In this program, artist and researcher Tony Cho presented his work on “demilitarizing practices” in visual representations of U.S. bases on foreign soil, particularly in South Korea. He argued that South Korea’s understanding of the Pacific still upholds a militaristic view, and called for a demilitarizing process from a Korean perspective. The returned U.S. bases in South Korea are currently nameless and unmarked “suspended sites” dealing with the consequences of military presence, including environmental waste, underdevelopment, and continuing struggles against dispossession.

Artist and architect Bz Zhang said it felt special to be in a Korean diasporic space as a Chinese diasporic person, as both cultures have complex and nuanced relations to the U.S. Their practice and research openly address the “representations of violence and the violence of representations” by “productively co-opting” architectural tools with military origins, re-orienting viewers to look at and understand the built environment in different ways. Moderated by memory worker and scholar Professor Crystal Mun-hye Baik, Cho and Zhang had an engaging conversation on topics related to global efforts to demilitarize the Pacific Rim.