Sangsangmadang Gallery

Sun Mu Solo Exhibition
KOREA NOW

10.24. 2009[Sat] - 12.09. 2009[Wed]

Opening reception 10.24. 2009[Sat] 6PM
Artist talk 11.07. 2009[Sat] 4PM


l Preface

l Kim No-am, Director of Gallery sangsangmadang

Sun Mu is an artist who fled from North Korea

Sun Mu is an artist standing in a unique position among artists of Korea who garnered attention in 2006. Among those who fled from North Korea (saetuhmin), he is the only professional painter. He is discussed in relation to a debated topic of the divided Korea in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He has been interviewed by various media and has been invited to many important exhibitions.

However, we still know little about this artist. Paying attention to his delicate work should be done in consideration of the big title he is wearing – an artist who fled from North Korea. It is difficult to dissociate socio-scientific and political economic perspectives, regardless of whether one has completed a course in North Korean Affairs or one related to the Ministry of Unification. His mixed feelings of hatred and attachment have been deeply seated in his mind since the Korean Civil War. There is really not a fit word to describe those emotions. However, these have nothing to do with his artistic will.  It is what defines our existential structure. And it is compulsory that we start our discussion of Sun Mu’s work there.

After spending three years in art college in North Korea, Sun Mu risked his life to cross China and the jungles of South-East Asia to settle in South Korea. He continued his major in art there and completing his unfulfilled life as an artist in North Korea. It was not long before Sun Mu’s life changed drastically after his arrival in South Korea. His work became popular in the art market and he had to get used to this sudden popularity. Hence his artistic career’s trajectory took a somewhat of a different path than that of other’s as his past contributed a lot to the way his work was introduced to South Korea’s art world.

There’s bound to be more or something else than first meets the eye. Sun Mu’s life and work hovers outside our ways of conception, as he spent most of his adolescence in North Korea. There are countless accounts of painful memories of the Cold War and the modern history between him and us. The smokes are fusing out, leave their endless tail. Only Sun Mu has been able to fully experience the North and the South.

Today’s artists seem to struggle without the experience of marginalization. Creativity spurs out from experience. The same applies for a good appreciation and understand of a work of art. Through inter-subjectivity and integration, ideal communication becomes possible. However, such a requirement renders a distance between Sun Mu and us. Such distance segregates us and leads us to feel a kind of deprivation. We are further away from each other. We both sense the presence of a stranger. Our effort to understand and imagine how things must have been for Sun Mu becomes useless. We cannot possibly see the actual reality of the North. We can only conjure up the conceptual idea or media-projected image of the North: the world’s last hereditary communist nation, trampled human rights, and people dying of hunger and oppression. For such conditions, there seems to be no appropriate means of discussing art history, theory, and critique. His work challenges our understanding and appreciation with its unfathomable identity.

One can recognize Sun Mu’s face in his paintings depicting Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il, the father and the son, and Kim Jong-il as the founder of a cult, and the faces of the people of the North expressing their satisfaction with their life. One realizes that his work and the viewer share a resemblance. Obsession over the purity of a racially homogenous nation is perhaps the only thing that connects us with Sun Mu. Have we ever thought of some other ways to relate?

The news and weather of North Korea

If art creates illusion, life and reality are the tools that can dispel the illusion. The balance and fantasy which has been building up in the last five decades of the two Koreas’ post-colonial history are dismantled in Sun Mu’s work. His most personal artistic experience does not remain as a mere personal memory. One cannot avoid the inevitable truth behind the false sense of peace since the truce between the two Koreas. It stands as a specific experience in the completion of a work of art, as experience is the source of art.

Our interest in Sun Mu is more than just a curiosity. Rather than looking at the works as a leisurely activity, we reflect on ourselves. This is neither Sun Mu’s intention nor the subject of his work. However, it stands as the only condition allowed to us and Sun Mu. At the same time, it is a condition of a work of art. Through Sun Mu, we can verify a transparent reality. What happens outside the boundary of art is more dramatic than that inside the realm of art. History does not happen according a rational set of procedures and events. There is a balanced mix of coincidences and destiny, working together to form an inevitable event. This applies particularly to our history.

South Korea has had to struggle against war, poverty, and military dictatorship while the North relished in their success throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Our youth had to be sent abroad to the jungles of Vietnam, the mines of Germany, and the vast desert of Saudi Arabia. We volunteered to be the fool and went to the sea to catch the whale. To seek what could not be sought in reality. We became little midgets, calling ourselves the descendents of darkness, and looked for Jesus in Seoul. Our portrait from the past overlaps with that of those who flee North Korea now. This bitter resemblance adds sore pain to the wound.

