I had always believed that prostitution should disappear. But when the city of Paju announced the closure of the Yongjugol red-light district as a measure for "women's human rights," I found myself instead facing people who opposed it and kept up their rallies. Just who is this closure for?

Following that question, I began to meet the various people entangled with Yongjugol. I met the merchants, the business owners, and the women sex workers who work there. In this place, which had been reduced to phrases like "crime scene" and "brainwashed victims," there are concrete faces and relationships—people carrying on their lives each in their own way. The stories of those who live in this space from different positions gradually began to unsettle the ideas I had taken for granted.

In that process, I came to join their struggle and stepped into the current of guarding the site together. Gathered under the slogan "Life cannot be shut down," the sex workers, queer people, activists, and others—each in a different position—kept an unfamiliar distance, not fully understanding one another, but before long they grew curious about one another, and their lives gradually began to overlap. The strategies for defending their lives, too, took shape within these relationships.

Yongjugol follows this chain, documenting the closure carried out in the name of "women's human rights" and the living sites that resist it. Along the way, it casts light on the questions that lie behind the policy.​