Sim Chi Yin

Sim Chi Yin’s series Most People Were Silent, commissioned in 2017 for the Nobel Peace Prize, takes us along the China-North Korea border and to the former U.S. missile sites. Straddling the border between documentary and speculative, Sim reflects on humankind’s development and use of nuclear weapons in two opposed countries. These photos reveal spaces abandoned or foreclosed from the public eye, and, without aestheticising the annihilating horror of nuclear potential, emphasises the lingering risk of nuclear armageddon. This selection offers a glimpse of the North Korean border from the Chinese side; Sim used satellite data to map sites closest to where scholars deduce there was a North Korean nuclear missile base, as well as a plant that produces centrifuges for nuclear power plants. She then travelled to the other side of the Pacific, to North Dakota, where we find the most advanced missile defence site of the 1970s, decommissioned almost immediately to further anti-nuclear negotiations with the USSR. This is followed by a photo of Minuteman II, an intercontinental missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads, along with the missile base commander’s desk from which the command to operate the warheads would have come. Sim explores these scenarios from two opposing countries and invites us to think beyond their roles as “rogue state” and the world’s rightful policeman, and about the present-day threats that lie beyond these nuclear relics stored in museums.