MOON Kyungwon & JEON Joonho started collaborating in 2009, when they were thinking about contemporary art and its meaning, the expendability of exhibitions, and the absence of criticism in their own work, and decided to make art that is practical and gives them a chance to reflect on themselves. They were awarded the 1st Multitude Art Prize (2013), Noon Award at Gwangju Biennale (2012) and the MMCA Korean Artist Award 2012.
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?
