theorized and practiced in relationship with the recent and ongoing urban design projects initiated by the city ministry. Despite the ministry’s attempts to theorize what it means by ‘good sign,’ accompanied by a set of manifestos and design guidelines, this article argues that the Seoul Good Sign exhibition uses the term in a narrow sense, most often morally charged and in reference to specific models drawn from certain historical times and geographical locations. What is thus proposed is the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness, which addresses an intentionally delayed, reflective psychological process that is attentive to the possibilities that a given object or environment could be perceived in indeterminate thus multiple ways. One’s perception of a given signage is a sort of proposition, which brings forth a set of other propositions in either agreement or disagreement. Thus, the seemingly top-down, linear way of signage design as implemented by the city ministry ultimately operates at the level of intersubjectivity and indeterminacy, which leaves possibilities of looking at the institution-bound urban project in flexible manners.

To be published in the January 2017 Issue at: Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering.

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This article claims that the recent mega-scale urban project Design Seoul is a case illustrating the entanglement of institutional interventions onto everyday city space and varying reactions from individual agents of power. Nominated by two international NGOs—the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) and UNESCO—Design Seoul, which lasted roughly from 2007 to 2011, is the first extensive urban project in the history of Korea. In order to make the project move forward, the ministry of Seoul and groups of specialists from different sectors of society attempted to renew the entire city under a number of guiding principles in the hope of making Seoul a brand city. Despite the dominant views that Design Seoul is considered a pivotal exemplar of a top-down model of power in the urban realm, this article claims that such an ostensibly one-directional project in fact operates through more complex patterns of intervention and public experience, in ways that various agents of power related to the project read given design guidelines and practice them in aleatory and creative ways.

To be published at Journal of Modern Art History, Winter 2016:

This article explores the affectivity of the contemporary city through the analysis of the work of video performance by Korean artist Park June-bum. In doing so, it particulalry focuses on discussing three of his works: <3 Crossing> (2002), <1 Parking> (2001), and <The Advertisement> (2004). These works are characteristic for the oversized hands appearing in video screens, and the dynamic moods and the network of forces generated by the entanglement of ordinary urban fabrics. What these videos mediate are instances of daily cityscapes, which include scenes such as the awaiting and moving of pedestrians and automobiles at crossroads, outdoor parking lots, and a set of billboards and banners that are attached upon commercial buildings. Park considers these seemingly banal strata of everyday life to be objects of curiosity, from which to generate a new sort of power relations by re-mediating and recomposing given strata in various ways. What move forwards the narratives of Park’s videos are undoubtedly two hands, which are fragmented parts of certain bodies that do not provide further cues regarding to which bodies those hands are related. While reminiscing the Midas’ hands that are omnipotent and visually threatening, those hands in Park’s videos seem to solidify the logic of the binary between the practice of forces conducted by a strong agent of power permeating in the neoliberal urban settings, and the suppression and alienation of everyday life as thus generated in such settings. However, this article argues that Park’s videos do away with such a cliched binary, in ways that illustrate the complex entanglement of two visibly different forces without relying on strict hierarchical systems. The ostensibly threatening and omnipresent hands in his videos do not impose power onto the everyday in a top-down manner: Instead, those hands become part of the existing network of disparate forces within given environments. In other words, those hands as fragmented body parts prominent in Park’s videos are willing to adjust to the speed of given milieus, unfold new rhythms and moods, and ultimately instigate a myriad of affective instances that are reflective of the infinity of the world of everyday life.

This article aims to examine the affective dimension of cityscapes in contemporary Korea through one particular artwork: Korean artist Choi Jeong-hwa’s 2004 installation work titled <Anybody Anything Anyway>. In doing so, it takes the scholarship of affect as a point of discussion, from which to explore the vibrancy and dynamism of ordinary commercial cityscapes in the country that most often consist of a myriad of billboards, neon signs, and banners prevalent throughout the entire urban realm, instead of considering them simply to be the exemplars of commodity fetishism and urban degeneration. Often known as an artist who freely meanders the lines between the artistic and the popular, the sublime and the vulgar, and between the spectacular and the ordinary, for this installation Choi collects a number of discarded banners from the storages of local authorities, in order to temporarily transform Arco Art Center, one of the representative art museums located in Seoul, into the space of festivity. What results is a flexible realm between the public and the private, in which unruly forces and affective intensities are released and thus generate an inflected sense of community that is commercially through and through. His installation is spectacular in the sense that it displaces all the various texts and images inscribed on banners onto the same plane, without imposing them any clearly defined hierarchies; furthermore, it sets up an interesting equilibrium between urban chaos and the poetics of space, as marked by the museum that was designed by Kim Swoo-geun, the renowned architect in modern Korea. However, Choi complicates what is meant by the spectacular, by bringing forth a visual and spatial recomposition through his work so that one is able to find instances of everyday life, or “smells of life” immanent in the space of the everyday. By closely looking at the details of the installation, also paying particular attention to the moods and affectivities that arise, this article claims that one would be able to find senses of ambivalence through the inflected cityscape that is at once spectacular and ordinary, distracting and sense-making, and resistant and enchanting.

This article explores the affectivity of sign-filled urban environments in contemporary Asia by taking the French painter Manoël Pillard’s nightscape paintings produced during his trips to Seoul between 1998 and 2008 as a case. In his paintings, Pillard scrupulously renders each commercial sign in great detail to capture the way the multiple neon signs create a particular mood and atmosphere in Seoul’s nightscapes, which ultimately sets up a world of sense that is social, physical, and communal. Pillard’s receptive way of seeing the nightscapes and his foreignness to the Korean language enable him to perceive the commercial environments afresh and thus to produce paintings that elicit the singularly plural, spectacularly ordinary, and distracting but sense-provoking aspects of the Asian metropolis.

This article focuses on examining how the American novelist Henry Miller takes ‘bridge’ as a thresh- old from which to explore the multiplicity of the metropolis New York through his 1936 work Black Spring. Instead of treating bridge as a passage or backdrop for his narrative construction, Miller activates it as a territory where his past memories and present experiences, as well as disparate and fleeting impressions and imagi- nations, meet altogether, which release a plethora of urban affects in aleatory and haptic ways. In this respect the Brooklyn Bridge is the very place that repeatedly appears in Black Spring, which plays as a critical point of departure enabling Miller to set up a world in which he weaves together instances of everyday life without sub- suming one over another. Although subtle and implicit, Miller brings forth a way of taking the capitalist city space as an affective terrain in a Deleuzian sense, which encourages us to be attentive to the vibrancy and dyna- mism immanent in the modern metropolis despite its alienating nature.

This article explores an extended sense of autonomy in contemporary architecture activated through the practice of fashion, by taking architect Rem Koolhaas’ work Prada Epicenter in New York as a case. In doing so, it argues that throughout the work Koolhaas sets up a world in which the corporate and the individual are entangled together in complex ways. Instead of considering Prada Epicenter to be the exemplar illustrating that the global company—Prada—institutionalizes the designed commercial space in a top-down manner, this article claims that such a space imbricates a multiplicity of meaning that is generated at the intersections of the local and the global, the ordinary and the spectacular, and the individual and the institutional. In this respect French philosopher Gilles Lipovesky’s fashion theory works as a critical point: his claim that the ambivalence of fashion—both as corporate power and individual freedom—is a threshold encouraging us to better understand the operativity of late capitalism in daily life is extended to Koolhaas’ case. In other words, Koolhaas’ Prada Epicenter brings forth possibilities that the ostensibly technocratic and institutionalized space in fact works as a resillient field where senses of individual autonomy arise in the aid of corporative practice of branding.

This study explores the sense of place in contemporary commercial spaces in South Korean cities by analyzing Shin-chon, one of the major commercial districts located in Seoul. While studies of "place" have grown alongside critiques of modernism and have played a significant role in fostering better understandings of built environments in the last few decades, the discourses of sense of place within dynamically changing metropolis remain relatively unexamined. Despite many criticisms of the distracting and placeless aspects of contemporary Korean cities, these aspects also reveal localized commercialisms, privatized public spaces, and material representations in everyday life. Advertisements are here perceived as the mode of communication and medium through which one can construct sense of place according to what one experiences. Signboards are the vehicles that reflect this psychological process. Through the application of Walter Benjamin's two concepts – flâneur and mimesis – this paper will discuss how the theory of signboards in everyday life is formulated, and how Shin-chon can be interpreted as a place where people find sense of place without being alienated from the built environment.

An essay contributed to the booklet of the exhibition titled, Paik Soon-Gong: Traces of the Mind which took place at the Gyeongnam Art Museum (28 October 2022 to 19 February 2023) and was curated by Yi Mi-Young. I wrote an essay as the member of the bereaved and also an art historian

Paek S. (2022) The Billboard Community: The Visual Culture of Seoul and Its Multiplicity. In: Tambling J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_156-1

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In this essay, I explore the multiplicity of Seoul by reading one of the prominent but undermined strata of the city’s visual culture known as ganpan, a term that can roughly be translated as “signage” and represents a myriad of street advertisements such as billboards, neon signs, banners, posters, digital screens, and other kinds. In Korea, ganpan has been the target of intense criticism throughout the twentieth century due to its visually chaotic and unruly nature. At the same time, it is con- sidered an enchanted phenomenon by those who are attentive to its densities and intensities generating urban singularities. What is implicit in such contrasting viewpoints of ganpan is the tension between the aspiration of establishing an ideal image of the city through its removal made in a top-down manner, and a multiplicity that unfolds from the commercial everyday that is improvisational and aleatory. By taking into account of these two very different attitudes towards signage in Seoul, the essay explores how the city’s visual culture in the twenty-first century can be read as the site in which various forms of life unfold in close relationship with forces of consumer culture despite its spectacular and alienating aspects.

