Gwon Donghyun (b. 1982) and Kwon Seajung (b. 1988) formed a collective in 2020 and have since explored and re-presented moments in which human and non-human subjects become entangled and interconnected through video, sculpture, and installation. Gwon Donghyun has primarily worked with sculpture, while Kwon Seajung has focused on installation and video; in their collaborative practice, the two complement one another by addressing what each medium alone cannot fully articulate.

Gwon Donghyun and Kwon Seajung began to seriously envision their collaboration in 2021, during conversations about a dog that Kwon Seajung had lived with for many years and that had fallen ill. Since forming the collective, the artists have presented experimental documentary videos, sculptures, and installations that center on dogs, weaving together themes of human–animal relationships, care, the city, and modernization.

The work Seddy, How to Meet Dodo (2021), created as a result of this collaboration, is a video that documents the experience of introducing a pet care robot when “Dodo,” an elderly dog who had long lived with Kwon Seajung, became ill. While away from home, the artists remotely operated the care robot “Seddy” to check whether Dodo was in any kind of emergency.
 
In fact, “Seddy” was nothing more than a home camera on wheels that moved around and filmed the interior. However, by fabricating and attaching a human-like face to the body of this home camera, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung endowed it with the status of a robot.
 
Borrowing the body of “Seddy”—a robot that conveys the owner’s voice through a human-like form familiar to a dog—the artists attempt to communicate with Dodo. Transforming into “Seddy,” which operates from a lower vantage point than Dodo and moves in a crude, awkward manner, evokes emotions that are at once familiar and strange, opening a fissure within the notions of care and the habitual relationship between companion and companion animal.

Furthermore, in the group exhibition 《You Cannot Elaborate the Dark Thickness of Night As They Can》 (2024) at DOOSAN Gallery, the duo presented the sculptural work Woman with Dog, Dog with Woman (2023–2024) alongside Seddy, How to Meet Dodo, seeking to render more sensorially the moments spent caring for an ailing dog at home.
 
These sculptures are modeled after figures captured in photographs taken during that period of home care. While conveying intimacy, they also suggest a relationship in flux through gestures that appear similar yet subtly divergent, leaving behind an afterimage—as if the moment, and the relationship itself, might continue to unfold.

Building on this work, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung went on to develop the long-term project series ‘Love Death Dog’ (2022–). This research-based project traces the ways in which humans and animals have coexisted, spanning from narratives of the past shaped by modernization and urbanization to the present, and addressing the diverse histories of relationships between humans and animals.
 
In Love Death Dog City (2022), the artists examine the process by which, since the 1950s, dogs’ place shifted from village alleys into indoor spaces alongside urbanization, tracing how changes in spatial conditions affected the status of dogs. By collecting archival materials from Seoul of that period, Gwon and Kwon sought to better understand the relationships formed between humans and dogs in today’s urban environment.

Subsequently, as the artists revisited the research materials from Love Death Dog City, they sought to address aspects of urbanization that had not been fully examined in the previous work, connecting the structural dimensions of this transformation to the relationship between humans and dogs.
 
In this process, Gwon Donghyun and Kwon Seajung returned to one of the archival photographs they had collected, Jindo Dog of Usuyeong (1914), and began to investigate the historical contexts surrounding it. This inquiry prompted a shift in the project’s focus toward examining how the forced imposition of modernization during Korea’s colonial period intervened in and reshaped relationships between humans and dogs.

The resulting exhibition, 《Love Death Dog》 (YPC SPACE, 2023), marked Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung’s first solo exhibition and brought together a new video work with speculative sculptural practices that trace stories of dogs and humans from over a century ago.
 
The video work Love Death Dog & Epilogue (2023) begins by examining dry glass photographs, which serve as an archive of anthropological investigation conducted on Joseon by the Japanese Empire in the early 20th century. Among the faded images from a series of research measuring Joseon people’s bodies and documenting the local landscape and custom to justify the colonial rule, dogs are with us, as if they’ve been there all along.

Posing the question, “How did this dog end up in a photograph during an anthropological investigation by the Japanese Government-General of Korea?”, the artists trace a history in which the logics of control and domination imposed upon Koreans were extended to the animals living alongside them.
 
Accordingly, in this video, Gwon Donghyun and Kwon Seajung delineate a situation in which humans and nonhumans coexisted at what they describe as an “equally low” position. As measures were taken to limit dogs to human ownership, dispose of ones that were out of human control, and rob their - humans’ and dogs’ alike - bodies as war materials, humans and animals entered modern society together.

Compared to earlier works in the project, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung adopt a more explicitly archival and historical perspective, drawing on documentary sources to derive, from a macroscopic viewpoint, the grounds for interspecies solidarity. At the same time, they address the ethics of the gaze—that is, the hierarchies embedded in acts of looking, capturing, and recording.
 
