Hyeong-Seob Cho, The Prolonged Transreal, 2025, site-specific installation, single-channel video, 13min. loop, dimension variable.
Hyeong-Seob Cho focuses on the disappearing spaces and traces of life within Busan’s rapid urban development. For the Sea Art Festival 2025, Cho explores the Dadae Incineration Plant, an industrial site abandoned for over a decade, and reimagines it as a place where past, present, and future intersect. Once a busy site for waste disposal, the abandoned plant has now become an unexpected ecological habitat.
The Prolonged Transreal unfolds in two interconnected works. On the exterior wall hangs a large banner, The Grafted Guest, showing a blue rock thrush with the phrase, “It’s worth spending a night there.” The artist once spotted a nest and the bird on the incinerator’s smokestack from the observatory. This phrase reflects his view of the building through the eyes of this uninvited yet enduring guest.
Inside the former guard post is the installation The Prolonged Transreal: Check-in. Visitors step into a space that looks like a modest hotel room, converted from the former security office at the incinerator. The in-room television shows a video that offers a pointed critique of Busan’s redevelopment plans to transform the site into a major seaside resort, quietly raising the question: Whose future does this incineration plant serve?
Moving between the ruined incinerator and Dadaepo’s beautiful sunsets, visitors enter a space as layered terrain of unresolved temporal contradictions—past that lingers, present left in neglect, and a future waiting for our decision.
