For Yi Je-seok, that meant putting a wounded soldier on a billboard that could barely stand on its own.
Yi, the founder of Jeski Social Campaign and an advertising director known professionally as Jeski, staged a guerrilla billboard campaign following last month's land mine explosions near the inter-Korean border.
Dubbed the "One-Legged Billboard," the installation depicted a South Korean soldier with a severely injured leg, struggling to balance on a single supporting pole.
The slogan uses Korean wordplay to connect soldiers' physical injuries with political obstruction. Another read: "National security is not a partisan issue."
"At first, I thought about using it to mark mine-danger areas," Yi told AJP in a phone interview Tuesday.
"But then it would just say, 'This place is dangerous,' and that would be the end of it. I wanted politicians to wake up. That's why I added the message about politics holding us back."
Yi installed the temporary billboards on Oct. 10 and 11 in military border areas around Gimpo and Paju, as well as near the Ministry of National Defense in Seoul's Yongsan district.
The campaign followed two land mine explosions on Sept. 21 inside the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Three South Korean service members were injured, two seriously, while clearing a route near the Military Demarcation Line ahead of a planned United Nations Command inspection.
Yi said the political disputes that followed were overshadowing the safety of the people serving there.
"We should be thinking about how to prevent gaps in our national security and how to compensate the people who were injured," he said. "But instead, everyone is busy insulting one another, arguing about who was right and who was wrong."
The campaign video deliberately paired audio of politicians arguing during parliamentary proceedings with the image of a wounded soldier standing alone.
His unstable posture was meant to convey both the physical consequences of a land mine explosion and a country struggling with its political divisions.
"The left and right legs are out of sync. They're fighting each other, and the country can't even walk forward," Yi said.
The soldier on the billboard was not a victim of the September explosions. Yi said the figure was created using artificial intelligence, and the original design was considerably more graphic.
"I originally wanted to show a soldier standing there with one leg completely gone," he said.
He reconsidered because he feared the depiction could be interpreted as demeaning people with disabilities.
"We had to be very careful," he said. "If you get that kind of expression wrong, it could end up disparaging someone because of their physical condition."
The final version showed a badly injured leg instead — a compromise that Yi acknowledged had weakened the image's impact.
"We softened it little by little as we considered those concerns," he said.
Even so, some online viewers questioned whether the advertisement made light of injured soldiers' suffering.
Yi acknowledged those reactions but argued that the discomfort was part of what made the image difficult to ignore.
"Of course it's uncomfortable to look at. It's not a pleasant scene," he said. "It's someone's injury. Someone's sacrifice."
"When people hear that someone was injured, they don't necessarily grasp what that means unless they actually see it."
He wanted viewers to confront the reality behind reports of military casualties.
"People tend to forget things that are not directly in front of them," he said. "I wanted them to look at this incident again."
Getting the billboards into place required another kind of creative exercise.
Yi said his team erected them without prior authorization, filmed them and quickly dismantled them as security personnel approached.
"This is what we call a guerrilla campaign," he said. "The security guards come after us, we run away, put something up and disappear."
To transport the installation without attracting attention, the team divided it into several pieces.
"We folded the pictures like portable screens and wrapped the poles in picnic mats," he said. "We disguised everything as picnic equipment."
The brief installations were designed to leave behind footage even after the physical billboards were gone.
"A lot of what we do is basically a protest performance," Yi said. "If someone came into your house to protest against you, would you welcome them?"
It was far from his first campaign involving the peninsula's divisions.
"North Korea is an issue I've been dealing with for a very long time," he said. "I've produced many works over the years concerning inter-Korean relations, national security and North Korean human rights."
"I'm the guy who went to a North Korean embassy and put up a poster saying Kim Jong-un belongs in prison," he said.
"I got spotted and had to escape in a rental car."
His work has also brought him into military institutions through the front door. According to his research institute, Yi was appointed the South Korean Army's first promotional commissioner in 2013 and delivered a lecture on creativity at the South Korea-U.S. Combined Forces Command in 2024.
He gained international recognition in 2007 when his "Chimney Gun" advertisement won a Gold Pencil at The One Show advertising awards in the United States. The work turned a factory smokestack into the barrel of a handgun to highlight the dangers of air pollution.
Yi said he would continue developing campaigns on North Korea and national security, though he declined to discuss upcoming projects.
He acknowledged that his advertisements might not provide answers to the questions they raise.
"I'm just the one blowing the whistle."
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