Flyingcity

Flyingcity is a group of artists which researches and criticizes the urban culture and the reality of urban geography. Flyingcity is specifically interested in the transformation of the urban community influenced by the formation of urban structure in Seoul, and the alternative way of thinking about the city of ongoing growth conditioned by over-density and over-accumulation. In the meantime, it has tried to delineate the process of the natural growth of Seoul with site specific performances, mental maps showing utopian urban planning, and photographic documentations which aim to criticize the urban landscape of Seoul. This leads to the re-articulation of concepts such as “Psycho-geography” and “Drift.”

To understand the drifting life and to rethink that condition as a platform for creating a new style of life, and to draw a spiritual topography of the production relationship of Seoul Modernity requires a hypothesis built on clues scattered around urban landscape, close observation through parallax view, spying, disguise, installation of antenna, high-speed beam, and others.

We overhear the complaints of village people sweeping roads in the garbage lot. We go into a deserted house and smash all the articles left behind. We give big bows to the Olympic Apartments, which stand tall in isolation. We set up a signpost pointing to the Palace of Boys in Pyongyang and the World Trade Center. We collect flowerpots. We take tourist photos in front of a tank barrier on Freedom Highway. We get inside the stories of lessors as we pretend that we are taking pictures of the shopkeeper at an arts-and-crafts shop in Insa-dong. We shout the 4th of July South-North Joint Communique against the high wall. We go round and round in the night, and are consumed by fire. (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni).


An awful lot of shanty town in Seoul has desappeared as a result of redevelopment policy. Redevelopment business is now on its peak bringing totally different landscape to Seoul. Apartments crawling high up to the hill makes the landscape much thin.
We´ve been asking Chat kind of landscape it is? Such a huge chaos of desire and uncanniness has never been so close. That is, it is shocking not because it is too big, complicated, or the urban conflict in the site is too conspicuous, but because the desire represented by that scene is too close. Such failure of urban planning, or ultimate impossibility of planning does lie behind the two contradictory responses to Seoul: disgust and captivation.

We´re using large format digital photography technique to record the thinnest landscape.

01.01.2003