Cities often appear to preserve their past. Ancient walls stand beside glass towers, historic monuments remain visible among modern developments, and traces of earlier generations seem woven into the urban landscape. Yet beneath that appearance lies a more unsettling question: are cities truly preserving memory, or merely curating the parts of history they find most convenient?
That question forms the foundation of Joo Seul-a's solo exhibition Lost Signal, a multimedia project that combines science-fiction storytelling, installation art, 3D-printed relics, and video-based narratives to examine how cities archive, reshape, and erase collective memory.
Inside the exhibition space, fragments of historical relics from Ganghwa Island appear scattered across a dimly lit underground environment washed in violet light. Produced through 3D-printing technology, these objects do not resemble complete cultural artifacts. They appear fractured, hollowed out, and incomplete. Some monuments reveal inscriptions visible from both exterior and interior surfaces, exposing emptiness where permanence is expected.
The dreamlike atmosphere initially encourages aesthetic appreciation. However, Joo quickly redirects attention away from visual beauty. Through detective Nomel's investigation logs and testimonies delivered by archivist Seo-yoon on screen, the exhibition gradually reveals that these ruins are evidence of something larger: the manipulation and concealment of memory itself.
The exhibition transforms from a space of nostalgic contemplation into a site of historical investigation.
At the center of the project is Joo's original science-fiction narrative, also titled Lost Signal. Set in a distant future Seoul, the story imagines a society in which all urban records have been nationalized and placed under centralized government control.
Seo-yoon, a government archivist responsible for documenting heritage sites in Seoul's Seochon district, falls through a temporal rupture while conducting research through a surveillance system known as City Watch. What she discovers is an alternative history of Ganghwa Island, one that exposes the selective nature of official memory.
Within the narrative, Ganghwa's past has been streamlined into a patriotic story centered on national defense and state development. The more painful layers of history, trauma, displacement, and unresolved loss, have been quietly removed.
Rather than directly depicting historical events, Joo examines the systems through which memories are preserved and forgotten. Preservation becomes a language of management. Archives become technologies of erasure.
This process extends beyond historical sites into everyday life. Characters including Ha-eun, a young tenant worker; Mi-jin, a job seeker; and Su-yeon, an office worker, each encounter unexplained ruptures in time and space. Their attempts to step outside the system are not documented as acts of resistance but categorized as disappearances.
Movements that cannot be measured or controlled become noise.
The exhibition suggests that even when societies generate vast quantities of public records, not all memories survive equally. Cities preserve what is useful, marketable, and comfortable while gradually pushing more difficult histories to the margins.
Joo also challenges the assumption that digital preservation technologies are inherently neutral. Three-dimensional scanning, digital archiving, and reconstruction technologies play an increasingly important role in protecting cultural heritage from war, disaster, and decay. Yet the exhibition asks whether decisions about what deserves preservation are ever truly objective.
Tourist-friendly histories are often restored first. Traumatic memories are frequently left unfinished.
This skepticism is reflected in the physical form of the exhibition's artifacts. Some relics appear geographically displaced. Others survive only as partial reconstructions. Some remain abandoned entirely. By presenting hollow interiors, fragmented surfaces, and distorted coordinates, Joo reveals the gaps left behind by technological systems that promise completeness.
The exhibition extends this idea to the urban landscape itself. Historic fortifications and contemporary skyscrapers may appear to coexist naturally within the same city, but such harmony may be the result of careful aesthetic arrangement rather than genuine historical continuity.
Modern cities often transform ruins into picturesque scenery. Certain histories are restored and celebrated while others remain neglected.
Throughout the exhibition, silver grid structures spread across floors, walls, and ceilings, evoking the temporal fractures experienced by the story's characters. Within these coordinates, ruins, monuments, forests, and artificial palm trees exist together in a strange and unsettling system. The softer the light becomes, the colder the rupture feels.
Joo ultimately treats the city as a vast memory machine.
The machine stores history, but not all history.
It follows disappearing memories beneath illuminated skylines, cultural heritage transformed into tourist commodities, ruins converted into datasets, and individuals pushed beyond the limits of official systems. The subtitle Lost Signal refers not only to interrupted communication but also to voices no longer heard and lives classified as noise within institutional archives.
Born in 1988, Joo Seul-a studied Western Painting at Chung-Ang University and earned her master's degree in Fine Arts from Seoul National University of Science and Technology. Her previous solo exhibitions include REVERSE EDGE (2019), Putting a Finger into a Portal (2022), Nomel's Investigation Log (2023), and Crack (2025). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and served as a resident artist at the Asia Culture Center.
The exhibition is presented as part of Sarubia's Artist Support Program. Since opening in 1999, Project Space Sarubia has established itself as one of Korea's leading nonprofit exhibition spaces dedicated to discovering experimental and independent artists. Through its exhibition sponsorship initiative and critical discourse programs, the institution provides artists with opportunities for long-term engagement beyond the gallery space.
Within that context, Lost Signal feels particularly fitting. An exhibition concerned with archives, memory systems, and forgotten histories finds itself supported by an institution equally committed to criticism, documentation, and cultural dialogue.
Ultimately, Joo Seul-a's exhibition asks a deceptively simple question: when a city remembers, what does it choose to forget?
Reported by News Culture M.J._mj94070777@nc.press
Copyright ⓒ 뉴스컬처 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지
본 콘텐츠는 뉴스픽 파트너스에서 공유된 콘텐츠입니다.
