Peaceful Moutain
2021--2023

 Since the 1980s, Ansan, South Korea, has gradually become a multicultural city due to industrial development. Located more than thirty kilometers south of Seoul, it is a typical satellite city. In the context of a declining local population and labor shortages, immigrants from various countries and regions have flowed into this area, making it one of the most complex and unique multicultural zones in South Korea. People arrive here with the so-called "Korean Dream," facing cultural barriers in the real world, while also harboring hopes for the future. On this seemingly ordinary land, a concealed yet tangible tension exists between ideal and reality. This tension involves cross-cultural adaptation, social mobility, and the everyday experience of a heterotopian space.

 《Peaceful Mountain》began in the winter of 2021 as a long-term photographic project exploring immigrant society and emotional experiences. "Over the past two years, I have walked through this industrial city, composed of individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and various aspirations. My initial ambition for a grand narrative gradually shifted towards a more intimate observation of individuals." The project focuses not only on the social structures and spatial forms of the multicultural city but also on emotions that cannot be easily communicated through language, the fluidity of identity, and the psychological shifts brought on by translocal mobility. Migration is never just the physical relocation of belongings; it is a process that evokes deep memories, nostalgia, cultural ruptures, and shifts in the continuity and discontinuity of identity.

 “Mountain” does not refer to any actual, physical mountain but serves as a metaphor—pointing to a "mountain city" formed by the gathering of foreign labor along South Korea’s west coast due to industrialization. As a symbolic landscape, it refers to a multi-layered, decentralized social topology constructed by migrants. Here, language often fails, and there is unease, distance, and silence between people. This silence is, in fact, one of the most common forms of expression in the context of a post-immigration society.

 "It is precisely where language becomes ineffective that I realized photography, as a silent medium, becomes the most genuine way of connecting us. Therefore, rather than simply documenting Ansan, I am searching for and affirming those hidden emotions and untold stories."

《Peaceful Mountain》 was an exploration moving between real geographies and inner territories, constituting a field study on multicultural urban space and implicit affective experiences.