I spent my childhood in Gangneung, Gangwon Province—a small city where the shadow of division permeated daily life. Witnessing the armed infiltrator incident in the 1990s taught me the meaning of ‘boundaries’ through lived experience. From that day onward, peace became not merely an ideal, but a ‘question of survival’ for me. Returning to Gangwon Province to seek answers, I began studying the theme of ‘peace’ and embarked on a peace field trip along Germany's former border zones with Professor Lee Dong-ki, a historian and peace scholar. Traversing the German border and Gangwon Province's borders, I began to understand the identity of the region where I lived and the ‘border city’ as a frontier of the Cold War and division. How can we transform it into a ‘space in-between’?
