The conference brings together contemporaneous views from the cultural and artistic perspectives. Creators, researchers, critics, and curators in the field of literature, architecture, art, and film introduce their own researches and share their opinions on the DMZ and the state of Division in the Korean Peninsula. Korean-Japanese novelist Yu Miri tells the story of her family history from the perspective of a peripheral entity. Yu also shares her experiences in visiting North Korea three times, and the conversations she had on the state of Division while visiting South Korea. Architect Yehre Seo identifies a correlation between the strategic urban development we see in South and North Koreas and the ideological threats surrounding Seoul and Pyeongyang and explains how the post-war structure gave birth to a parallel dystopia that governs and restricts of the subjects in the two Koreas. Art Critic Gim Jong gil focuses on the process of how resistant art practices that aim to transform the DMZ from a forbidden symbol of Cold War into an aesthetic space of creativity have developed in full-scale since the 1980s, by presenting key exhibitions and projects. Scholar Seung-hoon Jeong maps out the “Southeast Network” that encompasses Japan, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Southeast China along with the “Northwest network” consisting of South Korea, North Korea, Russia, and Northwest China, analyzing the “global Korean cinema” that directly or indirectly illuminate the implications of the DMZ. Also, sound artist Mika Vanio introduces electronic sound performance. In addition, DMZ related art works and DMZ Peace Project research materials were simultaneously exhibited at Artsonje Center’s 1st floor Project Space and outdoor banner project, and a collection of conference papers was published under the title of DMZ – Stories of Today and Tomorrow.

Yu Miri was born on June 22, 1968 in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, as a second-generation Korean in Japan. After voluntarily withdrawing from high school after her freshman year, she joined the theatrical troupe “Tokyo Kid Brothers” and began a career in acting. In 1986, she formed the theatrical group “Seishun gogatsutō” (Youth and May Party) and published ten individual plays. In 1993, she became the youngest recipient of the annual Kishida Kunio Drama Award for her play The Festival of the Fish (Sakana no matsuri). In 1996, her first collection of short stories, entitled Full House, was published and earned both the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature and Noma Literary New Face Prize. In 1997, she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for Family Cinema (Kazoku shinema), but the book-signing scheduled to commemorate the award was cancelled due to telephone threats from a man claiming to be affiliated with the Japanese right-wing. This incident was not only widely reported by the Japanese and South Korean mass media, but was also taken up by Le Monde, The New York Times, and BBC World, among other international news outlets, and condemned as an “attack against the freedom of speech.” In 1999, her novel Gold Rush won the Kiyama Shōhei Literary Award. Her four-part novel series, comprising Life (Inochi), Soul (Tamashī), Living (Sei) and Voice (Koe), which was first serialized beginning in 1999 in the magazine Monthly Post (Gekkan posuto), has become a best-seller, having sold more than one million volumes in total, and in 2001 it received the Editors’ Choice Magazine Journalism Award for literature. Her novel The End of August (Hachigatsu no hate), which in April 2002 began simultaneous serialization in the newspapers Dong-a Ilbo and Asahi shinbun, has drawn controversy for depicting the Korean peninsula under Japanese colonial rule and featuring former comfort women as characters. Among her recent works are a collection of interviews, entitled Do Not Speak Words Lighter than Silence (Chinmoku yori karui kotoba wo hassuru nakare), as well as the novels Suicide Country (Jisatsu no kuni) and JR Ueno Station Park Exit (JR Ueno eki kōen guchi).

Yehre Suh is an architect, urban designer and educator. She is currently the Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Seoul National University, Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Department of Landscape Architecture. She has also taught at Cornell University, Barnard College/Columbia University, City College of New York and Pratt Institute. She is the Principal of Office of Urban Terrains and is a licensed architect in the State of New York and New Jersey, USA and is a LEED AP BD+C accredited professional. Yehre Suh progresses research and design projects on architecture and the city as a means to investigate alternative spatial strategies and scenarios. Her work focuses on the social, political, economic actor capabilities of architecture and the urban environment and investigates possibilities of flexible and sustainable mechanisms utilizing artificial and natural ecological systems. Her project “Parallel Utopias,” which dealt with the parallel conditions of North and South Korean architecture and urbanism was awarded the Graham Foundation Grant in 2008, Cornell Arts Council Grant in 2009, 2010, Rotch Foundation Grant in 2012, and was part of the 14th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion exhibition in 2014.

Gim jong gil is an art critic, currently working as a curator and a faciliator in the field of cultures and arts policy. He heads the policy development team in the Gyeonggi Culture Foundation, and is participating in the . He is also the assistant director of On Baewoomtoe Life Culture Research Institute at Green University, a board member at the Peace Museum, Knowledge Circulation Cooperative curriculum development committee member, Personage Art History Association research committee member, and a research fellow in the Curator Association of Korea. He has been awarded the Korean Art Critic Association New Critic Award, Nature Art Theory Research Award, Monthly Art Exhibition and Planning Participation Prize, Kim Bok-jin Art Theory Award, and the Curator of the Year Award. His research focus lies in the grotesque oppression resulting from Korea’s division and the Cold War legacies in East Asia, as well as their aesthetic representation. In particular, he writes on experimental performance art, video part, conceptual object installation, photomontage, and realist paintings/sculptures as modes of resistance and practice. Recently, he published a book entitled 『Post-People’s Art Shaman/Realism』, and is currently working on theproject, building an art history archive on an arts coterie called ‘Durung,’ launched in 1984.

A former film critic in South Korea, Seung-hoon Jeong specializes in film theory and philosophy in relation to diverse modes, areas, and periods of cinema. His current research on global cinema explores a variety of global phenomena around cosmopolitanism, terrorism, network, and ecology in their cinematic representation and critical theory. Jeong received Korea’s Cine21 Film Criticism Award (2003), a Domitor Essay Award on early cinema (2007), and the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Dissertation Award (2012). He is author of Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory After New Media (Routledge, 2013), co-translator of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature in Korean (Moonji, 2013), and is co-editing A Companion to Korean Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, expected in 2016). He has published and presented on various filmmakers including Werner Herzog, Peter Greenaway, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, on major theorists such as André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Rancière, and on cinematic issues related to the animal/ghost/machine, memory/mind/media, and catastrophe.

Mika Vainio, currently based in Berlin, was one half of the minimal electronic duo Pan Sonic from Finland, (the other half was Ilpo Väisänen). His solo works, under his own name and under aliases like Ø, are known for their analogue warmth and electronic harshness. Be it abstract drone works or minimal avant techno, Vainio is creating unique and physical sounds.