Manipulated image of military exercises by the People's Army of Korea

Hyounsang Yoo's works explore relationships between history and ideas of production of reality through photography, video, installation and sculpture. In his series “Brave New World,” the namesake of Aldous Huxley’s novel about a dystopian state, South Korean artist Hyounsang Yoo mimics North Korean media. Appropriating official photographs from the North Korean Press agency KCNA, Yoo crops them into segments, reproducing the newly “censored” images as slides to be projected inside a Kodak Ektagraphic AudioViewer Projector. Controlling every step in an intentionally convoluted working process, he then re-photographs the desktop projectors in the studio against a black backdrop, transforming the original images into new forms. The press photographs Yoo manipulates are themselves Cold War era images reworked for current consumption: nuclear tests, military exercises, and the rising sun and guns that symbolize the eternal president Kim Il-sung. Using outdated technology and propaganda still in circulation half a century later, Yoo derides the obsoleteness, credibility, and tight control of North Korean media.