An essay contributed for an edited volume titled "Neo Geography", a multi-disciplinary project organized by Adeena Mey and Kyung Roh

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In my essay, I propose a way to explore the experiential dimensions of contemporary Korean cities, with a particular interest in looking at how one is to encounter the daily scenes of city space in wonder and indifference. In doing so, I will mainly deal with three different blocks of research all of which are intricately related to one another: first, a critical overview of Pai Hyung-min and Woo Don-son’s research on Ahn Young-bae’s theory of architectural experience; second, analyzing Rem Koolhaas’ essay titled “The Generic City” with an emphasis on the issue of experience; and third, extending the implications of architectural/urban experience as addressed in above two works into a case of photographer Park Hong-cheon’s photo-collage of 21st-century Seoul. Through these three cases, I argue that everyday experience in contemporary Korea is always entangled with a pair of ambivalent states of being such as curiosity and boredom, interest and disinterest, anxiety and serenity, and wonder and indifference.

40 Years of Seoinn Design Group: Other Symbolic Gestures

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A book commemorating the 40th-year anniversary of Seoinn Design Group, an architectural firm of Korea that has specialised on designing church in Korean urban contexts. My contribution for the project was to write an annal of the company's history based on serial interviews with the group's members, primarily with the head of the office Choi Dong-gyu. Starting from 1978 to the present, the company has constructed almost 100 churches and other facilities, and is characterised by non-conventional church design, which comprises a strata of Korean modern and contemporary architecture.

2021

In 3 April 2021, I will curate a conference preliminarily titled “Enchanting in the Plastic World” as the Spring Meeting of the Korean Association for Aesthetics and Science of Art. It is scheduled 3 April 2021, and will take place somewhere in Seoul (to be informed later). Details of the conference will also be posted when it is completed.

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본 기획은 일상생활에서 광범위하게 사용되고 있는 플라스틱의 존재론적 차원을 탐구하는 것을 목표로 한다. 플라스틱은 1907년 처음 발명되었으며, 그로부터 2년 후인 1909년에 특허가 부여되었다. 무한한 변형과 표현을 촉발하는 플라스틱은 20세기를 거쳐 진화해오고 있는 가능성의 물질이다. 다른 한편 플라스틱은 환경오염의 주범이다. 약 10만년 동안 썩지 않고 주변에 머물러 있는 플라스틱은 그 폐기 이후에도 다양한 경로를 통해 우리에게 다시 돌아오며, 이는 개인의 건강뿐만 아니라 지구의 생태적 지속가능성을 위협한다. 플라스틱을 둘러싼 논의와 실천은 종종 업사이클링과 재사용 등 당위성에 기반한 제도적 정책 집행과 실천으로 이어진다. 하지만 사람의 수명을 한참 초월하는 플라스틱을 삶의 반경에서 완전히 제거하기란 쉽지 않다. 히서 데이비스(Heather Davis)가 주장하는 것처럼, 플라스틱에 대한 생태주의적 접근만큼 중요한 것은 그 한계를 인정하고 플라스틱과 함께 살아가기 위한 관점을 수립하고 방법을 모색하는 것이다. 데이비스의 관점을 확장하는 본 기획은 다섯 개의 사례 연구로 구성되며, 이는 생태주의와 무비판적 수용이라는 이분법에 한정하지 않는 플라스틱의 다양한 차원을 숙고할 수 있는 기회가 될 것이다.

List of presenters:

백승한 (가톨릭관동대학교)
플라스틱 어버니즘: 신자유주의 도시에서 플라스틱과 함께 살아가기

박경은 (서울대학교)
플라스틱 탈/식민성 (de/coloniality): 생동하는 (이)물질의 발견과 발명, 은폐에 대해

이준석 (대구경북과학기술원)
플래스틱 세계의 코로나19: 행위자-네트워크 이론과 객체지향존재론으로 본 코로나19의 가소성(plasticity)

우정아 (포항공과대학교)
포스트모던 플라스틱: 1990년대 한국 미술의 상징적 질료

손정아 (국민대학교)
플라스틱 없는 섬: 예술, 과학, 액티비즘

2021

유엔스튜디오: 지구적이고 지역적인 실천 짓기
UNStudio: Building a Global Local Practice

가톨릭관동대학교 건축학부 특강 시리즈
Special Lecture Series organized by School of Architecture, Catholic Kwandong University

2021년 2월 8일, 월요일 오후 5 - 8시 (한국 표준시)
8 February 2021, Monday 9am – 12pm (CET: Central European Standard Time)

YouTube: https://youtu.be/-I90OkaJA2w

Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83322094176?pwd=aE5QaHN3NitESENMa1RXN00ydjhiZz09
(Meeting ID: 833 2209 4176 / Password: 001234)

요약 Abstract

지난 30년간 국제적으로 활동해온 유엔스튜디오는 암스테르담 이외에도 세계 곳곳에 새로운 지사를 새롭게 열었으며, 이에 따라 다양한 지역에서 프로젝트 디자인, 시공, 감리 작업을 수행해오고 있다. 유엔스튜디오 상하이, 홍콩 그리고 프랑크푸르트 지사는 각각 2008년, 2014년, 2018년에 개소하였다. 2021년의 두바이 그리고 멜번 오피스 개소를 앞두고, 이번 발표에서는 여러 국가들의 유엔스튜디오 프로젝트를 선별하여 살펴볼 것이며, 국제적인 활동의 기회와 도전, 지역성의 의미 또는 지구적 건축 실천에 있어서 지역적 현전(local presence)의 중요성에 대해 살펴볼 것이다.

Throughout the past 30 years of working internationally, UNStudio has grown not only in terms of our Amsterdam base, but opening up new local and regional chapters worldwide: all evolving from large-scale projects that UNStudio is designing, building and supervising in different regions. UNStudio Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Frankfurt offices opened up in 2008, 2014 and 2018 respectively. With the Dubai and Melbourne offices opening up in 2021, we will look at a selection of UNStudio projects across the different continents, examining the opportunities and challenges of working internationally, the meaning of regionality and the significance of local presence to a global architectural practice.

밀레나 스토픽 Milena Stopic

밀레나 스토픽은 유엔스튜디오의 시니어 아키텍트 및 Associate이다. 2010년 프린스턴 대학을 졸업한 후 유엔스튜디오에 합류하여 유럽, 아시아, 호주 및 중동지역에 위치한 문화, 소매, 복합용도, 인프라스트럭처 및 교육 관련 프로젝트에 대한 광범위한 경험을 쌓았다. 가장 최근에는 콕스 아키텍처(COX Architecture)와의 협업을 통해 멜번에 위치한 뷸라 사우스뱅크(Southbank by Beulah) 공모전을 당선시킨 디자인 팀을 이끌었으며, 현재 유엔스튜디오를 대표하여 프로젝트 디자인을 진행하고 있다.

Milena Stopic is a Senior Architect / Associate at UNStudio. Upon graduation from Princeton University in 2010, she joined UNStudio and developed extensive experience in cultural, retail, mixed-use, infrastructural and educational projects across Europe, Asia, Australia and the Middle East. Most recently, she led the design team toward winning the competition for the Southbank by Beulah project in Melbourne (in collaboration with COX Architecture) and she is currently leading the design efforts on the project on behalf of UNStudio.

현명석 Myung Seok Hyun

현명석은 건국대와 한양대의 겸임교수로 활동 중이다. 서울시립대 학부와 대학원에서 건축을 공부했으며, 미국 조지아 공대에서 20세기 중반 미국 건축 사진을 이론화한 작업으로 박사학위를 받았다. 서울에 살며 대학에서 건축 역사와 이론, 디자인을 가르친다. 『건축 표기 체계』 (아키텍스트, 2020)의 대표 편저자이자 『건축 사진의 비밀』 (디북, 2019)의 공저자다. 『The Journal of Architecture』, 『Space』, 『건축평단』, 『와이드AR』 등에 글을 실었다. 건축 매체와 재현, 시각성, 한국의 젊은 건축가들의 작업 등 다양한 주제에 관한 연구와 저술에 몰두하고 있다.

Myung is an adjunct professor at Konkuk University and Hanyang University. He received his PhD in architecture at Georgia Institute of Technology, and his Master’s degree at the University of Seoul. He teaches courses on architectural history and theory and design studios. He is the co-author of Architectural Notation (2020) and The Secret of Architectural Photography (2019), and has published in numerous journals. His research interests include architectural medium and representation, the visualities of architecture, and the current works of young Korean architects.

이동하 Brett Dong Ha Lee

Brett Lee는 뉴욕과 서울에서 활동중인 건축가 겸 갤러리스트이다. UNStudio, ARO, IK Studio, 정림건축을 포함한 다양한 스케일의 사무실에서 디자인 경험을 쌓았다. 현재 그는 Perkins Eastman Architects의 선임 디자이너 및 Associate으로 있으며 복합상업시설, 호텔, 체육시설 등의 디자인을 이끌고 있고, 서울에 소재한 갤러리JJ에서 큐레이팅, 번역 및 홍보를 담당하며 현대미술계에도 관여한다. 펜실베니아 대학교에서 건축학석사를 수석으로 졸업하였으며 2016 년부터 2019 년까지 PennDesign에서 겸임교수로 활동하였고, 베니스 비엔날레 (2016, 2018)와 서울건축도시건축비엔날레 (2017, 2019)에 그가 가르친 학생들의 작품들을 출품하였다. 

