Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, New Possible Futures

The South Korean artist duo Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho present Dialogue Manual, a project that brings together video installations, painting, and sculpture to explore the condition of the contemporary world and the possibility of imagining new futures. Working together since 2009, the two artists have developed a shared practice that spans diverse languages and media, including film, photography, performance, and theoretical research, with the aim of examining the tensions between technological progress, cultural memory, and collective responsibility. At the center of the exhibition is the video installation Phantom Garden (2024-2025), set in a future where the seasons of spring and autumn have disappeared due to climate change. The work, suspended between melancholy and contemplation, imagines a society living in fragile balance, poised between survival and the loss of connection with nature. The reflection stems from a real fact: in September 2025, in Japan, temperatures consistently exceeded 30 degrees Celsius, erasing the experience of autumn as an intermediate season. The individual works on view, including Moon’s paintings and Jeon’s aluminum sculptures, expand on their shared research. In Prosperos Botanica (2025), aluminum becomes a symbolic material, described by the artists as a “carrier” of meaning, capable of linking eras, civilizations, and generations. The metal, a residue of the industrial and digital world, replaces the plants that in their previous works embodied the vital force and memory of time. With Dialogue Manual, Moon and Jeon offer a reflection that is both aesthetic and methodological. The title evokes the idea of an open manual - an invitation to dialogue and to seek new forms of coexistence in an increasingly uncertain world. For the artists, the future is not a utopian projection but a field of experimentation born from the imperfections of the present.