Current Work
2024

Oppa 
2023

The DMZ is Dreaming Again
(다시 꿈꾸는 DMZ)

“De-sited, de-auratized cultures are not merely replications devoid of any authenticity. They achieve another Being, another reality, which shines in the absence of the auratic. On the model of the term hyperculturality, it could be called hyperreality.”

Hyperculture (2022), Byung-chul Han

Organza ribbon tapestries started in 2020, develop into a research trip to the Korean Demilitarized Zone to experience the plants and animals that flourish in this accidental nature preserve. These orchids thrive where few are permitted access, and continue to survive despite past and future deterritorializations. The legacy of American engagement in Korea, and the dialectic between savagery and beauty in nature create strange opportunities out of crises.


DMZ / ROK / DPRK
2020-ongoing

Shim

American opens a cafe at the DMZ.
17 minutes and 27 seconds. digital video.

Shim was a free, one-day pop-up cafe staged in Yangji-ri village’s air raid shelter at the DMZ. Referencing Korean cafe culture’s fixation on third place, the DMZ’s evolution from security tourism, to ecological peace tourism, and its repurposing as art production site, Shim attempts to intervene and align the past and present.

Yangji-ri was one of many minbuk propaganda villages established by the Park Chung Hee regime in the 1960s to showcase the farming bounty and prosperity of the south for a North Korean gaze. The village was formerly part of the Civilian Control Line (CCL) until 2013 when it was reterritorialized as a normal part of South Korea. The village hosts an artist residency funded by the Cheorwon Cultural Foundation, and supported by the Real DMZ Project.

Yangji-ri / Cheorwon-gun, ROK.
2024

DMZ: Checkpoint
Real DMZ Project
August 31 - September 23 2023  


Participating artists:
Onejoon Che, Soyoung Chung, Gimhongsok, HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander, Kyungah Ham, Ikkibawikrrr, Su-Mi Jang, Sunny Kim, Makiko Kudo, Hyeseong Kwon, Jaeseok Lee, Jung-hoon Lee, Woosung Lee, Mikael Levin, Minouk Lim, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Na Mira, Ok Seungcheol, Boma Pak, Hyungjin Park, Noh-wan Park, Seonglib, Youngsun Suh, Sikyung Sung, Kim Westfall, Tomoko Yoneda, Kyung Jin Zoh & Hye Ryeong Cho

The DMZ Exhibition: Checkpoint contemplates on how to perceive the division of Korea and the border area through the perspective of contemporary art and diversify its viewpoint. Continuing various artistic attempts that have dealt with the history and reality of division, it will perceive the DMZ as a new cultural creation zone where reality and imagination intersect.

While acknowledging that the contemplation on war, Korea's division, and the formation of the DMZ as the aftermath begins with an understanding of history and politics, the exhibition will approach the matter with a broader viewpoint and sometimes distance itself while going beyond boundaries. These views may be presented in ambiguous and unfamiliar forms or reveal blurred and layered meanings. We hope that the new artistic attempts will expose the reality and paradoxical situation of the DMZ and transcend our rational thinking and general sensibility.

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Spicy Memory attempts to reconcile the virtual, mutable nature of contemporary Korea with the militarized, static DMZ checkpoint. Ribbons (the artist's chosen material for her textile works), red pepper flakes, and fragments of the artist's adoption documents are encased in an acrylic resin record spinning on a turntable. The stylus never makes contact with the record.

Instead, Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again and Hank Locklin's Geisha Girl play on loop from an unseen source.

The installation of Spicy Memory in a permanent exhibit of an American GI's bunk meditates on the history of Camp Greaves, and the ongoing US-South Korea alliance, and the contradictions of the DMZ as an ideological space, a nature preserve, and military checkpoint.

My Eyes are Down Here (2015), hangs above the mantelpiece.