Brett Lee is a licensed architect and educator based in New York and Seoul. He has design experience from small to large offices including UNStudio, ARO, IK Studio, and Junglim. Currently, he is a Senior Designer / Associate at Perkins Eastman Architects where he leads design efforts in hospitality, retail, sports, and mixed-use projects. He also actively participates in the contemporary art scene as a manager at GalleryJJ in Seoul. Lee received M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania with AIA Henry Adams Medal, Gold Medal Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial, and John Stewardson Memorial Prize. He has been a lecturer at PennDesign from 2016 to 2019 and has exhibited the works at Venice Biennale 2016 and 2018, and Seoul Architecture Biennale 2017 and 2019.

Inquiries directed to: seunghan.paek@gmail.com

2020

Co-chairing with Jieheerah Yun, a colleague of mine who works at the Seoul campus of Hongik University, I will run a panel entitled "Urban Affects: A New Materialist Approach to the Global City" for the 2020 Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH).



Abstract

Global city is perceived and practiced in relationship with an emerging body of scholarship that considers the architectural and urban world to be a realm in which multiple forces and intensities, affects and moods, and gestures and their material inscriptions coexist in consistent but aleatory manners. New Materialisms (NM) is one that pays close attention to how our material world is not so much a fixed entity but rather put into a perpetual becoming process. From the perspective of NM, elements shaping the global city such as star architects’ iconic buildings, infrastructures, and the “generic” and spectacular cityscapes are not in opposition to more genuine, locally bound, and nostalgic forms of life. Despite its alienating and reifying nature, the spectacle is a fundamental form of life, mediums becoming messages, and “groundless grounds.”

In a similar vein, the affect theory, although contested, presents a critique of the dominant narrative of primacy of reason and rationality. In the architectural field, this new move to consider affect and mood has generated controversies, some of which include critiques addressing its imprecise and at times subjective engagements with urban discourses that do not bring up immediate solutions in designing the city. Do spectacles and urban affects result in “pre-critical” turn to justify the architecture of neoliberalism? Can urban affects be opted by the civil society to critically engage with issues of environmental protection, economic justice, and urban regeneration and thus help improving the qualities of urban life today?

Presenters in order:

Trude Renwick, Urban Affects, Ghostly Affects: Global Architecture of Bangkok's Commercial Past

Carmela Cucuzzella and Jean-Pierre Chupin, Urban Affects, Competitions as Means for an Alternative Development in the City

Gary Sampson, Urban Affects, Urban Disposition and Affect in the Emergence of Kop van Zuid

Danielle Choi, Urban Affects, Interior Landscapes in the Age of Gaia

Katarzyna Balug, Urban Affects, Immersed on Earth: Inflatable Forms and the Post-Lunar Imaginary

2020

With the proposed theme entitled ‘Reassembling Gangneung,’ this second design workshop cohosted by two entities—School of Architecture at Catholic Kwandong University and École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Grenoble—aims to explore how the built environments in the coastal city Gangneung can be thought, unthought, and reassembled through ideas brought forth through an establishment of a short-lived community that is creative, engaging, and provocative in dealing with urban issues that they encounter.

Considering the limited time period of the workshop that will be run only for five days, it proposes a specific task that students will concentrate on: making a building known as Seobusijang a lively and sustainable place (its address is as followed: 강원도 강릉시 임영로 155번길 6 [용강동]; Limyoung-ro 155beongil 6 [Yonggang-dong], Gangneung, Gangwon Province). Literally translated as ‘Seobu Market (‘서부시장’ in Korean and ‘西部市場’ in kanji character)’, it is a four-story building with one-story underground located at the center of the city’s historic districts. The lower two levels (1-2) with the underground are used for a marketplace where individual shopkeepers sell various things such as food, clothes, marine products and miscellaneous goods, whereas the upper two (level 3 and 4) are for residents some of whom are also shopkeepers working within the building. Seobusijang is a result of the renewal of the old structure that was first constructed in 1977, which was removed and replaced with the current version that was built in 1982. Its site area (대지면적) is 3,707 m², gross floor area (대지면적) 6,446 m², and shop area 5,462 m² where about 150 shops are displaced.

Seobusijang is the oldest one among seven traditional markets available in the city area, and constant care and investment has been given to it. This ferro-concrete building has a triangular-shaped plan in resonance to the given site, and represents a typical complex in which both commercial and residential units coexist. Its commercial community has continuously attempted to activate the place, which includes a renovation project that had been executed between 2002 and 2006 with an investment of 2.9 billion in Korean currency (equivalent to approximately 2.4 million US dollars), the construction of a parking lot with 54 slots in front of the building in 2009, the replacement of the existing billboards with new ones and also the installation of CCTVs in 2012, and enhancing its fire-protection condition in 2019. Meanwhile, the ministry has also been organizing night markets during the period between June and November that are accompanied with events such as performances and night walks, which helped activating the building as a lively place to visit. All these instances are the result of collective endeavors that aspire to rehabilitate the old city districts of Gangneung on an institutional level, which is realistically operated under state-funded projects known as ‘New Deal’, which is activated in relationship with the 2013 legislation of a law called ‘Special Act on Promotion of and Support for Urban Regeneratation (도시재생 활성화 및 지원에 관한 특별법)’ (you can search the term in both Korean/English languages at: http://www.law.go.kr; the law is often abbreviated as ‘Urban Regeneration Act’ and under constant updates).
While acknowledging the benefits that such institution-driven projects could offer, which we, as architects, also strive to search for other ways of engaging with the issue of urban regeneration that is not only program-driven but also spatially and architecturally speculative. It is true that urban stagnation is an issue difficult to be resolved entirely through architectural parameters; What we are rather interested in are ways of interacting with given site conditions, thus making sustainable environments both economically and culturally.

Reassembling Gangneung, and Seobusijang in particular for this workshop, does not mean so much to put things together in a material sense and make it just functionally work, but rather to implement a field where individuals and the surroundings are coordinated each other on both conscious and unconscious levels. No predicated directions of regeneration are assumed despite the popular ways that a number of New Deal projects are administered in Korea; By the same token, despite the historic value of Seobusijang, tearing it down and constructing a completely new one is also encouraged if necessary. The term ‘context (맥락)’ is here opened up to its extreme, which encourages us to attempt various architectural and urban typologies. We can also conceive the city’s ‘identity (정체성)’ without limiting its implications merely to some clichéd ways of understanding ‘nature (자연).’ It is argued that natural elements such as sea and pine trees represent Gangneung more than its constituents under the rubric of modern and contemporary ‘culture (문화)’, under which a conceptual bifurcation between nature and culture strongly exists. However, we are also attentive to ways in which both cultural and natural strata coxist in complex ways; this line of thinking is reminiscent of how feminist scholar Donna Haraway does away from a strict binary and rather brings forth a new term called ‘natureculture (자연문화)’ without hyphening. The City’s ‘history (역사)’ is fully respected, but its meanings are perpetually rethought in the present tense so that one is able to generate (not ‘regenerate’) materially and psychically thus to deal with the perennially accumulated activities, memories, and the material traces of given situations.

This seemingly radical way of thinking about Seobusijang is not to disregard its historic significance and values but instead to open up ways in which a building could unfold its unthought dimensions that are latent, and could be materialized through the entanglement with the strata of the everyday, if we understand the term ‘everyday (일상)’ in a broader spectrum. By throwing ourselves into the given site, we aspire to mediate a building and the surrounding milieu that is fundamentally local and global, historic and present, institution-bound and individual, spectacular and ordinary, repetitive but emerging and co-imbricated with haecceities.



o Date: February 10-14, 2020 (Monday to Friday)
o Number of Participating students: 17 (13 forthcoming 5th-year Korean students + 4 French students) (Korean students’ representative: Janghee Jung; French students’ representative: Yasmina Maalouf)
o Number of Workshop supporters: 6 (forthcoming 4th-year students)
o Coordinator: Dr. Seunghan Paek (백승한, Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture, Catholic Kwandong University)
o Tutors: Sinwook Keun (architects x5), Joomin Kim (RE:TMUS ARCHITECTS), Magali Deschamps (ATKM Consulting services  Urban planning, Sustainable & Eco-tourism)
o Translator: Joomin Kim
o Guiding Professor of the Grenoble Team: Magali Deschamps
o Place of Tutoring and Exhibition: Room #401 and adjacent Hallway, Daegeon Hall
o Languages used during the workshop: Korean, French, and English
o Invited Lecturers: Sim Oseob (심오섭, Gangneung Cultural Center: https://www.gncc.or.kr), Jaewon Suh (서재원, aoa architects: https://www.aoaarchitects.com), Kim Kwang-soo (김광수, K_works: http://studiokworks.com), Taehyun Terry Lee (이태현, THE A LAB: http://the-a-lab.com/)
o Organized by: School of Architecture at Catholic Kwandong University (가톨릭관동대학교 건축학부 건축학전공) (Homepage: http://cms6.cku.ac.kr/user/indexMain.do?siteId=arch)
o Cohosted by: School of Architecture at Catholic Kwandong University, École nationale supérieure d'architecture de Grenoble (그르노블 국립건축학교), Leaders in INdustry-university Cooperation (LINC+ 링크사업단), Innovation Center for Engineering Education (공학교육혁신원)
o Sponsored by: KIRA Gangwon (강릉지역건축사회)
o Supported by: OKCHEON Urban Regeneration Support Centre (옥천동 도시재생현장지원센터), JOONGANG Urban Regeneration Support Centre (중앙동 도시재생현장지원센터)

2017

This is a special exhibition held at the convention center located at Samseong-dong, Seoul, often known as COEX, from September 4 to 7, 2017. It was a booth exhibition in one of the exhibition halls in that space, and I coordinated the entire process of exhibiting JUNGLIM Architecture in the venue. Below is an introductory remark addressing the identity of the architectural office, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in the year 2017. The exhibition consisted of a three-channel video and four screens, both of which show some of the impressive instances and the fifty works of the firm, which were chosen through an internal vote, from 1967 to the present.

