The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT10) Catalogue

Artists The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 100 O Tannenbaum (still, detail) 2017–21 Two-screen video, found objects / Installed dimensions variable / Courtesy: The artist Since the 1990s, when she was active in the more politicised end of relational art, Minouk Lim has created a striking body of video works that combine public intervention with song to confront social inequalities. Over the past decade, she has focused on the idea of a ‘Liquid Commune’ — the mingling of oceans and tears — as a metaphor for sharing experiences of grief. Lim draws together threads of loss from more than a century of turbulence on the Korean Peninsula: from Japanese occupation, through disastrous Cold War polarisation and decades of dictatorship on both sides of the border, to the uneasy coexistence of reckoning and forgetting in the South Korea of today. Since 2017, Lim has been researching the German folk song ‘O Tannenbaum’, an ode to the silver fir tree, and its adaptation into an English Christmas carol, a popular anthem for American states and colleges and a revolutionary worker’s song, among many other things. Under Japanese occupation, it served as the Korean national anthem, but a version of the tune as British labour standard ‘Red flag’ — translated by Japanese communists — became the song of Korean independence fighters. Authorship has even been attributed to none other than North Korea’s founding ruler Kim Il-sung. Fascinated by these evolutions across culture, Lim has produced several evolving performances and installations presenting multiple versions of the tune whose iterations mimic international adaptation of European Christmas traditions. In APT10, she presents a two-channel video work, O Tannenbaum 2017–21, that combines various manifestations of the song with footage from her related projects. Seven sheets of music attest to the tune’s numerous manifestations: traditional German standard ‘O Tannenbaum’; Jim Connell’s 1889 British Labour Party anthem ‘Red flag’; its direct 1921 translation into Japanese as ‘Akahata no uta’; the 1930s Korean version ‘Jeoggiga’; the parallel Korean nursery rhyme ‘Sonamu’ or ‘Pine Tree’; and the English language carol ‘O Christmas Tree’. In the video, these different versions appear in a dizzying montage that traverses Nazi Germany, the Cold War historical drama Silmido 2003, 1 and the brief revival of ‘Red flag’ under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour Party. Lim interweaves these moments with original documentation of her own research and actions. In one sequence, a solo accordionist plays the tune from inside a speaker truck that tours the sites of Tokyo’s Bloody May Day riots of 1952, when Japanese police open fire on unarmed protestors — including ethnic Koreans — opposed to military cooperation with the United States. 2 In another, forensic researchers conduct X-ray studies of pine trees in central Gwangju to locate bullets fired by government troops during the violent suppression of the popular pro-democracy uprising of 1980. Contrasting these sombre memorials are recordings from karaoke booths that Lim set up to enable audiences to sing the seven different versions of the tune. Gallery-based iterations of Lim’s O Tannenbaum are typically accompanied by displays of material accumulated by the artist in the course of her research. For APT10, the sheet music is woven into a photo-montage of related documents, including references to the Tree of Knowledge — the ghost gum in the Queensland town of Barcaldine that served as a meeting place during the 1891 Shearer's Strike. At the entrance to the space, a sculpture of a gnarled wooden bird stands guard. For Lim, the relevance of these objects is poetic and associative rather than overdetermined, operating within the expansive, self-described ‘emotional atlas’ she constructs around a tune that has found itself a musical vehicle for an extraordinary range of ideologies. Reuben Keehan Endnotes 1 Directed by Kang Woo-suk, Silmido 2003 dramatises the true story of Unit 684, a South Korean black operations unit who mutinied in 1971, dying in a shootout with the army in suburban Seoul. Long concealed by the state, the incident only came to widespread public attention with the film’s release. ‘Jeoggiga’ figures in the film as a symbol of resistance. 2 Two protestors died, and a further 22 of the roughly 2300 wounded suffered bullet wounds; it was the last time firearms were used to control civil disturbances in Japan. William Andrews, Dissenting Japan , Hurst, London, 2016, p.19. Minouk Lim Born 1968, Daejeon, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul, South Korea