OLDENBURG.- The Haus for Media Art Oldenburg presents a duo exhibition by Yehwan Song and Kwang-Ju Son, titled The Square and the Cross.
Two Korean female artists of differing generations employ divergent strategies to interrogate questions of identity, connection, history, and the far-reaching influence of colonialism, both digital and historical, on lived experience and language.
Yehwan Song’s grand video installation, The Square (2023–2026), occupies the upper gallery, its fragile and intricate structure animated by a singular ambition: to imagine the internet otherwise. Song has long investigated the internet’s evolution—how it has fundamentally reshaped human behavior, reordering users’ purpose and reconditioning their patterns of attention. What began as a promise of open access, boundless knowledge, and unfettered space for social and political discussion and discovery has, in the present moment, contracted into something narrower: social media platforms run by algorithms, search engines governed by huge, unaccountable corporations, and AI chat systems over which users hold neither influence nor oversight—each of us sealed within our own echo chamber. The utopian premise of the early internet has curdled into something closer to dystopia. “You can navigate but not toward any destination,” the artist writes in an accompanying poem.
Song makes visible this cyberspace transformation by designing deliberately “anti-user-friendly” technologies, blending digital and physical media to draw viewers into an act of genuine navigation—a radical, playful, and unmistakably political gesture of reclaiming the online sphere.
The installation’s title, The Square, borrows from Choi In-hun’s 1960 novel of the same name, often regarded as a key work of Korean modernist literature. Set against the backdrop of a nation split by war and ideology, the book probes whether a balanced, honest life is possible between the claims of private existence (the chamber) and those of collective life (the square). Its protagonist moves between South and North Korea, testing his political convictions against each society in turn, searching for a place where a full and undivided human experience might still be lived.
Song draws out a parallel metaphor through mourning the disappearance of online homepages: these were once the chamber, the private space where desire and hidden individuality could be lived out, that one entered before stepping into the square, the shared square of interaction and exchange.
Division and dichotomy, borders and continuous landscapes, are equally central to the work of filmmaker Kwang-Ju Son. The lower galleries, with their intimate, darkened rooms suited to immersive cinematic presentation, host a selection of her work spanning more than twenty years. Son’s practice traverses fiction, documentary, experimental film, and video installation, investigating landscapes shaped by overlapping temporalities and the accumulation of historical, political, and spiritual forces. Her exhibition centers on The Holy City (2026), an essay-film and video installation that critically examines the symbolic and political significance of Christianity in contemporary Korean society. With a particular focus on the Cross as a site of dispersion, the installation attempts to reveal how Christianity has become intertwined with different historical, political, and social forces and how these layers continue to coexist within the contemporary landscape.
Son’s project explores how the Cross evolved from a foreign symbol to become deeply entrenched in the Korean cultural landscape while increasingly moving away from its religious origins. The Holy City seeks to capture those fragile moments where salvation, faith, and enlightenment slip from the spiritual context—distorted, secularized, and repurposed within the ideologies of the modern world.
Across her films, Son returns to a specific haunting portrait: a society of “system-compliant human beings” laboring in quiet devotion toward a future that remains uncertain. These portraits bear no judgment, and are instead fueled by compassion—a tenderness for the world the artist observes. Her work is equally drawn to the way different temporalities bleed into one another: how people carry forward the structures and desires of the past, even as they are pulled, almost against their will, toward a horizon they cannot see. Moving between observation and speculation, Son’s poetic cinematic projects explore how collective affects, beliefs, and memories condense into images and social formations.
