“Most People Were Silent”

Fallout (China-North Korea border, United States, 2017)

In this exhibition commission for the Nobel Peace Prize 2017 — won by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) — I created a series of diptychs pairing nuclear-related landscapes from the North Korea-China border and the United States.

My intention was to get the viewer to suspend their sense of place and perhaps moral judgement: who gets to call whom a “rouge state” or decide how many nuclear warheads is too many?

 

Featured in The New Yorker: https://video.newyorker.com/watch/the-traces-of-nuclear-bombs 

From “Fallout”, 2017, 35mm digital. DIPTYCH / Left:
Hatches over silos which in the 1970s held missiles meant to shoot down incoming Soviet warheads, North Dakota, November 2017. / A missile field in rural North Dakota near the Canadian border which held Sprint and Spartan anti-ballistic missiles designed to intercept attacking nuclear warheads from Soviet missiles coming over the North Pole. These were deployed at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex near Langdon, North Dakota, in the mid 1970s – a radar and anti-ballistic missile defence site which was shuttered by 1979.
Right:
The North Korean city of Hyesan, about 120km from North Korea’s nuclear test site, October 2017. / The city of Hyesan in North Korea’s Ryanggang province sits across the Yalu River from the Chinese border town of Changbai. Hyesan is 120 km from the Punggye-ri nuclear test site where North Korea is estimated to have conducted six underground nuclear tests since 2006. Japanese news reports in October (2017) said that a tunnel at the site had collapsed, killing as many as 200 North Koreans. Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test, on September 3 (2017) recorded as a 6.3-magnitude earthquake in North Korea’s northeast. — From “Fallout”, a series on humans’ experience with nuclear weapons, past and present.
From “Fallout”, 2017, 35mm digital. DIPTYCH / Left:
A factory producing into the night, in Manpo, North Korea, October 2017. / A factory, perhaps making cement, continues production into the night in Manpo, Chagang Province, North Korea, photographed from across the Yalu River from close to the northeastern Chinese city of Ji’an, Jilin province.
Right:
The desk of a commander in the control room of a decommissioned Titan II Missile Site in Arizona, November 2017. / This was the desk of a launch commander in a control center which could fire a Titan II Missile tipped with a 9 megaton thermonuclear warhead – the largest warhead ever deployed on an ICBM by the United States. There was a “No Lone Zone” rule here, meaning there were always at least two members of the crew present. If they received orders to launch a missile, they would each have to turn a launch key at exactly the same time. Once their keys were turned, the missile took 58 seconds to launch and 25 to 30 minutes to reach its target which could be 9,700km away. Crew members were never told where the missiles were targeted at. That launch order never came. This site, operational from 1963 to 1982, is now a museum.
DIPTYCH. Left: The pyramid-shaped Missile Site Control Building stands in the middle of the Stanley R Mickelsen SAFEGUARD Complex. This anti-ballistic missile defense site — the only one of its kind to be built in the US — was designed to detect and intercept attacking nuclear warheads from Soviet missiles coming over the North Pole. Nuclear-tipped Sprint and Spartan anti-ballistic missiles were deployed at the site to shoot down the incoming Soviet missiles. The facility, built in the early to mid 1970s at a cost of US$5.7 billion, near Langdon, North Dakota, was fully operational for only a day in October 1975 before Congress voted to shut it down. At the time, it was one of the most advanced radar systems and had among the most powerful computers in the world. With its deterrent effect, it is seen as having been a bargaining chip for the US in the SALT treaties.
Right: Looking from China into North Korea over Mount Paektu, elevation 2,744 m, an active volcano on the border of the two countries. The mountain and the crater lake formed by a volcanic eruption are divided between North Korea and China. The highest mountain on the Korean peninsula and northeast China, it is regarded by North and South Koreans as a sacred place that is their countries’ spiritual home. Imagery of this mountain features in many North Korean propaganda paintings.
October 28, 2017
From “Fallout”, 2017, 35mm digital. DIPTYCH / Left:
Fence along the China-North Korea border, near Tumen city, May 2015. / China and North Korea share a 1,420km border, separated by two rivers and a mountain. This gate was in a fence along the China-North Korea border near the Chinese city of Tumen, just across the Tumen River from the North Korean town of Namyang. Tumen City offers clear views into North Korea and attracts Chinese tourists — and sometimes North Korean fugitives who wade across the river into China. There is a large ethnic Korean population native to Tumen city which is a part of Yanbian prefecture. In early 2015, there were reports of a series of incidents involving North Korean soldiers or citizens coming over and stealing or killing Chinese residents in the Helong area, about 80km west of Tumen. China has stepped up border patrols and built new border fences over stretches of its border with North Korea.
Right:
Atop a hill looking into the Nellis Air Force Range outside Indian Springs, Nevada, near the Nevada Test Site, November 2017. / A facility atop a hill looking into the Nellis Air Force Range outside Indian Springs, Nevada, about 90 km from Las Vegas. The Nellis Air Force Range provides a buffer to the Nevada Test Site, where over 900 nuclear weapons tests were conducted between 1951 and 1992. Combined with the Nevada site, this region is one of the largest unpopulated areas in the US.
From “Fallout”, 2017, 35mm digital. DIPTYCH Left: A border guard in his sentry post on the China-North Korea border, close to a suspected North Korean missile base, October 2017. / As seen from the Chinese side, a guard inside a sentry border post in North Korea, along a stretch of the border close to where experts suspect is a missile base at Yongjo-ri, said to be about 20 km inland from the border with the Chinese city of Linjiang. / Right: Minuteman II Missile, South Dakota, United States, November 2017. / A Minuteman II Missile sits in the Delta 09 silo outside of the town of Wall in South Dakota, United States. This intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) could travel across 12,500 km and deliver its payload — a nuclear warhead with a yield equivalent to 1.2 megatons of TNT — in less than 30 minutes. It was in the US nuclear arsenal between 1965 and 1994. The Minuteman missiles were America’s first solid fuel ICBMs. By 1965 there were 1,000 Minuteman ICBMs located in six different missile fields across the Central and Northern Great Plains region which were sparsely populated — and hence might limit casualties in a nuclear war. The Great Plains were also the furthest area from both the Atlantic and Pacific coastlines, preventing them from being struck by Soviet submarine- launched ballistic missiles. From these locations, missiles could also be launched over the North Pole in order to strike targets in the central Soviet Union. A third generation of this missile, the Minuteman III, is the only ICBM still deployed by the United States. As of 2017, there are over 400 Minuteman III missiles on alert in North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana.

 

See photographs from the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore below:

Sim Chi Yin: Most people were silent, installation view, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, LASALLE College of the Arts, 2018. Photo: Weizhong Deng