In the opening section of the video, the artists present a speculative historical epilogue articulated from the perspective of an entity from a distant past, a time when the distinction between humans and animals was not yet clearly defined. In contrast, the latter part features closely observed footage of a companion dog’s final days, filmed with an almost caressing intimacy. By excavating the time nonhuman beings, including dogs, have spent alongside humans, the work prompts viewers to reconsider how we look at the animals that exist beside us today.

Alongside the video, fragments of artificial bodies were dispersed throughout the exhibition space. Sculptural forms—such as sparsely haired forearms and faces that appeared neither fully human nor animal—evoked intermediary beings that could not be anchored to any specific point in the past or future.
 
Situated in the physical space outside the screen, these liminal entities emerge as excavated figures summoned to narrate stories of humans and nonhumans alike. They extend Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung’s ongoing inquiry, developed through the moving image, into the ethics of the gaze through which historical human–nonhuman relations are viewed. This is an attempt to imagine a long-awaited being could finally tell the broader story about “us.”

Following this, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung further expanded the ‘Love Death Dog’ project at 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》 (MMCA, 2025). Alongside a newly developed multi-channel video work, they presented archival objects gathered throughout the project as well as small sculptural works derived from these materials.
 
While Love Death Dog & Epilogue (2023) sought to trace and speculate on the present relationship between dogs and humans through public archives and research-based materials, the new iteration, Love Death Dog & Epilogue (2025), broadens its scope to encompass a wider range of private records and traces. Through this expansion, the work offers a more panoramic view of contemporary human–animal relations.

Furthermore, the new work multilayeredly examines the relationships and narratives between humans and animals by centering not only on dogs but also on another non-human subject: cows. In the Korean Peninsula of the early twentieth century, an agrarian society at the time, cows occupied a central position within institutional systems and state policies. By contrast, despite having long maintained close relationships with humans, dogs were excluded from the social center and treated as peripheral beings—subject to control and objectification.
 
Within the context of human-made systems and cultures, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung expand their inquiry beyond dogs to include cows as an additional non-human subject. By weaving together the stories of multiple beings, they seek to reconsider human–animal relationships within a broader network of interconnections.

The various objects presented alongside the video work move beyond the linear narratives of the materials encountered during the research process, taking form instead as sculptures and crafted objects, each with its own specificity. These sculptures and objects offer insight into how humans have perceived animals, allowing viewers to reflect on the attitudes and gazes through which animals have been regarded.

In this way, Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung continues to delve into the narratives and discourses surrounding hierarchy and coexistence between humans and animals, as well as among humans, as unveiled throughout Korea’s modern and contemporary history. Rather than constructing linear narratives centered on a single event or individual, they pursue open-ended narratives in which the entangled relationships between humans and animals are layered and accumulated. Within these interstices, they reflect on and imagine the possibility of other relationships yet to come.

 “By addressing human stories that are closely intertwined with the situations faced by animals, we came to pursue an open narrative in which relationships between humans and animals are gradually added and layered, rather than a linear narrative centered on a single event or individual.
 
If there is one point that became increasingly clear through the course of this project, it is that the relationship we now have with dogs in urban settings is, in fact, an arbitrary form that has been shaped over a very short period of time. We believe that retracing the process through which such relationships were formed can serve as an important point of departure for imagining other relationships in the future.”  (Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung, interview for 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》, MMCA)

Gwon Donghyun × Kwon Seajung both graduated from Hongik University, majoring in Sculpture and Painting respectively, and formed a collaborative team in 2020. They are currently based in Seoul. Their solo exhibition includes 《Love Death Dog》 (YPC SPACE, Seoul, 2023).
 
Their works have also been presented in numerous group exhibitions and film festivals, including 《Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now》 (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2025); 《You Cannot Elaborate the Dark Thickness of Night As They Can》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2024); 《The Saviour Who Came To Tear My Life Apart, and We*》 (Hapjungjigu, Seoul, 2023); the 49th Seoul Independent Film Festival (SIFF) (Seoul, 2023); Frieze Film Seoul 2022 《I Am My Own Other》 (Together Together, Seoul, 2022); and The 13th Seoul Mediacity Biennale Pre-Program II 《Terra-informing》 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2022).

References

• 국립현대미술관, ARTIST INTERVIEW | Gwon Donghyun×Kwon Seajung | Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), ARTIST INTERVIEW | Gwon Donghyun×Kwon Seajung | Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now)
• 국립현대미술관, [리플렛] 젊은 모색 2025: 지금, 여기 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), [Reflet] Young Korean Artists 2025: Here and Now)
• 한국문화예술위원회, [다원예술] 권동현×권세정: 인간과 개를 넘어, 동물과 동물이 서로 마주하는 순간
• 두산아트센터, [서문] 우리는 개처럼 밤의 깊은 어둠을 파헤칠 수 없다 (DOOSAN Art Center, [Preface] You Cannot Elaborate the Dark Thickness of Night As They Can)
• YPC SPACE, [전시 핸드아웃] 러브 데스 도그 (YPC SPACE, [Handout] Love Death Dog)
• 국립현대미술관, 관계 맺기의 새로운 미학, «젊은 모색 2025: 지금, 여기» 인터뷰 2편