2016-2019
23 photographs in various sizes
Jugong Apartment is a project I began producing in the summer of 2016 until 2019 in South Korea. After hearing the news that the former neighbourhoods where I grew up in South Korea are part of an urban redevelopment plan, I went back to the city of Gwacheon and Seoul to document the demolition of the existing Jugong Apartment buildings. Like most of the other Jugong Apartment complexes, the city of Gwacheon was planned for a lifestyle that values single-family living while allowing for proximity to the denser centres of the capital, Seoul. When I arrived in Gwacheon, the buildings were being emptied and were in various states of abandonment. Some of the areas had been vacated; people were still moving out to other parts of the city. Goduck, another planned city in the East of Seoul, was trapped in limbo and left to deteriorate for an extended period; then, the site became centred by lawsuits between the owner's council and the construction company.
After the demolition of Gwacheon Jugong and Goduck Jugong Complexes in 2017, I decided to visit other remaining Jugong Complexes around Seoul to document their last appearances to observe operations from the moving out phase to the demolition.
These are the last days of “Jugong” Apartments in South Korea. As time passes, the previous dream of a common person owning a unit in the Jugong Apartments (largely a legacy of the post-war rebuilding of the nation-state) is rapidly being replaced by new futures for the city.
The sites represented in these photographs:
Gwacheon Jugong Complex 1, 1981-2017
Gwacheon Jugong Complex 6, 1983-2018
Gwacheon Jugong Complex 12, 1983-2019
Goduck Jugong Complex 3, 1983-2017
Gaepo Jugong Complex 4, 1982-2019
Duncheon Jugong Complex 3, 1980-2018
Created with generous support of