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Since its inception in 1967 to the present, JUNGLIM Architecture has focused on shaping the textures of the everyday world in stable yet diverse ways, with more than a thousand projects completed so far. Different from the architectural fashions that are marked by their spectacular and experimental nature, JUNGLIM has produced an array of culturally sustainable strata of modern and contemporary Korea, as if reminiscing of the hanok typology that has barely changed during several centuries. Intricately related to the multiple sensorial dimensions and habits of ordinary life that are unforeseen and dispersed, the fifty projects introduced in this exhibition would be an interesting opportunity that one is able to think about their public values and the ontologies in the world where we live.

An online presentation (recorded) at the conference entitled, A Focus on Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning and Research in the Modern Academy. The event takes place on 20 to 22 of April, 2022. It is organized by the AMPS: Architecture_Media_Politics_Society. My presentation explores architectural complexities from the perspective of climate change, in a way to take plastic as a threshold. I will draw my own teaching experience on contemporary Korean architecture, and how the understudied aspects of environmental crisis, as represented by the ever-debated material, might lead to the reconnection of what architecture can do today, and how the old idea of modernity might likewise be reconsidered, for example its complicity with the oil industry. Petromodernity is one point of departure in this respect, and I will put it in conversation with some recent architectural works dealing with plastic in different senses.

An online seminar organized by Myengsoo Seo who is Professor in the Department of Architecture at Hankyong National University. The talk will meander the rereading of Learning from Las Vegas in relation to some of the recent work of Neil Leach, a scholar who would put it as the bygone paradigm as opposed to the growing scholarship of AI today.

April 6, 2022, 13:00-15:00 via Zoom

Access: 878 7753 9494
pw: 0

A presentation at the panel session entitled, "Agency of/in digital culture" as part of the conference (section conveners: Mariusz Pisarski, Ewa Szczęsna, Piotr Kubiński):

Re-Thinking Agency: Non-Anthropocentric Approaches

3–5 February 2022

University of Warsaw and via Zoom worldwide

Keynote lecture: Karen Barad (University of California, Santa Cruz)

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Abstract
This paper claims that architectural image is a vibrant agency, which mediates the line between the disciplinary understanding of architecture as a material entity and its flattening process in which its materiality is entangled with shifting senses of visuality, mobility and authorship. What if the profession saturated by the image culture brings forth what Scott Lash calls “technological forms of life” in which the architect as a strong agent resonates with forces and technologies generated from the world that is material and immaterial, as well as human and nonhuman? Architectural image is not just a visual means for material construction but also a ‘vibrant matter’ according to Jane Bennett, a nonhuman agency which is symmetrically displaced with a given work. It anticipates to provoke new expressivity and communicative platforms although arbitrary and dispersed. Seeing architecture as a flat, fluid, virtual and vibrant phenomenon challenges its traditional definitions made since the Renaissance, and considers the architect as someone other than a goal-directed actor. This object-oriented approach to architecture, or what Levi Bryant calls as “Machine-Oriented Architecture,” proposes to reconfigure the profession as an open system by rethinking its anthropocentric traditions. With mapping the theories of agency put in conversation with the subfields of new materialisms, I will focus on analyzing how the works of architectural firm, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, mediate the lines between architecture and image, some of which include The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate (1987), Para-site (1989), Overexposed (1995), Slow House (1991), Institute of Contemporary Art (2006), and The Shed (2019). Particular attention is made to how they treat their projects as opportunities with which to challenge the set of acknowledged values of architecture and bring forth the discursive and affective dimensions that are entangled with bodies, technologies, media and spectacles.

An upcoming lecture as part of the following venue run by Professor Hyon-sob Kim: 2021 Autumn Semester/ Korea University Architectural History, Theory and Criticism Open Seminar [online]

22nd of November, 2021, 19:00-21:00 KST

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10/11(월) 10:30~12:30. Neil Leach (Department of Architecture, Florida International University), “Learning from AlphaGo: what AI can tell us about the future of architecture” https://korea-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/83265389582?pwd=czU3SkJqMllpMGZ6UXJRUFkrS294dz09

11/08(월) 19:00~21:00. 박유정 (대구가톨릭대학교 프란치스코칼리지), “크리스티안 노르베르그-슐츠의 ‘장소의 현상’” https://korea-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/85963926969?pwd=clBjd05iMjNpajcrR24vYjRqVDVwdz09

11/22(월) 19:00~21:00. 백승한 (가톨릭관동대학교 건축학부), “한국 콘텍스트에서 <라스베이거스의 교훈> 다시 보기” https://korea-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/84055600677?pwd=RVl0S3RlSFpFbEU2SFp2c1V6ODNEQT09

12/06(월) 10:30~12:30. 조현정 (KAIST 인문사회과학부), “일본 건축에서 전후(戰後)란 무엇인가?” https://korea-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/84536869760?pwd=MVZ0TStDL2UyZWtaR2Q2SmhralBjQT09

2021 Global Mobility Humanities Conference, 29-30 October 2021

http://www.mobilityhumanities.org/main.html?lang=EN

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Abstract

This paper aims to rethink the idea of ‘urban experience’ in today’s urban world that operates in relationship with the forces of mediatization and mobility. In doing so, it will focus on reading sociologist Scott Lash’s work, in particular reviewing the way that he theorizes the term ‘experience.’ Addressing three types of experience—epistemological, ontological and informational—Lash claims that the first two types are collapsed into the third. According to him, one’s experience of the city is knowledge-based and sense- driven but both faculties are collapsed and reformulated in “today’s global information culture” in which an excess of images has become a form of life. Lash’s claim is based on his critique of information and also in line with Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory in that he considers information, as broadly defined, to be a realm where both human and nonhuman agents coexist and unfold events. But his theory remains insufficient as to address the “agential cuts,” to borrow the term from Karen Barad, as well as coming an unresolved conclusion that one’s sensory experience predominantly becomes nonhuman data and thus loses its tactility. By reading Lash against the grain, this paper argues that urban experience operates as a mode that is reshaped through the contacts with the systems but still bodily oriented in a loose sense.

A talk for the upcoming AHRA conference, 11-13 Nov 2021
https://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/abce/ahra2021-region/

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This article explores the vibrant relationship between architecture and its milieu through which to rethink what region means in what urban historian Peter Rowe called the “neon environments,” which refers to the busting commercial landscapes in Asian cities. In doing so, it conducts an in-depth analysis of an architectural work: Sun Tower that an LA-based group Morphosis designed in 1997. Their key design was to propose a “second skin” which separates the highly articulated surface made of deconstructivist skeletal frames from its box-like building which consists of rentable commercial spaces. While separating the surface from the building gave them a freedom to experiment what they aim to establish, they did not also miss the point that, in a city like Seoul where commercialism takes command over architectural autonomy, a designed work is open to unexpected interventions which are represented by advertisements attached upon the work. In this respect, they did not grasp enough is the degree of intensity that advertisements such as billboards and banners are attached and detached upon the surface and thus perpetually disrupts the work’s autonomy. A conventional gestalt dichotomy of figure and ground is therefore suspended, and what unfolds is a figure-like ground or vice versa, which instead makes the work vibrant and puts in resonance to the changing commercial moods and atmospheres. Whether intended or not, Sun Tower immerses itself into the surrounding milieu so that an entangled entity which is at once autonomous and heterogeneous is brought forth. In the sense that Jane Bennett considers advertising to be a vibrant matter actualized in commercial ways, I claim that a work of architecture put in close relationship with commercial forces challenges us with a renewed sense of region and place that is not so much an essentialist notion like ‘genius loci’ but rather an affectivity fueled by an evenly distributed attention.

A presentation scheduled for the upcoming spring conference of The Association of Aesthetics and the Arts in Korea, 3 April 2021, which is part of what I will be curating for the special session within the conference entitled "The Plastic World."

A presentation scheduled for 2021 College Art Association Annual Conference (CAA, online and  New York)

10-13 February 2021 (mine on the 10th of February)

This paper aims to explore how disparate strata of the city bring forth an assemblage that cuts across a set of binaries of institution and individual, tradition and the modern, and nature and culture in differing ways. In doing so, I will take the post-Olympic city Gangneung as a case, which is located alongside the east coast of South Korea. The city ministry co-hosted the 2018 winter Olympic Game with another nearby city Pyeongchang. Hosting such a mega-event made the city vibrant, and helped them to deal with the sustaining economic stagnation. Newly constructed infrastructures such as railway, flat housings and urban parks made the city comparable to other renowned global metropolises, but those urban strata quickly became empty as soon as the event was over. It is because implementing those strata were mostly driven by exhibition administration which does not reflect enough what makes the city operate in daily life. Clichéd images illustrating the city’s natural resources, especially pine tree and the ocean both of which are prevalent throughout the city area, were highlighted over other considerations. However, those sleek images are in drastic contrast to the city’s reality, exemplified by the ongoing construction of thermal power station which is neither response-able nor ecological to environment, the overpopulation of automobiles and the related facilities such as car washes and parking lots, and tourist investments resulting in the excess of lodges and hotels. The disparity between the city’s ideal image and its crude reality is derived from the narrow definition of ‘the urban’, as well as a naïve assumption that nature and culture are clearly distinct from each other. By challenging such assumptions, I claim that one needs to understand the city as an assemblage through which to rethink the perennially dividual identity of the city from the ground.

