MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho, El Fin del Mundo, 2012 ©MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho

In 2012, the artist duo MOON Kyungwon (b. 1969) and JEON Joonho (b. 1969) presented the video work El Fin del Mundo at documenta in Kassel, Germany. Two screens installed side by side depict a man and a woman living in completely separate worlds. The man, played by actor Lee Jung-jae, is an artist who continues to pursue art even as the end of the world approaches, inhabiting a worn and decaying environment thick with dust.

The woman, portrayed by actress Lim Soo-jung, represents a new form of humanity in the future, living in a sterile laboratory-like space surrounded by machines. The disconnection between the two worlds is also clearly expressed through color. The man’s world retains a trace of warmth, illuminated by the faint orange glow of a sunset filtering through a window, while the woman’s space is dominated by cold, blue, and sharp fluorescent light.
 
El Fin del Mundo is part of MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho’s long-term project News from Nowhere. The title originates from a novel by the British artist William Morris written at the end of the nineteenth century. In this pioneering utopian narrative, Morris described an ideal society that would emerge after a revolution in the distant future. Reinterpreting Morris’s perspective in a contemporary context, MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho imagine a world that emerges after the collapse of civilization caused by technological development and the destructive consequences of capitalism. While Morris believed that revolution could eliminate social problems, artists of the twenty-first century—facing threats to human survival such as war, mass destruction, climate crisis, and ecological disruption—no longer envision a perfect utopia.
 
Near the end of the roughly thirteen-minute video, the woman accidentally encounters a work left behind by the man across time and space. Through this encounter, she faintly senses the presence of nature—already vanished—and the beauty of art. In a world increasingly overwhelmed by the power of machines created by humans, the work raises a question: how long will art continue to survive?

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