Echoes from the Back(背影畫聲)


Space AfroAsia: AfroAsia – Eco Museum
Dec 6, 2025 – Feb 28, 2026

CHE Onejoon  

Curated by AfroAsia Collective  
Supported by Arts Council Korea

 Dongducheon is a city whose spatial structure and social relations have been shaped by the presence of U.S. military forces for more than seventy years since the Korean War. Here, history does not remain fixed as a series of events belonging to the past. The existence of U.S. military bases has permeated alleyways, commercial districts, residential forms, and even the ways people relate to one another and perceive their everyday lives, continuously driving transformations in the city. Dongducheon is a space where these layered and ongoing changes have accumulated into the present.

The exhibition Echoes from the Back (背影畫聲) begins with the archive of a photography studio in Bosan-dong that operated primarily for U.S. military clientele from 1963 to 2025. The images preserved in this studio constitute a rich repository documenting a fragment of camp town culture formed alongside the military presence. Che Onejoon focuses in particular on the women appearing in these photographs. At the time, women in the camp town occupied a position in which social prejudice and discrimination made it difficult to reveal their faces and identities in public space. Their lives were recorded, yet they were also subjects in need of protection.

Using AI technology, the exhibition reconstructs the women’s figures as back portraits based on their original photographs. This is not a choice made to aesthetically stylize representation or to emphasize technological effects. Rather, through back portraits, the exhibition protects the women’s portrait rights while recording the time and place of their existence, as well as positions that could not be openly spoken. By moving away from frontal portraiture, it proposes a new mode of archiving, one that existed yet did not fully exist. Through the gaze of contemporary viewers, the exhibition invites the imagination of their stories and recalls them into the present as an archive that is both past and future.
The installation using bookshelves, presented for the first time in this exhibition, extends this indirect mode of documentation. The shelves juxtapose records of Dongducheon’s history and sites, including the Yun Geum-i murder case, the Sangpaedong cemetery, and U.S. military firing ranges, with contemporary records related to African migrant communities. These include the Yam Festival and the Nzu ritual, in which flour is applied to the face. Objects collected in Dongducheon are placed along the lower sections of the shelves.

The photographs are not arranged according to chronological order or regional narratives. Objects related to the U.S. military and those symbolizing the present lives of African migrants are placed together within the same compartments rather than separated. This arrangement suggests that the transformations of Dongducheon since the military presence and the conditions under which African Town has taken shape are not disparate histories, but coexist within a single place.
This grammar of installation, which places the past and present of Dongducheon side by side, is further emphasized in the documentary film Dongducheon New Town. The film traces the paths through which the city arrived at its present form under the condition of U.S. military presence and how African communities have established themselves within this flow. Without separating past and present, the artist shows how the history of the military base and the later emergence of African Town have intersected within one place. Rather than reflecting on the camp town’s past or explaining migrant communities, the film records how Africans arrived in Dongducheon and how they have formed relationships and communities within urban structures and sensibilities shaped by the military presence. In doing so, it reveals Dongducheon’s present and future as spaces of coexistence.
Through this method of juxtaposition and editing, the exhibition resists defining Dongducheon through a fixed identity or a singular history. Instead, the city emerges as a place where structural conditions imposed by the U.S. military presence, along with diverse relationships, movements, and processes of cultural translation, have operated simultaneously. Within this context, the rituals, festivals, and bodily gestures of dance practiced by the Nigerian Igbo community, who constitute a significant portion of Dongducheon’s African Town, are not treated as objects of folkloric explanation. Rather, they function as a lens through which the place itself can be understood. Their ritual systems represent ways of sustaining time and organizing relationships under the conditions of the military base and make visible echoes from the back that are often unseen by Korean audiences.

The final project in the exhibition, AfroZia: Pow Pow, emerges from this context. Developed through vocal, choreography, and acting workshops with three second generation African migrant youths born and raised in Dongducheon and three Korean youths, the project does not explain the outcomes of social collaboration or cultural exchange. Instead, it creates a moment in which the present and the future, Africa and Asia, and differing temporal sensibilities and worldviews briefly overlap on the ground of Dongducheon. This state does not resolve into a single meaning, nor does it culminate in a conclusion of fusion. The song that resonates after the film ends lingers like the voices of children calling out. This echo is the present and future of Dongducheon, no longer something that can be left behind.


EXHIBITION VIEW