A Korean translation of the lecture series run online is attached below:

본 강좌는 최근 국내외에서 활발하게 논의되고 있는 객체-지향 존재론을 통해 건축을 탐구한다. ‘트리플 오(OOO, Object-Oriented Ontology)’로 불리는 이 이론은 철학자 그레이엄 하먼이 처음 고안한 것으로, 하이데거의 형이상학과 객체성에 대한 그의 1999년 박사학위 논문에서 시작하였다. 물리적 실체에 한정하지 않고 상황이나 사건 등을 또한 포괄하는 객체는 실재하지만 가상적이고, 또한 자연적이면서 인공적이다. 펜과 같은 사물을 일상생활에서 늘 사용하지만 그것이 나에게 어떤 의미로 다가오는지는 숙고하지 않고 지나칠 수 있는 것처럼, 객체 개념은 건축이라는 세계, 또는 유보되었거나 잠재된 건축적 상황을 나를 둘러싼 느슨한 관계성의 사태로 이해하고 실천할 수 있는 접점이다. 건축과 트리플 오가 연결되는 지점과 의의를 확인하고(1강), 예술 및 건축에 대한 하먼의 입장(2강), 트리플 오에 긍정적인 두 건축가의 작업(3,4강)과 디지털 건축의 방향성을 주도하려는 진영 간의 대립(5강)을 살펴보는 구도이다.

1강 (1월 7일) : 건축과 트리플 오
백승한 (가톨릭관동대 건축학부 조교수)

2강 (1월 14일) : 직서적인 것의 미학화
정만영 (서울과기대 건축학부 교수)
Graham Harman, “Aestheticizing the Literal - Art and Architecture,” Michael Benedikt and Kory Bieg (eds), CENTER 21: The Secret Life of Buildings, 2018, 60-69쪽.

3강 (1월 21일) : 건축에서의 객체-지향 철학
서현식 (행림건축 부팀장)
Mark Foster Gage, “Killing Simplicity : Object-Oriented Philosophy In Architecture,” Log 33, Winter 2015, 95-106쪽.

4강 (1월 28일) :
객체-지향 존재론 기반의 건축
이용주 (서울과기대 건축학부 조교수)
Tom Wiscombe, “Discreteness, or Towards a Flat Ontology of Architecture,” Project 3, 2014, 34-43쪽.
“A Specific Theory of Models : The Posthuman Beauty of Weird Scales, Snowglobes and Supercomponents,”
Architectural Design 89-5, 2019, 80–89쪽.

5강 (2월 4일) : 파라메트릭 진영의 비판
백승한 (가톨릭관동대 건축학부 조교수) Patrik Schumacher, “A Critique of Object-Oriented Architecture,” Michael Benedikt and Kory Bieg (eds),
CENTER 21: The Secret Life of Buildings, 2018, 70-89쪽.

강연자 소개

백승한 : 가톨릭관동대학교 건축학부에서 건축설계와 역사·이론·비평 과목을 담당하고 있다. 주요 연구 분야는 건축이론 및 도시론이며, 일상생활의 철학적 탐구, 정동, 분위기, 매개성, 경험, 어셈블리지, 신유물론, 인류세, 플라스틱 존재론, 비판적 유산과 관련한 다수의 연구 프로젝트를 진행 중이다. 와이드AR 및 한국미학예술학회의 편집위원으로 활동 중이다.

서현식 : 서울과학기술대학교 학부와 대학원에서 건축을 공부했으며, 졸업 후 창조건축을 거쳐 현재는 행림건축에서 실무 중이다. 디지털 건축과 이론에 흥미를 갖고 연구 중이며, 최근 객체지향철학이 디지털 건축에 미치는 영향에 관해 관심을 집중하고 있다. 현재 갈무리 출판사에서 운영하는 다중지성의 정원에서 '객체지향 철학과 건축미학 세미나'를 진행하고 있다.

이용주 : 연세대학교와 컬럼비아 대학교에서 건축을 공부하고 현재 서울을 중심으로 활동하는 건축가이다. 정보가 가진 패턴의 복잡성을 바탕으로 한 건축의 기하학적 표현에 관심을 두고 있다. 여러 스케일과 다방면의 매체를 통한 디자인 실험을 해오고 있다. 대한민국 공공건축상, IF 디자인 어워드를 포함한 다수의 국내외 디자인상을 수상했다.

정만영 : 서울시립대에서 「건축형태의 자의적 생성에 관한 연구」로 박사학위를 받았다. 건축설계와 이론이 매개되는 지점에 서기를 원하며, 현대건축 이론에 관심을 집중하고자 한다. 2003년부터 10년간 철학아카데미의 여름/겨울 건축강좌를 진행했으며, 한국건축가협회 평론분과위원장, 한국건축역사학회 부회장을 역임했다.

In my upcoming presentation at Mijihaeng, a school concentrating to investigate aspects of social design in the contemporary world, I propose to explore the multiplicity of the ordinary that is a worldly mood and also vital in shaping ourselves in material and affective ways. In doing so, I will focus on investigating a way to deal with the issue of the everyday/ordinary in architectural studies, the perennial issue that cannot simply be 'done', because one’s way of encountering the surrounding environments - and the architectural world - always differs, which is most often entangled with his/her ever-shifting perceptual and affective resonances that are beyond imposed representations and thus always partially mediated and left sovereign. The rationale behind such a claim is a critical reconsideration of how the term ‘ordinary/everyday’ has been theorized as a symptom representing the postwar capitalist society, and the alienating moods and atmospheres without looking at the subtle affectivities that always unfold.

In this paper, I explore the multiplicity of the everyday city that unfolds through the coexistence of regulation and its divergences, or an affective co-imbrication in which varying forces of the everyday shape a fragile ground that disrupts any top-down, hierarchized impositions of power. This will be done through an investigation of one of the popular urban culture in Korea known as bang, a spatial typology literally meaning ‘room’ in the Korean traditional housing system. In doing so, I will offer an in-depth analysis of the ‘City of the Bang,’ a title of the Korean pavilion for the 2004 Venice Biennale Architecture Exhibition, by discussing the work of three Korean artists/architects on Bang culture—Song Ze-ho, Yoo Suk-yeon, and Lee Bul all of which demonstrate that these hypermodern places, often replete with a dense array of signs, can foster new modes of sociability, which consist of gathering in spaces that are oddly intimate, yet thoroughly commercial. This traditional domestic typology was interrupted by Korea’s rapid modernization in the 20th century, but began to reappear in everyday city space from the early 1990s in commercial settings, such as karaoke bars, private theaters, and public saunas. Commercial bangs are replete with moments of “porosity” and “transition,” where rational spatial division and property ownership becomes blurred. Although there are definite senses of community evidenced in these spaces, they are always fleetingly convened, gathered, and dispersed, thus resisting any unifying notion of total or hierarchical design, or absolute domination by commercial interests.

This article aims to explore the ontological dimension of urban exp erience that is most often exploded by a plethora of neon signs through the lens of new materialisms. What follows is an in-depth analysis of the online exhibition called <neonsigns.hk>, which is run by the M+ Museum located in Hong Kong. New materialisms is an interdisciplinary strand of research that investigates the world where we live, i n which both material and immaterial aspects are complexly entangled. Instead of relying on a set of strict binaries between material and immaterial, human and non-human, nature and artifice, reality and virtuality, and figure and ground, new materialisms pays attention to their mode of coexistence and imbrications. According to new materialisms, neon sign is considered not only a means of advertising but also a threshold enabling us to look at the phenomenological dimension of the city. While neon sign has most often been criticized due to its visually distracting and flickering qualities especially during the nighttime, this article highlights that such urban strata evoke the past urban memories and senses of nostalgia, although fragmentary and temporary due to its unstable but dynamic materiality.

An upcoming conference at the University of Hong Kong, organised by the department of English, Yonsei University, November 30 - December 1, 2018

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In this paper, I will overview the growing stream of post-internet art and its making relationship with urban space in contemporary Korea. In particular, I will pay attention to addressing how game has become a means to explore the blurred line between the virtual and the real, or the “groundless grounds,” to borrow the term that encourages us to explore a set of scholarly discourses, which include the phenomenological (Martin Heidegger), the linguistic (Ludwig Wittgenstein), the affective (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), and the semiotic (Hito Steyerl). In doing so, I will focus on analyzing a set of experimental films of Korean artist Kang Jung-suck (1984~). Kang’s work is characterized by a virtual space that the artist creates in collaboration with graphic and game designers, in which he imbricates a myriad of urban infrastructures, memories, and instances of online chatting. Mostly accessible by YouTube amounting to over eighties in its number, Kang’s work is comprised of various junk (moving) images, such as cropped images of friends’ waiving hands, self-created videos of K-pop idols circulated online (most often known as jikkam), an ordinary world transformed according to a first-person shooter online game named Sudden Attack, all of which bring forth a simultaneously familiar and alienating world of everyday life. Despite the variety of his work in digitized forms, what constantly appears is the conflict between a drive toward the moments of authenticity in his life, and the frustration unable to fully grasp them. In the context of contemporary Korean art, Kang’s work reflects how ‘young’ artists deal with forces of the digital (media), in ways to create their own refugees (partly related to the phenomenon called Sinsaenggonggan in Korean term) that are not disrupted by the institutionalized societal and cultural systems. Put differently, in his work Kang strives to drift away from an excess of disciplines, traditions, hierarchies, commodity fetishism, memories, and nationalism, which is always in half success and thus constantly entails states of depression and lethargy.

