A Better Past Tomorrow

A Better Past Tomorrow is a four-channel video installation that examines how images of peace, progress, and global unity are constructed through repetition and exclusion. Drawing from post–Cold War educational and state-produced footage, the work considers how visual optimism can organize perception by naturalizing order while pushing failure, anxiety, and contradiction outside the frame. Across vertical screens, the footage breaks down and moves upward in a continuous flow, linking historical promotional imagery to contemporary habits of scrolling and platform-based attention.

The project begins from a discomfort with images that present harmony and progress as if they were natural or inevitable. Their optimism is not treated as a simple message of hope, but as a visual structure that depends on what remains unseen. Through repeated gestures of unity, alignment, and forward movement, these images construct a way of seeing in which rupture, failure, anxiety, and contradiction are displaced outside the frame.

The project is also shaped by the artist’s position as someone born and raised in South Korea, where modern and contemporary history has been repeatedly organized through binary confrontations: colonizer and colonized, North and South, capitalism and communism, dictatorship and democracy. More broadly, this binary structure continues through geopolitical tensions between the United States and China. These oppositions are not abstract categories; across colonialism, war, national division, dictatorship, and democratization, they have often been matters of survival. Within this framework, binary logic is not only a political structure, but also a visual and perceptual one: images can make certain forms of order feel natural while making other realities harder to see.

A central material in the installation is multilingual educational footage from the late 1990s, which reflects the period’s optimism toward globalization. The video imagines the multilingual child as an ideal future subject: flexible, adaptive, and prepared for a globally integrated world. In the installation, this promise is fragmented through partial subtitles, image degradation, and repeated upward movement. What first appears as an image of education and openness becomes a trace of circulation, distortion, and guided attention.

The installation uses four vertically oriented screens tilted forward, with all channels moving upward in a continuous flow. This movement recalls both the rhetoric of aspiration and the bodily habit of scrolling. The work creates what the artist describes as a perceptual track: a structure in which viewers appear to move freely while their attention remains guided by a larger system. Rather than offering a complete narrative, the installation places viewers inside a field of partial understanding, fragmented sound, and continuous visual motion.