The Sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

90 Kyungah Ham Communication beyond the unreachable place The work of Kyungah Ham reflects on the way images structure our understandings of cultural politics, militarised conflict and social activism. Employing imagery from past and present-day exemplars found on the internet — and using traditional artisanal techniques for their reproduction — Ham’s work foregrounds the way these images are circulated and interpreted within popular culture and online communication. Inspired by the use of the propaganda poster bill for disseminating dissident views, Ham’s work explores the significance of past atrocities for contemporary audiences and asks: how can an individual’s actions have agency within the context of international politics? In her 2008 solo exhibition ‘Such Game’, 1 Ham presented her first series of textile works produced in North Korea (DPRK). Collecting images sourced through the online search engine Google, Ham covertly sent composite imagery and photomontages to female artisans in the DPRK (via China) to be hand-embroidered using traditional techniques and materials. The project began as a means of opening up communication with North Koreans about local anxieties and foreign politics that influence everyday lives on both sides of the Korean border. In undertaking this charged exchange, Ham sought to enact a dialogue across the barriers of ideology and physical distance. Owing to the political sensitivities of the works, many of the embroideries have been confiscated by DPRK officials; in some instances, the textiles are sent back to Ham by the artisans in pieces, to be reconfigured on their receipt in South Korea. In the diptych Nagasaki Mushroom Cloud, Hiroshima Mushroom Cloud 2008, Ham reproduces two of the most recognisable images of modern warfare: the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States. These aerial views depict the nuclear mushroom clouds in stark black and white, devoid of flaming colour; concealed beneath is the destruction, devastation and unseen effects of radiation. As images of the world’s only wartime nuclear attacks, the photographs continue to conjure anxieties over nuclear proliferation in a post-Cold War era. For Korean audiences, their reception is further complicated by the shaping of these events in mainstream Korean history. While large numbers of Koreans interned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki labour camps were casualties of the bombings, acknowledgment of their experiences is shadowed by Korea’s liberation and independence from the prewar Japanese empire. In Some Diorama 2008, Ham interweaves representations of war, colonialism and trauma — what she terms images ‘representing hidden terrorism, a hidden political brutality’ 2 — into a network resembling a platform video game. Based on a miniature diorama of the Vietnam– US War (1959–75) — illustrating key events within a complex of secret caves and tunnels used by the North Vietnamese — Some Diorama explores the way these particular images register with a media-literate public, as well as their influence on video game culture, which often mimics military strategy and imagery. On the surface, the burning skyline of New York on September 11 2001 is relocated to the jungles of Vietnam. Below, a labyrinth, connected by staircases and passageways, reveals fragmented images and signifiers — piles of skulls are a stark reminder of massacres carried out in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge regime; the back of an anonymous man recalls the ‘Tank Man’ of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing; and, in a more abstract illustration, Wandjina figures painted by Aboriginal people from the Kimberley region of Western Australia evoke the trauma of colonisation. 3 These diverse images were selected by the artist as enduring symbols of conflict and resistance that the North Korean artisans would need to consider while transforming the source images into embroideries. Ham’s embroideries offer a strange and compelling mixture of propaganda, personal memory and social agency. Given the labour- intensive process of hand embroidery, Ham’s project might be interpreted as utilising the participatory process of labour as a form of political enactment and transformation. For Kyungah Ham, the contrast between her ability to spontaneously access information online and the limited access her collaborative artisans have prompts a desire to ultimately, as she puts it, attempt ‘communication beyond the unreachable place’. 4 Jose Da Silva Endnotes 1 ‘Such Game’ was held at SSamzie Space in Seoul in 2008. In addition to the textile works, the exhibition included a series of white porcelain sculptures of Kalashnikov rifles and related weaponry, which were decorated with traditional landscape paintings and the pattern of a Persian carpet traced with the oil residue of Iraqi military supplies. 2 Kyungah Ham, email to the author, 10 August 2009. 3 Wandjina is the Aboriginal name for ancestral spirits who control the seasons and rain patterns. The painting of Wandjina figures forms part of important ceremonial practices at sacred sites for the people of the West Kimberley region. The appropriation of these figures, by those not permitted to paint or reproduce these images, is the subject of continued debate. 4 Ham, email to the author.