Chorus of the Displaced explores the Korean War’s aftermath on my father and its resonance with my diasporic journey as an immigrant. It it serves as a personal map that navigates the complex and often uncharted terrain of the displacement and also as a showcase of the geopolitical power struggles behind Korea’s colonization and division shaped by the Cold War and superpower rivalries, highlighting the global interconnectedness of historical events.
Weaving influences from Handicrafts, Expressionism, and personal and historical narratives accompanied by harmonic glossolalia—speaking in tongues commonly associated with Pentecostal and charismatic Christian traditions—I re-contextualize them with the modernist artistic approaches and narrative deconstructions to contemplate overlooked narratives, while projecting possible identities for the marginalized and providing a commentary on redemptive identity. Using the interior-exterior juxtaposition of my sculptures and collages of imagery intertwined with metal wire as a metaphor of dislocation, nostalgia, assimilation, and desire for belonging, I make my art, situated between chaos and order, emotion and meditation, and isolation and community and weaving together fragments of memory and emotion, I tried to provide a visual language for the universal longing for belonging And contemplating my father’s uprooted trauma from the entire family, I understand his avoidance of modern tools like video chats with me across continents as a bitter reminder of past disconnection. It prompts reflection on ‘genetic trauma’ and the lingering impacts of historical tragedies on individual psyches.
The video features the Korean Red Cross’ interview with my father, conducted in 2014, 64 years after the outbreak of the Korean War, in an effort to find any surviving family members in North Korea, but without any success. Juxtaposing sculptural installations of the Korean War in 1950 with a video installation accompanied by Verdi’s ‘Chorus of the Hebrew slaves’ from the opera Nabucco, recollecting the Babylonian captivity of 586 BCE and viewing the repetitive handicraft method and my harmonic glossolalia as physical pathways for the mind, I hope Chorus of the Displaced will be a mapping to reveal a personal history as a communal destiny that transcends time and space with aspirations for redemption. .
