flyingcity (Yong-seok Jeon
and Jang-Jong kwan)::::
live and work in Seoul

flyingcity explores the physical and psychological transformations of Seoul and its urban landscape and how these transformations have affected the ways in which society interacts with the environment. Yong-seok Jeon and Jang-Jong kwan, as the founding members of flyingcity, conduct research on the impact of the rapid industrialization of the city. Creating a complex and chaotic vision of Seoul through psychological geography or “mental maps,” they record the psychological shocks caused by place, creating a new understanding of space and time that revives ideas of the physical and relates them to an activist’s state of mind. Imaginatively based on “a little local knowledge” and made real by the spirit of intervention, Drifting Producers (text by Yong-seok Jeon) directly refers to the network production system of Cheonggyecheon (the Cheonggye stream) in the downtown area of Seoul that was once covered by a highway and transported sewage. People have been debating whether that project is the discovery of a natural water line or a redevelopment for capitalistic profit to expel marginalized social groups such as street vendors and small workshops surrounding the road. flyingcity researched these social groups and alternate redevelopment plans—plans that culminate in a diagram representing the production line or network that was found. Drifting Producers originally came from a book on the survival of family businesses and handicraft industry in Italy after the breakdown of mass production manufacturing; here the idea is used to delineate the hybrid production system of cheonggyecheon (the cheonggye stream). “drifting,” an unexpected and creative turn or adaptation, is a method for surviving a post-Fordian economy.