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ON DMZ - trade
“Starting in summer, 2004, North and South Korean ships to trade directly for the first time, as each country opens seven ports to ships from the other.”

During my trip to Korea this summer, my grandmother who is 92 years old, showed me these two round coconut-like items that you see in the image to the right call “bak”. Bak was used by my grandmother for cooking during the Korean war. The War ended (actually ceased) in 1953, along with the trauma of poverty, hunger and death. In memory, she keeps them anyway. There’s a lot of stitches on them.

All of my parents' family had lived in the north before the war. My father and mother were born, prior to the division in Korea, while it was still colonized by the Japanese. Upon the 1950 break in war, my grandparents escaped to the south with my parents. I can seldom imagine them in their teenage years, crossing the frozen river when most of the bridges were exploded by the U.S. Air force's indiscriminate air bombings. More than 90 % of the land and industry in the north were destroyed by the bombings. It is estimated that 5 million people,about one-sixth of the population at the time, were killed during the Korean War.

DMZ or Double Cut map Line, concrete, each of 78 by 1.5 inch height, 1997

My parents eventually made their home in Inchon, the city where MacArthur had operated landing in Sept., 1950. My childhood was there. Like any immigrants from the north, my father would tell me how the communists were bad. Now I understand why there were so little options for him.

Since the 1945 division, South Korea has long suffered from the ‘National Security Law’. Especially since the unauthorized military dictatorship abused the law and used it to control the population from the 1960’s through the 1980’s. Red complex was a specter that
has kept people in fear of the ‘witch hunter’. While a peaceful reconciliation seems evident between the two Koreas, our history will always be a part of our inner division.

Now, I am a visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Currently, my main work is done in video where I want to push the limits of ‘division’. Like a parasite, I owe a lot to the authors of the resource I collect.