Queensland Art Gallery - Queensland Government

Kyungah Ham
Communication beyond the unreachable place
The work of Kyungah Ham reflects on the way images structure our
understandings of cultural politics, militarised conflict and social activism.
Employing imagery from past and present-day exemplars found on the
internet — and using traditional artisanal techniques for their reproduction
— Ham’s work foregrounds the way these images are circulated and
interpreted within popular culture and online communication. Inspired
by the use of the propaganda poster bill for disseminating dissident
views, Ham’s work explores the significance of past atrocities for
contemporary audiences and asks: how can an individual’s actions
have agency within the context of international politics?
In her 2008 solo exhibition ‘Such Game’, 1 Ham presented her first
series of textile works produced in North Korea (DPRK). Collecting
images sourced through the online search engine Google, Ham
covertly sent composite imagery and photomontages to female
artisans in the DPRK (via China) to be hand-embroidered using
traditional techniques and materials. The project began as a means of
opening up communication with North Koreans about local anxieties
and foreign politics that influence everyday lives on both sides of the
Korean border. In undertaking this charged exchange, Ham sought
to enact a dialogue across the barriers of ideology and physical
distance. Owing to the political sensitivities of the works, many of
the embroideries have been confiscated by DPRK officials; in some
instances, the textiles are sent back to Ham by the artisans in pieces,
to be reconfigured on their receipt in South Korea.
In the diptych Nagasaki Mushroom Cloud, Hiroshima Mushroom Cloud
2008, Ham reproduces two of the most recognisable images of modern
warfare: the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the
United States. These aerial views depict the nuclear mushroom clouds
in stark black and white, devoid of flaming colour; concealed beneath
is the destruction, devastation and unseen effects of radiation. As
images of the world’s only wartime nuclear attacks, the photographs
continue to conjure anxieties over nuclear proliferation in a post-Cold
War era. For Korean audiences, their reception is further complicated
by the shaping of these events in mainstream Korean history. While
large numbers of Koreans interned in Hiroshima and Nagasaki labour
camps were casualties of the bombings, acknowledgment of their
experiences is shadowed by Korea’s liberation and independence
from the prewar Japanese empire.
mimics military strategy and imagery. On the surface, the burning
skyline of New York on September 11 2001 is relocated to the
jungles of Vietnam. Below, a labyrinth, connected by staircases and
passageways, reveals fragmented images and signifiers — piles of
skulls are a stark reminder of massacres carried out in Cambodia by
the Khmer Rouge regime; the back of an anonymous man recalls the
‘Tank Man’ of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing; and, in
a more abstract illustration, Wandjina figures painted by Aboriginal
people from the Kimberley region of Western Australia evoke the
trauma of colonisation. 3 These diverse images were selected by the
artist as enduring symbols of conflict and resistance that the North
Korean artisans would need to consider while transforming the source
images into embroideries.
Ham’s embroideries offer a strange and compelling mixture of
propaganda, personal memory and social agency. Given the labourintensive
process of hand embroidery, Ham’s project might be
interpreted as utilising the participatory process of labour as a form of
political enactment and transformation. For Kyungah Ham, the contrast
between her ability to spontaneously access information online and
the limited access her collaborative artisans have prompts a desire
to ultimately, as she puts it, attempt ‘communication beyond the
unreachable place’. 4
Jose Da Silva
Endnotes
1 ‘Such Game’ was held at SSamzie Space in Seoul in 2008. In addition to the textile
works, the exhibition included a series of white porcelain sculptures of Kalashnikov
rifles and related weaponry, which were decorated with traditional landscape
paintings and the pattern of a Persian carpet traced with the oil residue of Iraqi
military supplies.
2 Kyungah Ham, email to the author, 10 August 2009.
3 Wandjina is the Aboriginal name for ancestral spirits who control the seasons and
rain patterns. The painting of Wandjina figures forms part of important ceremonial
practices at sacred sites for the people of the West Kimberley region. The
appropriation of these figures, by those not permitted to paint or reproduce
these images, is the subject of continued debate.
4 Ham, email to the author.
In Some Diorama 2008, Ham interweaves representations of war,
colonialism and trauma — what she terms images ‘representing hidden
terrorism, a hidden political brutality’ 2 — into a network resembling a
platform video game. Based on a miniature diorama of the Vietnam–
US War (1959–75) — illustrating key events within a complex of secret
caves and tunnels used by the North Vietnamese — Some Diorama
explores the way these particular images register with a media-literate
public, as well as their influence on video game culture, which often
Kyungah Ham
South Korea b.1966
Nagasaki Mushroom Cloud, Hiroshima Mushroom Cloud
2008
Hand embroidery on silk / Diptych: (a) 120 x 150cm;
(b) 120 x 150cm / Sigg Collection, Switzerland / Image
courtesy: The artist and Kukje Gallery, Seoul
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