TRANSITIONAL JUSTICE – TERMINOLOGY

Changwon Sculpture Biennale 2022 Seongsan Art Hall | Changwon | Republic of Korea The divisions of Germany and Korea are often invoked as comparable, yet the historical, cultural, and geopolitical asymmetries between them undermine any easy analogy. My installation Transitional Justice – Terminology engages this tension by examining how societies emerging from authoritarian rule or conflict negotiate the transition toward democracy and accountability. Focusing on the charged concepts of arbitrariness, freedom, law/right, and control, the work probes how their meanings shift across ideological systems and national histories. Such abstractions resist direct translation: while Recht in German carries a precise juridical contour, Korean differentiates among multiple, context-specific terms. Seven decades of divergent developments in North and South Korea have further fractured these semantic fields.