Mount Kumgang tourism, itself an event in the history of the division of the Korean Peninsula, began on November 18, 1998. The cruise ship Kumgang, carrying 826 passengers, including displaced people from the North, departed from Donghae Port and arrived at Jangjon Port in North Korea. In 2003, an overland route opened, allowing buses to cross the Military Demarcation Line, followed by countless school excursions and tours for elderly parents. On July 11, 2008, a tourist, Park Wang-ja, was shot and killed by a North Korean soldier, and tourism was suspended the following day. By then, 1,955,951 South Koreans had visited Mount Kumgang.² The window had remained open for less than ten years.

This fleeting opening onto the northern half of the peninsula produced countless reverberations throughout South Korean society. A sentence written by a citizen journalist who visited Mount Kumgang in 2004 reveals the unmistakable excitement of the time: “We are now living in an era of reunification.”³ The same account records an exchange of jokes between a North Korean female guide and a young South Korean man under the romantic title of a “love story.”⁴ For many South Korean tourists, the journey was an emotionally charged encounter with a long-held aspiration for national reunification; for displaced people, it was an instinctive desire to draw even slightly closer to their hometowns; and for government officials and business operators, it was a venture imagined as a prelude to a “reunification jackpot.”

This tourism project, which opened almost unbelievably through a brief gap, has become all the more mythologized in South Korean society now that the destination is once again inaccessible. An old legend of eight celestial maidens bathing in the mountain’s waters, an unrealized romance between a North Korean guide and a South Korean tourist, and incidents preserved in historical records accumulate layer upon layer under a single name. Confronting this mythology, the artist Lijung seems to have decided not to restore it, but rather to amplify it.

Phantom Mountain is the second collaboration between Lijung and myself. Last year, in People Buying Land in the DMZ,⁵ we examined the phenomenon of land within the inaccessible Demilitarized Zone being bought and sold in reality. In 8 Lands, 8 Keepers, Lijung collected descriptions of DMZ properties listed on online real-estate platforms. Excessive language—auspicious sites, ancestral land, roads that one day might lead home again—stood in for land that could never actually be stepped upon. Taking as clues the compassion and anticipation embedded in these words, the artist imagined beings she called “keepers,” giving them form and material presence. If that work focused on the affects attached to land and the emotions that linger there, this time a tourism product as a historical event occupies that position.

Lijung has continually met people and collected their stories. In Korean Ghost (2022),⁶ she traced the routes through which memories of the Korean War generation are transmitted to the third generation through the narratives of her two grandmothers and her parents, continuing this inquiry through Kishin: The Generation of Postmemory (2023) and Casper (2025). Each generation experiences division differently. From my perspective, one characteristic of the postmemory generation’s engagement with North Korea is its increasing treatment of the North as something virtual, as fiction—and Lijung stands at the center of this tendency. Born in the late 1980s, the artist and her generation have encountered North Korea largely through indirect media: the trauma of displacement transmitted within families, whispered rumors and ghost stories, and images from news reports, films, television dramas, and games. North Korea emerges, in other words, as a virtual image produced at the intersection of official and private memories.

In Phantom Mountain, Lijung accelerates this virtualization of a historical event. This attitude is particularly evident in her decision to produce the exhibition’s physical and conceptual centerpiece, the new VR work of the same title. The virtualization attempted in this project may also be understood as an imitation of the mechanism through which the generation born in the late 1980s has unconsciously constructed its image of North Korea.

The artist further combines this process with the structure of tourism. In contemporary capitalist society, tourism is one of the representative structures through which memory is virtualized. In other words, Mount Kumgang tourism becomes both the subject of the exhibition and its organizing structure. It is an especially revealing case through which to discuss how an inaccessible place is remembered—or, more specifically within the context of the Korean Peninsula, how South Korean society represents North Korea and the virtuality inherent in that representation. At the same time, tourism becomes a structural methodology through which those memories and histories are virtualized once again in the form of an exhibition. The exhibition thus takes the form of a memory of memory—that is, of postmemory itself. This is also why those who enter the exhibition are addressed not as viewers, but as tourists.

As always, the virtual is constructed on the basis of the real. One axis of the reality on which this exhibition is based consists of interviews: stories people recount and testimonies recorded in face-to-face encounters. The anonymity symbolized by interviews conducted with participants shown from behind allows them to reveal more intimate stories. Interviews are also a crucial methodology running throughout Lijung’s practice.

