Aichi Triennale 2019

This installation consists of nine digital photographs in light boxes, and a video which shows still images of the photographs with sound. A boy man walks through a forest while sometimes stopping at a water place, playing guitar or his harmonica, or lining up leaves on the ground. The facts that he is bleeding, wearing a uniform, and carrying arms and ammunition hint at the work's military theme, and from radio transmissions, parts that the boy reads from a textbook, and popular songs at the end, one can guess that it deals with issues related to North Korea.
Having created several works themed around the history of North and South Koreas in the past, here the artist focuses on how the media coverage of each nation form the respective people's ideas and opinions about each other. At the same time, the work touches upon the global problem of child soldiers, revolving around the notion that these soldiers - carrying guns to kill people - are in fact boys that still retain their childish innocence. It was inspired by stories about North Korean child soldiers that the artist's mother has witnessed first-hand. "Quite unlike the things the government and the news were telling us about brave and frightening soldiers, they were just boys with guns that played around in the mountains."