Image: Courtesy of the Artist and Real DMZ Project, Photo by Ahina, Natural/dyed sedge, white sands, Installation of eight pairs of shoes for cranes. Production in collaboration with Choong Kyung Lee, Straw-weaving Master.

White Cranes and Snowfall (2024) was produced as an outcome of Young In Hong’s research trip to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in the winter of 2023 observing a number of rare cranes migrating to the area. The work seeks to represent a hybrid territory where humans, birds, and their relations are metaphorically re-envisaged through a set of sedge woven shoes for cranes. These shoes theatrically express the presence of cranes humorously mimicking the human world by wearing individually different designed boots. Hong tried to see them as different individuals rather than as a group of anonymous ‘cranes’; each crane was personified as they were observed in the peaceful snowy fields. The once blood-stained DMZ was thus transformed into an ecological paradise for the cranes. When nature is left alone it can replenish its lives, and when humans observe other species more carefully, they can learn something from them that alters their way of being in the world.

White Cranes and Snowfall was a new commission for Forms of the Shadow (Secession Vienna 2024) and Undo Planet (Art Sonje Center Seoul 2024)