Presentation at the upcoming fall conference for the Associations of Western Art History (abstract only available in Korean at this moment; later to be worked on in English as well), November 10, 2018, Seoul

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본 논문은 일본의 실험적 그룹 팀랩 (teamlab, 2001~)의 인터랙티브 공간 설치 작업의 분석을 통해, 디지털 환경에서의 생태실천과 윤리성을 탐구한다. 작가, 프로그래머, 공학자, 수학자, 건축가 등 다양한 전문인들로 구성된 팀랩은 스스로를 “극단적 기술주의자 (ultratechnologists)”로 부르며, 기술발전 시대의 환상적이고 스펙터클한 체험 영역을 구현한다. 자연/인공, 혹은 자연/인간의 이분법에서 자유로운 방식으로 새로운 환경을 구축하는 팀랩은 “예술을 통해 인간과 자연의 새로운 관계성”을 탐구하는데 집중하며, 이를 수행함에 있어서 디지털 기술은 “예술을 물리적 조건으로부터 해방하고 경계를 초월”하게 해 주는 매개 장치이다. 이를 구현함에 있어서 인터랙티비티, 혹은 상호소통성은 중요한 요소이다. 꽃이나 물줄기 등의 자연 요소들은 전시공간을 이동하는 관객들의 동작에 반응하며, 새로운 관계의 양상을 만들어낸다. 이러한 인터랙티비티 기술은 동시대 미디어 아트에 있어서 종종 경험할 수 있는 요소인 한편, 그리고 이들의 작업은 종종 대중 지향적이고 때로는 상업적인 속성을 지니지만, 본고는 팀랩의 공간 환경에서 펼쳐지는 ‘따로 또 함께’의 순간이 나타나는 지점에 주목한다. 화려한 이미지들이 연속으로 나타나고 반응하는 팀랩의 공간 환경에서 관객은 때로는 열정적인 참여자이면서 동시에 무심한 군중이다. 그의 신체는 비일상적인 환경에 기민하게 반응하며 스스로의 영역을 확장시키려는 시도를 하지만, 동시에 일회적인 퍼포먼스에 귀속되지 않은 채 자신의 방식으로 인공 바위에 걸터앉거나 천천히 관람을 한 이후 사라지는 등 예측할 수 없는 경험양상을 펼쳐낸다. 어두운 조명 아래 관람을 하게 되는 관람객들은 실루엣으로 서로가 서로를 마주하게 되며, 이는 마치 대도시의 익명적 체험이 극대화되는 순간을 연상시킨다. 하지만 팀랩의 공간 환경을 경험함에 있어서 각 개인의 신체는 주어진 상황에 때로는 수동적으로 반응하면서 동시에 자율성을 지닌다. 제공되는 인터랙티비티 장치에 적극적으로 반응을 하든 그렇지 않든, 각 개인은 스펙터클에 매혹되며 또한 그로부터 자신의 일상적인 신체 리듬으로 되돌아가려는 경향을 촉발한다. 신체가 반응하는 방식이나 정도를 스스로 또한 알 수 없다고 말한 스피노자 (그리고 들뢰즈)의 신체 논의의 맥락에서, 팀랩의 설치 공간에 있어서 각 개인은 자율적이면서 또한 주어진 환경과 뒤얽히게 되는 유동적 주체이다. 팀랩 작업의 분석, 수행적 신체 담론의 계보에 대한 리뷰, 그리고 최근 미디어 아트에서 두드러지는 인터랙티비티와 공간성에 대한 비판적 독해를 통해, 본 논문은 디지털 환경에서의 생태 실천과 그 윤리적 차원에 대해 탐구한다.

A conference presentation at: The 18th International Planning History Society Conference (IPHS 2018 Yokohama)

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In my paper, I propose to write an inter-Asian global urban history through the following case study: a comparative analysis of two guidelines of urban design in Hong Kong and Seoul. By closely reading those two guidelines, based on the 2017 versions, I aim to illustrate how each city government draws a concept of the global through institutional urban design. While the case of Hong Kong considers a laissez-faire system to be a crucial impetus in generating the theories of urban design, which seems not unrelated to the country’s global history that emerged out of a “barren rock,” the one of Seoul relies on a set of binaries that consist of problematizations of urban realities and suggestions for their improvements through which to bring forth a purified, pre-global urban aesthetics. Although the framework of an establishment of rules and their practical implementations is a shared approach applied to both cases, I argue that each of the city government theorizes the global in quite different manners; the former proposes a loose, centrifugal system of generating the concept of the global as an open system, while the latter takes urban design as an opportunity to pursue a centripetal globalization not fully subordinated by the forces coming from the ‘imagined’ outside.

An upcoming presentation:

The Sense of Time in a Hyper-mobile Digital Age: Nostalgia, Presentism, and Hope

18-20 May, 2018

Doshisha University

organized by Monash University & Doshisha University

In my presentation, I explore how neon-signs permeating the contemporary city instigate senses of time that are neither chronologically gained nor hierarchically operative, instead resonating to what Frederic Jameson famously noted by “the nostalgia for the present.” In further articulating Jameson’s postmodern metaphor, which highlights the predominance of empty signs without referents, I propose to conduct two case studies of signage exhibition in the Asian urban context: first, the Seoul Good Sign exhibitions led by Seoul Metropolitan Government (2009-present); and second, the neonsigns.hk by M+ Museum (2014-present). Both exhibitions have a shared goal of accumulating the disparate data of neon signs in online space and thus offering an access to an ever-effacing dimension of urban life in postcolonial Asia where speed has become a crucial form of life. However, while Seoul Good Sign tends to ‘rescue’ the authentically Korean aesthetics from the convoluted twentieth-century urban history by proposing an idealized image of neon sign, the case of Hong Kong glimpses the sign-driven urban histories only in order to activate meanings in the ‘city between worlds’, which are always imbricated through an assemblage of diffused senses of time that unfold at the crossroads of multiple forces and intensities.

An upcoming presentation at the Associations for Asian Studies, 2018 Annual Meeting at Washington D.C., March 22-25, 2018:

(panel organized by CedarBough T. Saeji)

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This paper explores how public space operates in relationship with media practices in the South Korean urban context. I illustrate this theorization with the case of Gwanghwamun Square. This urban site, located in one of the representative historic sites of metropolitan Seoul is, considered the most symbolic place in the country representing authentic Korea. What I am interested in is, however, not so much the spatial features of the Square or its peculiar design qualities (such as the fusion of the feng-shui and Neo-Confucian spatial aesthetics) from the nationalist standpoint, but rather ways in which it is perceived and experienced in relationship with various media-driven practices. In this respect I use Absolut Vodka’s 2016 advertisement ‘Absolut Korea’ as a threshold, which encourages us to look at the intersections of a hands-on experience of the Square and its mediatization in the public realm. The advertisement captures the political moment that a great number of Korean citizens gathered in the Square and participated in rallies crucial to the former president’s impeachment process. Despite the tense and meaningful atmosphere, ‘Absolut Korea’ turned the politically charged event into a joyous party, thereby drawing parallels between activism and drinking vodka. Although highly criticized due to its subtle disparaging nuances, the case of ‘Absolut Korea’ shows how the instances of lived experience is complexly entangled with media practices that are most often commercially driven, thus generating new strata of urban meaning in aleatory ways.

November 4 2017, an exhibition and workshop taking place at the Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul (total period of time for the venue: 3 November - 3 December 2017)

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In my essay, I propose a way to explore the experiential dimensions of contemporary Korean cities, with a particular interest in looking at how one is to encounter the daily scenes of city space in wonder and indifference. In doing so, I will mainly deal with three different blocks of research all of which are intricately related to one another: first, a critical overview of Pai Hyung-min and Woo Don-son’s research on Ahn Young-bae’s theory of architectural experience; second, analyzing Rem Koolhaas’ essay titled “The Generic City” with an emphasis on the issue of experience; and third, extending the implications of architectural/urban experience as addressed in above two works into a case of photographer Park Hong-cheon’s photo-collage of 21st-century Seoul. Through these three cases, I argue that everyday experience in contemporary Korea is always entangled with a pair of ambivalent states of being such as curiosity and boredom, interest and disinterest, anxiety and serenity, and wonder and indifference.

A talk at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 20-21.

This talk will offer a survey of architectural history in Korea from 1988 to the present. During this time period that is roughly around three decades, Korea has experienced an unprecedentedly dynamic modern history both politically and culturally, and architecture is a threshold enabling us to look at such dynamism. Ranging from stadiums and war memorials to mnemonic designs that are reminiscent of traditional architecture, as well as from projects of urban regeneration and multi-sensory installations to shared houses and pavilions, Korean architecture after 1988 illustrates an overriding move towards globalization, which is however deeply entangled with disparate practices in disciplinary and affective ways. Instead of putting the term ‘globalization’ in contrast to more ‘authentic’ modes of practice, this chapter addresses how the forces of globalization have evoked what Bruno Latour claims by a “glorified form of provincialism,” in ways to unfold new rhythms and intensities that are spectacular and at times alienating but still regionally bound and sense-provoking. By overviewing major—and often highly debated—architectural and urban projects, exhibitions, installations, unbuilt projects, and some influential publications, this chapter brings forth a historiography of Korean architecture, without too much relying on the strict binaries between the global and the local, the traditional and the modern, and the spectacular and the ordinary. Attention is also made to not so much how building is designed as how it performs in daily life, through which to explore the experiential dimensions of architecture and the city in 21st- century Korea.

