Haejun JO & KyeongSoo LEE’s work mainly comes out of JO’s conversations with his father, Donghwan JO. Although the two artists employ a variety of media and artistic formats, their creative output is usually in the form of records named ‘documentary drawings.’
As the amazing stories told by JO’s father are narrated through simple writing-drawings, the relationship between a father and his son enters a completely different plane, which is the collective memory of Korean society. In recent years, Haejun JO and Donghwan JO realized that they had not been collaborating on a physical level, which led them to produce a short film titled Scenes of Between (2013). The narrative of the film is based on an oral memory about a real event that happened in the 1970s in Jinan in Jeonbuk Province, South Korea. In the film, Haejun JO and KyeongSoo LEE discover a small boat in reclaimed land near a US military base in the city of Gunsan. A Ship Believing the Sea is the Land (2014) takes the boat as a motive, presenting a situation in which a boat is anchored on land through a structure (plinth) that supports it. In addition, writings, drawings and edited footage of Scenes of Between are presented as part of an attempt to produce stories, sculptures and a film about Dokkaebi, a mythical being that appears in Korean folktales. [Haejun JO & KyeongSoo LEE]