Another axis is the officially recorded historical archive. In Timeline Index (2026), Lijung collects articles concerning Mount Kumgang from the past to the present and traces changes in the emotional temperature of the language used to describe the mountain over time. The language of nostalgia shifts into the language of military conflict, until eventually even references to Mount Kumgang begin to diminish. This trajectory is materialized and displayed within the show. Through it, the artist connects the archive to the memories of people living today. The oral memories of those who actually visited Mount Kumgang, the recollections of government and corporate officials involved in developing and operating the tourism project, the memories of people from the North whose hometown is Mount Kumgang, and the imaginations of those who have never been there are layered together on the same plane. What emerges is, quite literally, a plurality of landscapes traversing imagination and reality.

VR is the medium through which this real history is translated into a virtual landscape. By enabling an encounter with a place that does not exist, by reconstructing people’s memories as a virtual place, and by registering something never personally experienced as experience, VR gestures toward the increasing virtualization of North Korea within South Korean society.

What is particularly compelling is the way Lijung captures, in her distinctive manner, the difficult-to-articulate distortions and strangeness that accompany this virtualization. They manifest in the artificial landscapes of the VR work, reminiscent of the “liminal space” memes circulating online; in the unfamiliar sensation produced by a body under control, much as it was during the actual Mount Kumgang tourism program; and in the excessive technological smoothness encountered throughout the exhibition. A female tour guide who appears as though she were generated by artificial intelligence, for example, endlessly repeats announcements like a parrot in a male voice. The English she speaks is that of a flawless white North American man. The fact that English serves as a principal language mediating the exhibition’s content and its delivery is also significant, calling to mind the powerful influence of the United States over the origins of the division, the armistice, and the conditions that persist today.

Above all, the source of these distortions may lie in the desires that South Korean society itself has projected onto the structure of division and onto North Korea as an object. History and mythology, rumors and economic expectations, longing and regret are intricately entangled within them. A vast theater of memory with no actors, only an audience: it reflects the unconscious image formed through the twisting together of the structure of division, older generations’ memories of history, the attitudes of subsequent generations, and the complex gazes directed toward North Korea.

Meanwhile, as a South Korean, I found another source that made this rupture even stranger: the ordinary connections with North Korea that continue to take place elsewhere. I saw it in the trade between China and North Korea moving back and forth across a bridge in Dandong, and in the fact that students at Tokyo Korean Junior and Senior High School continue, even this year, to travel to North Korea for their graduation trips. What made these scenes even stranger was precisely how casually, routinely, and frequently such connections occurred. Confronted with them, there were moments when I realized, with a chill, that South Korea is an island—and became acutely aware of the countless possibilities that physical connection might otherwise have enabled.

What Lijung seeks to show, then, might be described as a virtual mountain made on an island. The virtual mountain staged by Phantom Mountain is not a substitute for the actual Mount Kumgang. Rather, it is closer to a condensation of the gazes that South Korean society has directed toward a place that has become unreachable. The exhibition simply reveals, in the present tense, how that mountain is being remembered, imagined, calculated, and ultimately transformed into fiction.

In a theater without actors, the audience ultimately encounters itself. If, after being addressed as tourists, passing through six sections, and removing their headsets, visitors find themselves asking where it was that they have just been, that is enough for this exhibition. When we say “Mount Kumgang,” what are we actually referring to? This question concerns not simply a place, but what the desire directed toward that place has been made of—and what kind of future that desire makes us wait for, even as it simultaneously postpones another.


Notes

1. The Pan-European Picnic was held on August 19, 1989, near Sopron on the Hungarian-Austrian border. During the temporary opening of the border, a large number of East Germans crossed into Austria. The event is regarded as a starting point in the sequence that led to Hungary’s full opening of its border in September of that year and the fall of the Berlin Wall in November.

2. Ministry of Unification, “Statistics on Mount Kumgang Tourists,” Public Data Portal. A cumulative total of 1,955,951 visitors traveled to Mount Kumgang between November 1998 and July 2008. Accessed August 26, 2026.

3. Lee Jong-won, “People I Met at Mount Kumgang: Realizing That We Are Now Living in an Era of Reunification,” OhmyNews, March 8, 2004.

4. Ibid.

5. People Buying Land in the DMZ, A-O-Y Seoul, Seoul, December 20–31, 2025. Curated by Lee Hyewon; participating artists: Ban jaeha, Lijung, and Pyun Jiji. Selected for the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture’s 2025 Arts Creation Support Program.