한국국제교류재단

For decades, the DMZ was described primarily in political and military terms. From the 2000s, however, artists began reinterpreting it as a place for contemplating loss and healing, boundaries and coexistence. By engaging with the DMZ through contemporary art, they shifted the focus from a landscape marked by conflict to one that fosters new creative pursuits, transforming it into a platform where visual art, architecture, ecology, sound, and media intersect.

At the center of these developments is the Rea l DMZ Project (R DP), a contemporary art initiative grounded in research on the DMZ and adjacent border areas. Its inaugural exhibition in 2012 brought together 11 teams of Korean and international artists, presenting works across the Second Infiltration Tunnel, the former Korean Workers’ Party Headquarters, the Cheorwon Peace Observatory, and Woljeong-ri Station, all key security-tourism sites. While earlier exhibitions had explored DMZ themes, the RDP was built through interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars in social sciences, the humanities, environmental studies, architecture, and ecology, integrating academic and scientific perspectives into artistic practice. It subsequently expanded into academic forums, regional research, and humanities-based discussions.

Lee Bul. “Aubade V.” 2019. Casted steel (collected from demolished checkpoint in DMZ), optium museum acrylic, electronic display board, LED light (bulb, strip, bar), LED socket, CPU, DC-SMPS, dimmer (DC, AC), terminal box, magnet, black PVC coated wire, electric wire (black, transparent). 400 × 300 × 300 cm.
This tower-like installation constructed from materials salvaged from demolished DMZ guard posts, shown in the 2024 exhibition Forms of the Shadow at the Secession in Vienna, was first presented at the 2019 edition of the Real DMZ Project.
Courtesy of the artist and BB&M

As the RDP evolved, its thematic depth and geographic reach widened. Through long-term residencies in a village within the Civilian Control Zone, artists explored how contemporary art could engage with the local community. From 2015, the discourse on contemporary Korean art was expanded to the global stage with exhibitions in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Once regarded solely as part of the collective Korean memory, the DMZ became a site for contemplating the universal boundaries of humanity.

Camp Greaves, located within the DMZ’s Civilian Control Zone, served as a U.S. military base from 1953 to 2004. Returned to Korea in 2007, it was converted by Gyeonggi Province into a history and culture experience center and opened to the public in 2013, with part of the site used for art exhibitions.
© Gyeonggi Tourism Organization

In 2023, the Real DMZ Project relocated its main activities from Cheorwon to Paju and Yeoncheon. That year, the 70th anniversary of the armistice brought renewed attention to the contemporary relevance of the DMZ . As a city positioned between Seoul and the DMZ, Paju emerged as a particularly symbolic place where memories of the Korean peninsula’s division intersect with Korean publishing culture and contemporary art. DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint was staged across key sites, including the Dora Obser vatory, Korea’s northernmost observation post; Camp Greaves, a former U. S. military base; and Imjingak Pyeonghwa Nuri Park, which is dedicated to displaced people who fled south during the war. Physical structures bearing the marks of conflict were approached from an artistic perspective. In 2024, DMZ OPEN Exhibition: Passage was held exclusively in Paju, exploring the concept of an unobstructed path connecting two places to broaden the spatial and conceptual understanding of the DMZ.

In 2025, UNDO DMZ opened in Paju as part of the DMZ OPEN Festival hosted by Gyeonggi Province. Curated by Kim Sun-jung, director of Art Sonje Center and long-time artistic director of the RDP, the exhibition presented 26 works by Korean and international artists — including paintings, installations, sound art, and drawings — at venues such as Tongilchon (Unification Village) inside the Civilian Control Zone, Galler y Greaves (a renovated section of the former U.S. base), and Imjingak Pyeonghwa Nuri Park. Through visual language, the works reflected the passage of time in places where nature has returned in the absence of human settlement. “The DMZ is not simply a place but a sensor y zone where humans and nature, memory and oblivion intersect,” Kim observed. “Art is the act of rewriting the language of boundaries.” To her, the DMZ is no longer a forbidden land but an experimental ground where art and society meet.

Haegue Yang’s 2020 installation “DMZ Un-Do” visualizes the visible and invisible forces of humans and nature that lie behind the DMZ. Since the early 2020s, Yang has presented a series of works that use the DMZ as a key motif.
Courtesy of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Art projects that engage with the DMZ make the realities of national division strikingly tangible, a weight one senses physically. Against a backdrop of guard posts, minefields, and barbed-wire fences, the tension that pervades the border area becomes a visceral experience. That atmosphere, both seen and felt, is absorbed into the artworks, transforming the DMZ from an abstract concept into a site of sensory experience.

In recent years, artists have highlighted the DMZ’s ecological resilience and its potential as a symbol of peace. The diverse plant and animal life that thrives there, and the deep silence shaped by decades of restricted access, become both subject and theme. Rather than simply depicting its landscape, artists explore the layers of time, emotion, loss, and healing embedded within it. By giving new form to erased roads, closed routes, and shifting boundaries, they redefine the DMZ as an atelier of peace that remains unseen. Their works convert the language of the Cold War into one of healing, and the scenery of division into one of contemplation.

“Vision in Motion Korea” by Patrick Shearn was shown as part of Let’s DMZ Art Project: Peaceful Coexistence Zone, hosted by the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation at Pyeonghwa Nuri Park in 2022. The panoramic public art installation, measuring 250 meters in length and 3.5 meters in height, was hung with 120,000 strips of colored fabric on which visitors were invited to write their wishes.
Courtesy of Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation

The essence of art that engages with the DMZ lies in making the invisible visible. Remnants that once signified tension and surveillance are reimagined through light, sound, wind, and vegetation. Art replaces the vestiges of violence, building a bridge of reflection that connects worlds long divided.

Artists are drawn to the DMZ for a simple reason: It remains a landscape shaped by uncharted time. In the rhythms of nature that now fill a place once dominated by humans, art returns to the most fundamental questions: What is a boundary? What does it mean to cross one? Through the art projects in the DMZ, the narrative of division is recast as a vision of coexistence.

Access to the DMZ remains tightly controlled, hence it is necessary to obtain prior approval and pass through military checkpoints to visit many of the exhibition sites. Yet the art emerging from the DMZ no longer lingers solely on past scars; rather, it poses questions about the future. From a war-torn land to a symbol of peace, from a restricted border to a platform for art, the DMZ is being seen anew through creative practice. In places where gunfire has long fallen silent, where wild grasses sway in the wind and birdsong fills the air, art speaks of peace in quiet, deliberate tones. 

“Elephant Cart” by Nam June Paik was featured in the DMZ Art & Peace Platform, hosted by the Ministry of Unification in Paju in 2021. It was displayed in the main exhibition hall of Unimaru, once the Inter-Korean Transit Office of the Kaesong Industrial Complex, and later remodeled by architect Min Hyun-joon into an art space.
Courtesy of 2021 DMZ Art & Peace Platform, Photo by Kim San

Gallery Greaves, a former bowling alley at the far end of Camp Greaves, was one of the venues for UNDO DMZ, hosted by Gyeonggi Province and held in 2025.
Courtesy of Gyeonggi Provincial Office