Geography of Disintegration – At the Ruins of Militarized Modernity

In Geopolitics of the Visible: Photographs by Che One-Joon

Monograph essay published by Noonbit Press, Seoul, 2009

© Images Copyright: the Artist and Noonbit Press, Seoul

Abstract:

That geopolitics of the Cold War is still gripping the Korean peninsula is

evidenced by the presence of various types of military facilities that are

now on the verge of extinction in South Korea. The photographer One Joon

Che documents what are now the largely forgotten structures from the

bygone era of South Korean anticommunist regimes. The defunct military

facilities include secret hiding places for the high-ranking officials, bunkers

for the general public, defense lines against the North Korean invasion, and

the vacant U.S. military camps after the repositioning of the troops by the

U.S. Department of Defense in light of the shifting geopolitical climate in

East Asia.

One Joon Che’s photographs are archeological studies of the ruins of

militarized modernity. Che presents the traces of erasures as sites of

negation, disorder, and desertion. Che photographs the current condition

of the facilities “after the fact,” after they have become a ghost of the

past. The facilities index the series of violent struggles between the two

Koreas in the aftermath of the Korean War, and the threat of another war.

The facilities also evoke national South Korean collective

consciousness, however, its essence is the vacuity of collective identity

situated within the public sphere. The empty voids depicted in the ruins in

Che’s images have little to do with the aesthetics of emptiness often

associated with Eastern philosophy, but rather they signify the history of

violent ruptures. However, Che laments that such void will soon be filled

according to the logic of capital. As evidence and document of the actual

physical traces of militarized modernity of Korea, Che’s photographs

question the meaning of collective identity and trauma, and imagine

taxonomy of empty spaces of geopolitical significance.