Poster image of 《SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014: Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers》 © SeMA

SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014 《Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers》, was held from September 2 to November 23, 2014, at the Seoul Museum of Art Seosomun Main Building and the Korean Film Archive. The focused of Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers was looking back on contemporary ‘Asia’ where they shared experiences of intense colonization, the Cold War, rapid economic growth and social change in a short period of time. ‘Ghosts’ from the title stand for the forgotten history and traditions of Asia, ‘spies’ symbolize the memories of the Cold War, and the ‘grandmothers’ are metaphors of ‘women and time.’

The Biennale looked upon the modern and contemporary history of Asia as the birthplace of Buddhism, Confucianism, Shamanism, Taoism, Hinduism and examined how contemporary artists discovered the traditions of such spiritual culture. It also brought attention local diversity of the Cold War, which cannot be seen as simply a competition between the USA and the Soviet Union and witnessed how the creations of media artists are look similar to the vast range of subjects related to ‘spy’ including taboo, asylum, the hacking of computer networks, code interpretation and information and communication methods. On the other hand, ‘grandmother’ here was a powerless being against authority, but also represented endurance and compassion which can be reflected upon as an active value surpassing such power in the moral sense.


Installation view of 《SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2014: Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers》 © SeMA

North Korea A is a painting created on the occasion of an exhibition titled 《Seoul Moves towards Pyongyang》 (2000). The year 2000 was a time when the relationship between South Korea and North Korea was at least in good shape thanks to the President Kim Dae-jung’s visit to the North. Around the time of the Inter-Korean Summit, the kinds of ‘art’ presented to the South Korean public were benign travel sketches by a few painters. The painters depicted the people or landscape of North Korea as “peaceful scenery of a foreign country” as if they were camels along the Silk Route. North Korea A and North Korea B also present peaceful scenery. But there is something “impure” in the paintings, different from other ideologically “pure” paintings produced by other artists around the time.
 
Choi’s paintings move beyond being peaceful scenery and construct a kind of utopia that is immediately laden with a burden of ideology (moreover, we know well that North Korea frequently uses ‘a socialist utopia’ as its rhetoric). We surely know that it is far from a socialist utopia, and the dear leader and his people in the country would no longer believe that ‘the North’ is a utopia. In this sense, the paintings are images of a distant dream that cannot be perceived as realistic. Hence, North Korea A acquires a complex system of meaning.
 
Although the North Korean painters are capable of producing highly manipulative propaganda images, they cannot paint ‘the genuine paradise—an authentic moment of pleasure by the people.’ What the dreamlike beauty of Choi’s paintings expose is the fact that the North Korean painters cannot depict such a moment. This is because of the excess of ideology for a communist utopia excludes one’s interest in ‘blissful moments’ that would actually exist in different moments in reality. Yet at the same time, Choi’s paintings depict a dream of a beautiful paradise.

The paintings are an equivalent of certain scenes of “the North Korea as a utopia,” which is not depicted or impossible to be depicted in both countries of the Korean peninsula. Or, they are certain scenes of a world that is (at least) lazy and unrestrained, which is completely relaxed in its ideology. In this sense, North Korea A and North Korea B appear to be an immense irony materialized in the form of painting, existing between the ideal and the reality, the virtue and the vice of the motivation and result, the rise of one’s will and its fall, and the momentary phenomenological pleasure and the ideological dogma.

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