Hostile Landscapes | 2022-2025

Two-channel Video
8K, Sound
60 minutes

“Hostile Landscapes” is a two-channel film revolving around the remarkable true story of Ju Hyeongeon (朱贤健/주현건/Zhu Xianjian), a North Korean defector who was imprisoned in Jilin Prison, Northeast China, since 2013, for illegal border-crossing, theft, and robbery. In October 2021, Ju escaped the prison with bare hands and managed to elude local police and authorities for 40 days before he was ultimately captured near the Fengman Dam, a historically significant location with deep Japanese colonial ties.

The film meticulously tracks Ju’s confirmed and potential hideouts, capturing the multilayered local landscapes through a series of cinematic gazes, reconstructing his fugitive odyssey while weaving in other border-crossing East Asian images and (hi)stories. Framed within the broader context of modern and contemporary East Asian history, the work reflects on Chinese/Asian identities/bodies and their entanglements with notions of sovereignty, governance, territory, infrastructure, nationalism, and colonialism.

The film is by default captioned in Chinese and English, with additional Korean and Japanese captions available.