Chan Sook Choi

The works of the Yangji-ri Archive (2025) form a complex constellation resulting from Chan Sook Choi’s long-term engagement with Yangji-ri. Located near the DMZ, Yangji-ri is one of 112 Minbuk settlements established by the government after the 1953 armistice. These “strategic villages” were designed as propaganda tools to demonstrate superiority over the North, yet they subjected residents to strict military surveillance.

Choi excavates the lives of women within this patriarchal structure. Under the former Hoju system, inheritance was exclusively patrilineal; war widows who cultivated the land remained legally invisible, unable to claim ownership. The video work 60Ho critiques this erasure, referencing how women were stripped of individuality and addressed by soldiers only by their house numbers.

The Yangji-ri Archive materializes this history through concrete models of the village’s identical housing and name plaques that evoke funerary tablets. Alongside these traces, Artificial Sun centers on a radiant heater, highlighting the physical fragility of life in poorly constructed homes during harsh winters.

This inquiry expands in qbit to adam, which juxtaposes Yangji-ri with the Chajnantor Plateau in Chile, home to a massive international observatory. By connecting a militarized border village to a remote scientific site, Choi interrogates how states and institutions stake claims over territory—whether for ideology, resources, or knowledge—bringing visibility to the inhabitants and environments occupied by these vast systems.