Practice, practice, practice. Credit: Choi Joongwon More translations across cultures: flowchart by Colectivo Amasijo from Mexico in another publication by Listen to the City, “Disturbants of land, breath, sound: Aesthetics of Post-colonial culture.” Asia, the Apparatus ExhibitAsia Cultur e CenterGwangjuThrough Sept. 27, 2026 (Jisu Sheen recently moved from New Haven to Gwangju, South Korea, where she’s covering local arts and culture for the New Haven Independent and Midbrow.) When Choi Joongwon learned how to write the phrase “Peace for Palestine” in Arabic, it wasn’t to practice for a later, more polished poster design. The artist’s repetition of the phrase, written over and over by hand in imperfect rows, was the art itself. I found Choi’s poster printed on a full page in a book display at the Asia, the Apparatus archive exhibit at downtown Gwangju’s Asia Culture Center Tuesday afternoon. It was one of the submissions to a call sent out by the 2009-founded Korean creative collective Listen to the City to ring alarm bells about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Surrounding the books were movies and video installations screened on passageway walls, in curtained rooms, and through nostalgic CRT television sets. It appeared the Asia Culture Center had used their resources in a focused, sensible way to build up their archive, which I appreciated. For example, researchers from the center visited avant-garde director Han Okhi’s home in 2025 and found (and restored) the film 3 Mirrors, a work Han made in 1975 but never publicly screened before now. In presenting poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s unfinished film White Dust from Mongolia, they provide not only the political context of why she had to stop in 1980 (government surveillance after the assassination of the Korean president a year prior) but the sketched storyboards of her cinematic vision. The books were there for visitors to read, part of a retrospective of Listen to the City’s art and urban design activities from 2009 to 2025. The literature rested on shelves by beanbag chairs, organized into sections like “Disaster and Disabilities” and “The Value of Art in Neoliberalism.” Free Palestine Poster Movement, the book of posters containing Choi’s handwritten design, was in a section called “Documentation of Resistance Solidarity for Peace.” By its side was a photobook published by Listen to the City, 싸움 or Protest, detailing protests in Korea from 1989 to 1993 against forced globalization and the government of that time. What was the link between this pair of books? To find the answer, I looked further back in time, about a decade before the start of the protest photo collection. My clue came in the form of another poster from Free Palestine Poster Movement, one of the first in the book. “From Gwangju to Gaza,” the design says in English, in fuzzy, textured letters. Interlaid with these words is the phrase, in Korean, “The May 18th of Gwangju is today’s Gaza.” One th to 2,000 people were killedousand by military police in the Gwangju Uprising of May 18th, 1980, often referred to just by its date, 5.18. According to Listen to the City’s book, the latest iteration of Israeli occupation has killed close to 70,000 people in Gaza as of November 2025. Can the two be compared? Well, in both of these cases, the existence of these statistics themselves has been hard-fought. Official Korean reports place Gwangju’s 1980 casualties at less than 200. (The 5x-10x number comes from a consensus of foreign reports.) While Israeli military officials now reportedly accept the 70,000 figure as of January 2026, this comes after years of disputes with the number of deaths reported by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. When a military kills citizens and misreports the number, how many snapshots should photographers take at the next sign of violence? 100? 1,000? The ’89-’93 scenes in Protest are curated from a collection of 100,000 photos taken by a group of five people in that short four-year period: Kwon Seon-gi, Park Seung-hwa, Song Hyeok, Lee So-hye, and Im Seok-hyun. In the photos, protesters fill the streets, facing off with police, ready to speak the language of the unheard. The photographers’ determination to witness the era as it really happened feels like a rail against the dangers of oblivion. 5.18, the major fight one governmental regime prior, saw a suppression of both the taking and distribution of photos; in other words, proof. In writing “The May 18th of Gwangju is today’s Gaza,” poster designer Han Wookyeong identifies what seems to a salient entrypoint for solidarity between Koreans and Palestinians: the shared struggle of the human mind against the state. To see what memory can do over time, visitors to the Asia, the Apparatus exhibit can look to the center housing it, the Asia Culture Center. The multi-building arts, culture, and library complex is built on the site of the bloody fight for freedom on May 18, 1980. The first time I visited, I got lost and found myself at a preserved section of the former provincial office, where bullet holes remained in the walls. On my way to the show Tuesday, I saw a picture of author Han Kang at the subway station connected to the campus. Han won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2024. From overseas, it felt to me like a point of Korean pride. It was only when I visited the country later that year that I learned it went deeper than that; for many activists here, that pride comes with the hope that Han’s Nobel win will lead to a renewed interest in her 5.18-based novel Human Acts, placing a foot in the door the government has tried to close. Free Palestine Poster Movement came out of an effort to resist what Listen to the City director Eunseon Park and her colleagues refer to as 기억의 학살, or “memoricide”—the aspect of oppression that seeks to erase culture and rewrite history. The Protest photobook likewise reveals the importance of documentation when memory is under attack. Peace for Palestine. What stands out in Choi’s poster is the effort to practice a phrase until it becomes familiar. The willingness, unbrokered by official government stances, to learn, to stay alert. To not be afraid to translate and understand. Han Wookyeong’s poster against memoricide. Scene from “3 Mirrors” by Han Okhi, a film tucked away for 50 years before the Asia Culture Center found, restored, and screened it. Also in the exhibit: one of Bong Joon Ho’s early films, White Man, about a white-collar worker utterly uncurious about the world. Protest against forced globalization at the turn of the ’90s. Credit: 싸움, photos by Minsayeon group Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s storyboard notes for her film. She had to stop due to the political conditions of Korea in 1980, and then was murdered in New York in 1981. The post Memory, The Final Frontier appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less