An upcoming presentation at: 2017 UIA Meeting held in Seoul, September 3-10, at Dongdaemun Design Plaza.

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This paper examines the intricate relationship between urban identity, transnational architectural practices, and media spectacles in contemporary Asia, by taking architect Zaha Hadid’s 2014 project Dongdaemun Design Plaza as a case. Known as DDP, Hadid’s work is a mega-scale structure located at the heart of Seoul, which is characterized by its spacecraft-like, “neofuturistic” form that is often put in drastic contrast to the nearby environments—including historical sites, bazaars, ordinary buildings, and modern skyscrapers—all of which reflect the multiple strata of urban practices accumulated during the past centuries. Instead of relying on such a binary opposition between the ‘authentic’ forms of urban identity and an imposition from the outside, this paper argues that Hadid’s work elicits the complex formation of urban identity in 21st-century Korea, which consists of disparate forces, events, improvisations, interventions, provocations, representations, and tensions at multiple levels and in various scales. Not only is DDP a public space where visitors encounter and interact with each other without forming an organic sense of community, it brings forth a territory in which they come across the building in aleatory ways, both through their tactile experiences of the building and through its media representations. As Elizabeth Grosz might claim, DDP is an “assemblage” that is comprised of affective instances that cannot simply be reduced to its idiosyncratic form and space, image spectacles, and the mindless repetition of the same onto the Asian city, thereby blurring the lines between private and public, spectacular and ordinary, local and global, and inside and outside.

A conference to be held at Harvard University, May 6-7, 2017

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In my presentation, I offer a historiography of advertising mediascapes in South Korea from 1953 to the present, from which to address how ordinary cityscapes in the country have become a communal arena where moments of provocation, improvisation, and innovation unfold. While the scholarship of new media urbanism in Korea is most often focused on the discussions of media arts and media façades that have predominated in the public domain since around 2000, I contend that such a notion neglects a longer history of media urbanism that consists of not only high-tech media practices in art form but also comparably low-tech, thoroughly commercial, but still highly expressive forms of urban practice such as billboards, neon signs, banners, posters, digital screens, and graffiti works. Although it is most often that the former brings forth ways of practicing media ecology through intense criticisms on the negativity of what the low-tech, and degenerated forms of urban media produce, such as visual and aural pollution and the waning of mood and affects, it is my argument that both kinds of practices are crucial constituents in shaping an interactive field where one can constantly be in relationship with differing strata of media-saturated urban environments without being completely subjugated by them.

The fall conference organized by the Architectural Institute of Korea

BEXCO, Busan, October 4-6, 2016

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This article examines the relationship between design guideline and urban experience, by taking the recent mega-scale urban project in Korea titled <Design Seoul>, and American artist Vito Acconci’s performance work called <Following Piece> (1969) as cases. While <Design Seoul> is a case reflecting the city government’s strong desire of imposing an ideal image of the city through a set of design strategies, it is interesting to note that such a desire is at times ignored, modified, and followed in multiple ways, as entangled with various individuals’ perceptive and affective dimensions. In other words, guidelines implemented by the municipal project expand into multiple paths so that the resulting city space is not so much a predicated arena where given rules are strictly followed, but rather an imbrication of those rules, improvisations, and inflections all of which constitute the multiplicity of city life. In this respect Acconci’s <Following Piece> gives us a crucial lessen in understanding the nature of urban experience as fundamentally unpredictable and improvisational: to follow someone else’ path as a threshold without being subjugated by given rules, which enables us to open up new modes of experiencing the city in creative ways.

This paper explores the affective dimension of contemporary South Korean urbanism by focusing on ways in which a myriad of individual—often commercial by nature—urban practices occurring in Korean cities construct a multi-sensory space for urban community, which cannot be reduced to the general rubrics of spectacle or the visual representation of the contemporary city. Walking the streets in the city like Seoul encourages one not only to look at visually flamboyant streetscapes, but also to ‘enchant’ urban territories that are shaped at the intersection of the visual and other sensory— sonorous and olfactory—dimensions that perpetually appear and disappear at varying tempos and rhythms, which cannot thus be fully grasped and materialized. Such a dynamism and vibrancy of Korean cities is at times embraced, but is most often considered the result of the postwar urbanization process that lacks systematic design guidelines and top-down government interventions. Instead of relying on ‘proper’ or ideal notions of the city that are critical against contemporary Korean cityscapes, I claim that Korean cities comprised of spontaneous and non-institutionalized visual and aural spectacles elicit a flexible, vibrant, and affective territory where senses of community arise without forming a perfect communion.

Location: Fudan University, Shanghai, China

More Info: A panel titled "Sound, Mobility and Urban Space" that is part of the Communication and China·Fudan University Forum 2015

Organization: Communication and China·Fudan University Forum 2015

Forum Date: December 19-20, 2015

My paper focuses on examining the French painter Manoel Pillard’s nightscape paintings produced during his trips to Seoul between 1998 and 2008, in order to explore the affective dimensions of commercial signage, and the way they can create a mood, and ultimately set up a world of sense that is simultaneously social, physical, and communal. In his series of oil paintings, Pillard scrupulously renders each commercial sign in great detail, without failing to capture the way the multiple neon signs create a particular mood and atmosphere in Seoul’s nightscape. The issues of mood and affect pose a challenge to the typical ways of approaching commercial signs in Korean scholarship, which tends to treat them as an objectively observable and analyzable set of objects separated from experience, perception, and the body. Against these empirical/scientific approaches, this paper shows that Pillard’s paintings provide the viewer with the opportunity to perceive commercial environments in Korea as an affective domain in meaningful ways that cannot be reduced to legibility, clarity, or even linguistic meaning. In doing so, this paper brings Pillard’s paintings in conversation with Heidegger’s account of mood as a way of mediating and meditating on the phenomenological dimension of everyday life.

Location: Busan Exhibition and Conference Center, Busan, South Korea

More Info: 2015 ELLAK International Conference, "Space/Spacialites: Practices, Encounters, and Articulations"

Organization: The English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK)

Conference Date: December 10-12, 2015

In this lecture, I offer an investigation of the recent and ongoing fashion of making 'design guideline' in contemporary Korea, in order to further explore the subtle and often complicated relationship between an establishment of rule and its following, which resonates with the claim addressed by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein often known as the issue of "rule-following." In doing so, I focus on two different sets of cases: one drawn from Design Seoul, a mega-scale urban project ambitiously taken up by the former city mayor of Seoul Oh Se-hoon; and another drawn from two contemporary artists’ works exploring the relationship between a rule and its following in their practices. While cases of Design Seoul reflect the city government’s strong desire of imposing an ideal image of the city throughout the project, such a desire is at times ignored, inflected, and followed in aleatory manners. However, it does not so much mean that such improvisational and indeterminate aspects of Design Seoul defy what those guidelines make clear, but rather reflects how established rules are perceived and experienced in everyday life by an array of city participants whose subjectivity is simultaneously porous and atonomous. Cases from contemporary art include works of Vito Acconci and Lee Bul that inflect the complex relationship between rules and their followings in everyday life.

Lecture delivered at The Design Center in the Changwon National University, November 23, 2015

This is a presentation that I will deliver at the 2015 Fall conference at the Urban Design Institute of Korea. In it I will present a case study of the signboard renovation project in Gunpo city through a particular analysis on the TV documentary broadcast at Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS), which captures the step-by-step process of the renovation in collaboration with various stakeholders.

Location: Daegu Catholic University, Daegu

More Info: The 2015 Fall Conference organized by the Urban Design Institute of Korea

Organization: Urban Design Institute of Korea

Conference Date: November 7, 2015

One of the most prominent, but still understudied, aspects of contemporary Korean urbanism is the prolific and often dense array of advertising, most often consisting of billboards and neon-signs of store names and announcements hung on the exterior of commercial buildings, and the vibrant and dynamic urban moods created by them. In my presentation, I focus on the French painter Manoël Pillard’s nightscape paintings produced during his trips to Seoul between 1998 and 2008, in order to explore the affectivity of sign-filled urban environments in contemporary Korea, and the way they create a mood, and ultimately set up a world of sense that is simultaneously social, physical, and communal. In his series of oil paintings, Pillard scrupulously renders each commercial sign in great detail, without failing to capture the way that multiple neon signs create a particular mood and atmosphere in Seoul’s nightscape. The issues of mood and affect pose a challenge to the typical ways of approaching commercial signs in the Korean scholarship, which tends to treat them as an objectively observable and analyzable set of objects separated from experience, perception, and the body. Against these empirical/scientific approaches, my presentation addresses that Pillard’s paintings provide the viewer with the opportunity to perceive commercial environments in Korea as an affective domain in meaningful ways that cannot be reduced to legibility, clarity, or linguistic meaning. In doing so, I will put Pillard’s paintings in conversation with the rich scholarship of affect, as well as taking philosopher Martin Heidegger’s account of mood as a way of mediating of and meditating on the phenomenological dimension of everyday life.

