Solastalsgia : The pain or distress caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of desolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory. It is the lived experience of negative environmental change. It is the homesickness you have when you are still at home.
Currently, Seoul and Korea are suffering from cities being completely taken over by microdust (or particular matter, a word used more often in english). This has made everyone compare the sky to the how it was 10-20 years ago and miss the past of a bright blue horizon. Additionally, Korea, which traditionally had four distinct seasons, is changing to a tropical climate, winters are getting colder, and spring and fall are disappearing. In addition to these typical environmental changes, microdust is covering the Korean sky, making people live their day to day lives in the midst of a climate change.
Inspired and concerned by this situation in Korea, I imagined how life in Korea would look and feel like by 2050. Seoul came to mind, where it will be impossible to move around without a high-performance filter mask. And to express this realistically, I created an environment reflecting this new reality using Blender 3D.
In this work, there is no one at the bus stop because no one moves around due to microdust. Yet the bus light blinks announcing an approaching vehicle due to limited visibility. A new mask from a large Korean company is being advertised on a billboard. The weather board displays gas masks and today’s fine dust concentration. By speculating a terrible, uninhabitable dystopian Seoul, I want to express how dire climate change is in Korea and around the world, and how much we miss the clear skies of Seoul. / Soo Kim
