FERTILITY PANOPTICON

About The Entry

Among the fundamental determinants of human development, reproduction is paramount. Yet contemporary discourse on fertility-particularly the“unspeakable" mindset that has taken root in many Asian societies-encourages people to cloak themselves in the veneer of an advanced civilization while suppressing and disregarding basic human nature. This phenomenon has contributed to sustained population decline in certain countries, some of which now find themselves on the brink of demographic peril.

This project addresses South Korea's prolonged population contraction and examines how humanity should confront, formulate, and set boundaries for reproductive norms, social power, and ethical baselines. My aim is to strip away this veneer of hypocrisy and lay bare the facts that have been deliberately concealed.

Beneath the fertility debate lies an enduring "selec tive bias":

Who exerts control?

Whom does reproduction serve? How is its value defined?

How are all these questions conditioned by the workings of social relations? Where is our moral bottom line?

What is the relationship between evil and good in human nature?

By giving tangible spatial form to these issues, the project leverages the reflective capacity of architec tural space to pursue answers. Those answers inevitably illuminate the cultural and power dynamics of different social strata. Disturbingly, however, they often appear to have no resolution--or rather, under the constraints of prevailing power structures, they are not permitted to have one.