Location: Haenyeo Museum & Jeju Stone Park,  Jeju, South Korea

More Info: "Re-thinking Lifescape: Linking Landscape to Everyday Life"

Organization: ICOMOS-IFLA ISCCL 2015 Annual Meeting/International Symposium

Conference Date: November 1-6, 2015

This is a public lecture to be delivered at the Gyeongnam Art Museum in October 20, 2015 (in Korean). With the title, I intend to explore what it means by being in common in the Korean urban context, through which to challenge the predicated notion of community and thus to propose a new way of thinking about urban community in contemporary Korea.

A talk given at the Council for East Asian Studies at Yale University, as part of the postdoctoral lecture series, November 4, 2014.

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One of the most prominent, but still understudied, aspects of Korean urbanism is the prolific and often dense array of advertising, most often consisting of billboards and neon-signs of store names and announcements hung on the exterior of commercial buildings. In this talk, Paek will focus on discussing how sign-filled environments in South Korean cities are a crucial part of everyday urban experience, where people can find new ways of being in common and making sense, which cannot be simply reduced to our general rubrics of spectacle, private consumption, or the culture industry. From its first appearance in Korean public space in the early 20th century, commercial signage has prompted vigorous criticism, which sees it as a disruption of ideal and top-down government planning, a primary example of urban degeneration and alienation, and evidence of the complete loss of critical and public space. Instead of entirely disregarding such critical interpretations of commercial signage, Paek looks at the diverse modes of interaction between urban populations and the affective dimensions of commercial signage, thus fostering a reconsideration of the relationship between urbanism and everyday life in South Korea. In doing so, Paek aims to reveal another way of thinking about Korean urbanism in the post-war period, which locates some of the more ethically and politically challenging models of urbanism and community in these commercially saturated environments.

One of the most prominent aspects of contemporary Asian cities is the ephemeral nature of cityscapes comprised of the dense array of advertising, most often consisting of billboards and neon-signs of store names and announcements hung on the exterior of commercial buildings. This paper will explore the singularity of everyday urban space in South Korea, by analyzing a series of experimental video works made by a contemporary Korean artist named Park June-bum, which simulate the step-by-step process in which small-scale commercial signboards are attached to the exteriors of ordinary commercial buildings in the miniaturized models he creates for his videos. Although at first glance it seems that Park’s works emphasize the presence of an omnipotent power manipulating everyday life, one comes to realize that there is a more subtle relationship between the sovereign power, represented by the physical hands in the films, and the activities of everyday life. In other words, in Park’s works there is no real hierarchical order between the two realms, in the sense that the “sovereign hands” always hesitantly follow what is occurring at the ground level, without completely grasping and overriding it. What is thus disclosed throughout the videos is the singularity of everyday urbanism that each performance of sign attachment played by the artist deconstructs the ostensibly firm relationship between the accumulated signs and the “sovereign hands,” and constructs the complicated relationships and spatial rhythms between the two realms. As Gilles Deleuze pointed out that power relations always “move one point to another” and generate “inflections, resistances, twists and turns” according to every change being made, the dynamic interplay between the sovereign power and the activities of everyday life opens up the multiple layers of affective and perceptive dimensions of everyday urban space that are always latent in Korean cities.


Location: Savannah

More Info: Palimpsest: The Layered Object, the Fifth Biennial Art History Symposium at The Savannah College of Art and Design

Organization: The Savannah College of Art and Design

Conference Date: Feb 28-Mar 1, 2014

One of the most prominent, but still understudied, aspects of Asian cityscapes is the prolific and often dense array of advertising, most often consisting of billboards and neon-signs of store names and announcements hung on the exterior of commercial buildings. This paper will explore one case study of an attempt by a municipal/city government in Gunpo City, South Korea, to “collaborate” with private enterprise to regulate and order the dense signage on one specific commercial building, Gwangrim Plaza. The resulting meetings and conversations between the government officials who were in charge of regulating urban signage and the numerous shopkeepers who own the stores in the Plaza, resulted in a four-part documentary series that was televised on the Seoul Broadcasting System in 2007. This widely televised series was clearly meant to be an exemplary moment in how government wanted to educate the broader Korean public about proper civic behaviour and good urban form. On a closer examination, the film series does not show a harmonious and smooth communication between the government and the commercial store and service owners affected, but rather a series of conflicts and disagreements, not only between the two parties but also within the realm of the shopkeepers and the government officials respectively. Although the narrative of the film treats those conflicts or interruptions as merely temporary obstacles in the “inevitable” achievement of this ambitious project, it is my claim that, as Jean-Luc Nancy notes, those interruptions, suspensions, and instances of dissensus in the smooth narrative are the critical moments where a sense of community in everyday urban life manifests itself.


Location: San Diego

Organization: The Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies

Conference Date: Conference Start Date: Mar 21-24, 2013

A book review of Bruno Latour's Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) published at <Architecture> 63(12), a magazine published by the Architectural Institute of Korea, December 2019

Co-chairing with Jieheerah Yun, a colleague of mine who works at the Seoul campus of Hongik University, I will run a paper session entitled "Urban Affects: A New Materialist Approach to the Global City." Attached is the detailed description of our calls for paper, which is also available at the SAH webpage: https://www.sah.org/2020/call-for-papers

An essay included for the Bulryangseonin (Bad-virtuous men) Annals vol.1; it is a result of three like-minded curators' work (Cho Hyun-dae, Kwak No-won, and Huh Nam-joo) that was pursued under the title, Urban Ghost Stories, also funded by the City Ministry of Seoul in 2017.

For the project, I was invited to give a talk on ghost stories and the affect theory first, where I also led a conversation that appears in the booklet. Second is an essay based on the overall theme; in the essay, I focus on articulating broader implications of what ghost stories mean in their relationship with urbanism.

This is an abstract of my dissertation submitted to the History of Art department at the Ohio State University in 2014.

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1404664900

My dissertation will investigate South Korean urbanism through the phenomenon of commercial signs, one of the most prominent but understudied aspects of the cityscape in the country. Known as kanp'an in Korean, commercial signage refers to the prolific and often dense array of advertisements, generally consisting of billboards and neon-signs with store names and announcements hung on the exteriors of commercial buildings. From its first appearance in Korean public space in the early 20th century, commercial signage has prompted vigorous criticism, which sees it as a disruption of ideal and top-down government planning, a primary example of urban degeneration and alienation, and evidence of the complete loss of critical and public space.

Although commercial signs are often seen as a corruption of public space due to the inundation of consumerism and capital, I argue that these environments are a crucial part of everyday urban experience, where people can find new ways of being in common and making sense, which cannot be simply reduced to our general rubrics of spectacle, private consumption, or the culture industry. Instead of describing commercial signage as a given, objective entity, I focus on the diverse modes of interaction between urban populations and the affective dimensions of commercial signage, thus fostering a reconsideration of the relationship between urbanism and everyday life in South Korea. My goal is to reveal another way of thinking about Korean urbanism in the postwar period, which locates some of the more ethically and politically challenging models of urbanism and community in these commercially saturated environments. In doing so, I offer a much more complex interpretation of urban space, and suggest new ways of looking at the interlocking realms of public, private, and commercial space in East Asian cities in general, and in postwar Korea in particular.

This study examines the heterogeneous modernity of South Korea as evinced in the phenomenon of ‘Korean Commercial Architecture’, that has been a crucial part of everyday life since the 20th century. Regardless of its popularity as the medium for modernization, small-scale commercial buildings have been strongly criticized by architectural historians in the country because of their distracting exterior form full of multiple signboards. Moreover, the subject was neglected in the discourses of architecture which prefer disciplined architectural designs to the rest of the ordinary buildings comprised of undisciplined commercial decorations. Against the conventional perspective, this study argues Korean commercial architecture not only reveals the fragmentary, transient, and ephemeral modernity of South Korea, but becomes the emancipatory moments of the repressed collective in the public realm. Korean commercial architecture thus shows an alternative narrative of modern architecture which mediates the relationship between everyday life and modernity.

The increasing decentralized forces – from transformation of workforces, ecological and environmental change to migration, industrialization, and city branding – generate new manners of engagement and new forms of life. However, cities continue to operate within disputed forms of urban renewal and antiquated but still strong models of real-estate speculation.

IARC 475 Comprehensive Capstone Studio and PR25086 Architectural Design Studio IV is a joint-studio program in collaboration with the University of Tennessee Knoxville USA and Pusan National University, South Korea which aspires to explore these continuing urban problems.
A team of four students will have an opportunity to choose a site either in San Diego, USA, or Busan in South Korea.

The site will look at either asylum seekers and refugees specifically from the world, or the environments related to the lives of migrant (foreign) workers in the greater Busan metropolitan area. Part of the studio will require developing their program through extensive research of the geographical location, current economy, political, social, cultural, and climatic background.
There will also be a series of diagrammatic exercises for in-depth analysis. As a studio, we plan to develop a research book after the first three weeks of the IDEC competition.

Students in Knoxville will have an opportunity to visit Los Angeles and San Diego during the semester, while those in Busan will visit the sites related to the lives of (foreign) migrants. The studio will run both in-person meetings and Zoom meetings with the students from two schools.

An elective course opened for fifth-year students primary but open to everyone. Theory-based but also practically driven. Offering an overview of the post-1968 architectural theory which is coupled with a series of field trips and in-class workshops and discussions, all of which are designed to encourage each student's grounding of his/her design works.