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Royal Blue Real Estate - 로얄 블루 부동산
_ installation _ 2010

A fake real estate office in a container. The container was an exhibition space of Gallery Kunstdoc / Seoul. It stands in the area where also the "Blue House" is located, Korea's presidential compound. For this reason it is not allowed to build buildings of more than 3 stories in this area. I was pretending to redevelop the neighbourhood and build a bunch of highrise Apartements in the area.

Artist note: " Like many other areas in Seoul, the area I live at the moment is scheduled to be "redeveloped" to become a "new town" in a timeframe of 3 to 4 years. Nowadays nearly every second shop in the area has changed it's type of business to real-estate. Here and there you can see banners on the street and buildings, some of them promoting, some of them protesting against the redevelopment plan.

From my point of view although this area is old, it has a special charm and it is beautiful.
But after a short time the small alleys with their walls covered by various climbing plants and flowers will disappear. Nobody will care about the vanishing of the 20 to 30 year old trees in the yard in front of our house.

Since I first came to Korea 16 years ago one thing really difficult to understand was the fact that koreans of all kinds and flavors love to live in big apartment complexes. For me apartment-complexes are a kind of housing, where people really live far away from nature.

In traditional korean thinking there is a theory called PoongSooChiRi, where when building a house, you would build it in harmony with the surrounding topography and nature - in modern korean urban development you absolutely cannot find even a small remain of this thinking.

In foreign media the government of Seoul promotes itself with slogans like "Green Greener Seoul" or "Design Capital Seoul", in reality Seoul and it's surroundings more and more become one big and boring uniform apartment-complex. Even the "green-belt" law, that provided a ring around Seoul where you where not allowed to build big buildings, was repealed by the government.

Even though Seoul government uses traditional and patriotic symbols for it's promotion, development in Seoul doesn't care neither about nature nor about tradition. Seoul becomes more and more full of new shiny apartment complexes and english institutes. Such kind of development what advantage will it have for the people living here ?"

an article about the work in Hankoreh-newspaper

 

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