A SHINING SEA OF NUCLEAR

The painter Jeong A Bang, who lives in the port metropolis of Busan, is one of the leading politically and feminist-motivated artists in contemporary Korea. Her original artistic inspiration came from “MINJUNG” (Korean for “people’s mass”), a revolutionary democracy movement that emerged in the South Korean city of Gwangju in the 1980s, was initially bloodily suppressed, but ultimately heralded the end of the military dictatorship.

At the beginning of her career, she dedicated her work cycles to the socially disadvantaged in the unconditionally advancing South Korean turbo-capitalism, especially the oppressed women of the lower class in Korea’s Confucian-patriarchal society.

Jeong A Bang relies on the communicative power of art and deals with the evident political and ecological core issues of our time, yet manages to subtly make the hidden, repressed and marginalized visible. She is a meticulously collecting, noting and sketching chronicler whose pictorial creations are born far more intuitively than they might appear.

In this sense, it is also the “fear” of a nuclear catastrophe that inspired Jeong A Bang to create her exhibition at NON Berlin in the Meinblau art space, whereby she does not focus on the threat posed by North Korea, but places the dangers of nuclear power at the center of her exhibition “A SHINING SEA OF NUCLEAR”.

The trigger for her research and ongoing artistic work on this topic was the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in 2011, especially as Japan shirked its responsibility and allowed the radioactively contaminated water from the havered nuclear reactor to be discharged into the East Sea of the Korean Peninsula – an ecocide that was also largely suppressed by the state in the Republic of Korea. With the ironically overdrawn “shining sea of nuclear power”, the artist turns against the interests of all those advocates and lobbyists who continue to postulate nuclear power as the energy source of the present and future. (Bernhard Draz)

Media partner: neolook.com. The exhibition is funded by the SBS Foundation. Meinblau Projektraum is funded by the State of Berlin, Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.