In 2004 Buan, on the west coast of South Korea, was between a rock and a hard place. The Government wanted to build a nuclear storage facility on nearby Wido Island, meanwhile construction of the Saemungeum sea wall, the longest dyke on the planet, was proceeding, behind schedule but proceeding nevertheless. Both projects but the sea wall especially threatened to devastate the ecology of the Saemungeum tidal flats. For context, Curlews and other waders made an annual journey from Siberia to the south coast of Western Australia (and back) and Saemungeum was one of their major stop overs. It was like building an enormous wall across a freeway and telling drivers to find alternative routes.
I knew about the protests, I’d seen some in Jeonju, and a friend teaching in Buan had to spend weeks at home waiting for the schools to reopen, but without fluent Korean the details were lost on me, so I caught a bus out to the tidal flats to see what all the anger was about.
I didn’t know it then but one fight was already lost the other about to be won. That year the Government in Seoul relented and abandoned plans for the waste dump on Wido, but the sea wall was already in progress. Today the landscape is profoundly transformed. Where there were tidal flats there are now crops and a network of canals. The natural state has not quite vanished, a small pocket blandly called an ecological park survives, but the birds don’t come in anything like the numbers they used to. This just doesn’t affect Korea; the south coast of Western Australia and the eastern shores of Siberia depend upon the birds to maintain ecological balance. The shamanist janseung, the Christian crosses and the land art were a final appeal to the gods to intervene, if they could.
I was living up in the mountains, in Muju-eup, the only non-Korean living in the entire county, and on Friday afternoons I caught the bus down to Jeonju, where I dropped my rolls of film at a downtown corner store with the standard instructions, 12.5×8.5cm matt prints with a white border. I’d pick them up on Saturday morning. The shop was typical mixed business, it had an express photo printer but it sold other things: bubble wrap, candy, paper fans, objects wrapped in opaque plastic. At first the print quality disappointed me, then I began to appreciate that the printing may have been cheap and the colour balance off but the prints were unique. The shop will be long gone and the machines sold off years ago and while it’s tempting to run contemporary scans off the negs and lift the color, a voice jumps in and says no, this was how you remember it, not how it might have been.
In a similar way, I suppose, I recorded the last of a landscape before it was irrevocably changed, and the protests by artists, Buddhists, Shamanists and Christians, which appeared to be ephemeral but couldn’t be so long as people documented them.
