Impression

HAM Kyung-ah (1966- ) makes use of a range of mediums including video, installation, photography, sculpture, and traditional Korean art forms. Ham’s keen eyes locate the crevices of double-sided and contradictory social values, systems, ethics, and actions of law that exist in the mind of a single individual, and therein gives her own artistic idioms and forms to them.One day Ham found a fly sheet made by the North in front of her house and decided to pin down the awry way of communication between the South and the North through her embroidery work. Ham thought “Is it possible for me to send a handbill, too?” and felt a disposition to communicate with some random people of the North. She immediately collected some domestic and foreign online news articles about wars, terrorist activities, and other not-so-funny things and rewrote them in North Korean language together with poet SUNG Kiwan. Written in North Korean the articles became rather humorous. Anyway, the news stories that are rewritten not in a formal, dry manner but humorously are accompanied by paintings by those Iraqi children who already figured out what war was like. And this was delivered to an anonymous North Korean embroidery worker through China so as to translate it into a piece of embroidery. This is how the project was carried out.