6.25 – The Korean War Project
6.25 – The Displaced
23 min video. Harmonic Glossolalia chanted by Kyong Boon Oh
-Archival Pigment Print on Lyve Canvas or Velvet Fine Art Paper-
6.25 – The Korean War Project
My father, Duk Keun Oh, is 90 years old. Since the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, he has been waiting to visit his hometown and meet his family members that might be alive in North Korea. At fifteen, he was separated from his entire family by the 38th-parallel division and served in the Korean Liaison Office (KLO), a covert unit under the U.S. Eighth Army. Sent on repeated intelligence missions behind enemy lines at such young age, where the length of service was measured not by time, but by survival, he silently carried memories never openly discussed, neither forgetting nor confessing.
Chorus of the Displaced explores the Korean War’s aftermath on my father and its resonance with my diasporic journey as an immigrant. It navigates the complex and often uncharted terrain of the displacement and showcases the geopolitical power struggles behind Korea’s colonization and division shaped by the Cold War and superpower rivalries. Within this context, I examine how religious histories—particularly Christianity’s entanglements with power—complicate narratives of salvation, belonging, and moral clarity.
The video work 6.25 – the Displaced centers on my harmonic glossolalia alongside the Korean Red Cross’ interview with my father, conducted in 2014—sixty-four years after the war—in an effort to find any surviving family members in North Korea, but without any success.
In 6.25 Mapping, I overlay images from my father’s life with archived Korean War imagery above, and my own images below, connecting them along the sides with a hollow center. This void becomes a space of dialogue between individual and collective memory. The naturally wrinkled, worn surfaces—produced by weaving images with metal wire—and the intentionally unfinished quality of the installation signal history as ongoing rather than resolved. The wire’s dual nature—fragility and strength—mirrors the tension between remembering and moving forward.
In 6.25 – The Displaced, I incorporate ID ME – 6 Year Old, a wire vessel formed from a former garden cloche. The interior-exterior juxtaposition becomes an acoustic and conceptual metaphor for dislocation: exposed, and still enduring bodies that hold absence. Combining new wire with aged chicken wire, I use the malleability of the material to manifest time and identity as fluid. Inside the sculpture I placed images of Korean War refugees, including my father, alongside the phrase “I want to be your superman, I want to be our superman.” Yet the child’s inability to contain these histories makes the images and words burst out of the form and scattered on the floor, showing my attempt to embrace, yet also highlighting my inability to fully achieve it.
In this context, harmonic glossolalia functions as an embodied residue of inherited noise what history cannot fully document. It becomes a counter-archive: not a replacement for recorded history, but an alternative mode of testimony that addresses absence, rupture, and unresolved memory. This approach aligns with Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory, in which descendants inherit fragments of trauma, and with Hannah Arendt’s emphasis on plurality, where community is formed through the coexistence of distinct voices rather than a single authorized narrative.
Weaving influences from handicraft, Expressionism, and personal, historical narratives and moving between prayer, lament, breath, and harmonic glossolalia as a durational sonic labor that holds what cannot be stabilized in narrative form, this body of work becomes a chorus, a collective resonance of longing for belonging, where material structures, video essays, and vocal performance make audible what has been scattered by war, ideology, and displacement, and where listening becomes a site of ethical attention and shared remembrance, attuned to Cathy Caruth’s account of trauma as resistant to full articulation.
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Exhibition Images Link
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