Busan Modern and Contemporary History Museum

Overview

Shadow theatre built from the shadow of a flag — a moment with almost no surviving photographs, retold in the language of silhouette.

The hard constraint in modern-history exhibitions is that archive photographs are scarce, and where they exist the resolution falls short of projection. Rather than force the little material there is up to size, silhouette and shadow became the primary language of the screen from the outset. A silhouette identifies no individual face, which turns the gap in the archive from a weakness into a form.

The frame is tall. A vertical screen can hold a flag rising and a crowd pressing upward from below in the same image, which suits a march. Three chapters — the Taegukgi, the Uiyeoldan, the Chinuhoe — unfold on one set of compositional rules.

AI generation produced the crowd silhouettes and the period clothing. The geometry of the Taegukgi, the division of the frame and all typography are manual. In historical subjects, generated detail collapses period accuracy quickly, so only the shapes were kept and the detail was stripped out.

“The absence of archive material is not hidden. The gap itself was made into the form.”