Though ups and downs, we have reached the 21^st century. In the late 90s, thanks to Kim Dae-jung’s Sunshine policy, the art world had the opportunity to discuss North Korea and whether or not communication between generations with completely different social and economic experience was possible and how. However, in contrast to the firm DMZ of today, it still evades our understanding. 

Let’s think about the North Korean News which is sent out everyday. It repeats like a weathercast after the 9 o’clock news. However it differs from the weathercast as the projection remains the same everyday. It is the repetition of a clear sky and cloudy day. What this repetition reproduces, or what stays as the years go by repeating its self-reproduction, seems to give a working means to a kind of insecurity and depression. The weathercast advises us not to consider outings to the North or the South. What changes is the look and fashion of the weatherman. It doesn’t matter if the projections are right or wrong. A nuclear bomb exists then disappears and Kim Jung-il has died many times over and over. The North and the South only exist as the images they intend to project.

What we are facing

Somebody inquires. Is the Korean peninsula a nation? Most people who have received a formal education would say yes. The world map with latitudes and longitudes crossing over in grids presents Korea as a peninsula. However, things don’t look that way to Sun Mu. Someone said that Korea is an island nation. Come to think of it, it is so. One cannot get to Korea without a plane or a boat. A divided nation is a geological matter. What one learns in a school geology class is contradicted by a political economic error.

Sun Mu made it to South Korea by crossing the big Chinese continent and the jungles of Laos. Gaesung industrial products, livestock, and rice packages can freely cross the boundary between South and North Korea, but a person has to risk his life to do so. It is like an island. One can visit North Korea as a tourist, but cannot communicate as one freely wishes. Tragically, only the brief reunification of divided families and visiting one’s hometown come and go. And even these are limited opportunities. Seeing their pain through the media is an unfamiliar and unrealistic experience. Reality is reduced to people’s agonizing drama. Our tears don’t console them as they are nothing more than that from everyday life. It may seem disrespectful, but the reality of North and South Korea has become a somewhat convoluted drama. The abject reality is only an ingredient to stimulate a catharsis. We are forced to a by-standing audience’s seat, becoming consumers of a cinematic tragedy. Such irony is our logic and rationale. And this is the actual entity behind the insecurity that forms the hesitation over being called a homogenous ethnic group. Such truth or ideology and the void behind the vanished empty room are what we are composed of. We are nothing more than just story-tellers of an episode of a drama. We become existing strangers.

When South Korea and North Korea reunite, could we become happy? Would the happiness of the nation and citizens suffice personal happiness? Could it be just a blindness that has led us to become an isolated nation? There is no way to tell. Our predecessor’s prophecy that reunification is our wish and will save us seems a little unclear. The argument contending our nation’s big problems and conflict is due to society’s little contradictions and endless conflicts become far less convincing and impose a sense of discomfort. Would there be a happy ending to a homogenous nation’s purity’s drama?

They say two means trouble. It is because once you choose one from the two, one becomes fettered to it. This is so. The split into two Koreas since the liberation has led to two separate paths of pain, but the world goes on. Time makes us heal and laugh over the past. However, the reality of the divided Korea remains unchanged. It looks as if it is making endless demands. It is not a surprising thing. Nothing much has changed in Korea during the transition from 20^th to the 21^st century. This droning instability and sadness is transparent and specific. Such reality composes the appearance of the former North Korean artist we are trying to see. Understanding Sun Mu’s childhood in North Korea, the experience of fleeing the state, settling in South Korea, and formulating one’s artistic creation are the challenges one faces when trying to understand the artwork. History has taught the inevitable pain of the splitting of a nation.

Every nation has its own problems. It may seem simple, but it is always complicated. It is only that one doesn’t examine it closely as it is not really an issue that concerns one’s immediate life. It is easy to push it away from a subject of speculation. Hence a complicated and desperate issue translates into a simple, banal one and we exchange a casual greeting or smile with Sun Mu.

Sun Mu cannot be sure to expect an appropriate and rational exchange of opinion and interest with us. There is no good advice to address this problem. It is bound to fail as a cliché and be seen as overly re-hashed words. Such a problem is due to a fundamental deficiency and tension that cannot be solved in the immediate future. Such tension is based on the existential condition that leads us to repeat attraction and repulsion between us, him, and the artwork. This is Sun Mu and our problem to solve. We must place ourselves on equal footing – the extent of our misunderstanding is the same and rightful as that of his and hence it must be equally honored. And mutual efforts should go on. This exhibition only directs us to a certain point in the path. There is still a long road to go if we are to truly understand and accept each other.