MY UTOPIA (Video Still), CHE Onejoon, 2018 © CHE Onejoon

September 7 through September 29, 2019
Opening: September 6, 2019, 7 pm

Korean artist CHE Onejoon presents 3-channel video MY UTOPIA (2018) along with his installation work International Friendship: The Gifts From Africa (2017) at Meinblau.

His 3-channel video My Utopia (2018) adopted a documentary theater format inspired by the story of Monica Macias, who was the daughter of the first President of Equatorial Guinea in Africa and spent 16 years in exile in Pyongyang due to a coup in the country. The actresses play Macias and people surrounding her. The people in the film expressing their curiosity of different skin colors and each other’s foreign languages. It reveals how similar individual identity issues are – including a sense of community, nationality, race, and language – in both Koreas, as well as the structural problems of the relationship between the two Koreas and their diplomacy.

Another work in the show International Friendship: The Gifts From Africa (2017-18) which borrows from North Korea’s International Friendship Exhibition in which over 224,111 presents Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il received from 179 countries are exhibited. Che found a catalogue of the International Friendship Exhibition in a North Korean library in Seoul but the library did not allow people to borrow or copy the book. Che broke the rules and scanned it at the library and used it as a reference point in his sculpture. The project consists of the re-edited version of North Korean propaganda film, the illegally scanned photographs, and 3-D printed objects from the photographs focus on gifts from African countries. The gifts are related to Kim Il-Sung‘s foreign policy at that time. Kim Il-sung actively participated in the non-alliance movement, fully supporting the leaders of the newly independent African countries of the 70s and 80s.

Organized by: NON Berlin – Asia contemporary art platform and Meinblau e.V.
Supported by:
Bezirksamt Pankow von Berlin – Amt für Weiterbildung und Kultur – FB Kunst und Kultur, Arts Council Korea

 

Meinblau Projektraum & NON Berlin
Pfefferberg Haus 5, Christinenstr. 18-19, 10119 Berlin
www.meinblau.de
www.nonberlin.com

Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday, 2 – 7 pm

Further information
Bernhard Draz
draz@meinblau.de

Press contact
Sylke Bluhm, Bluhm PR, +49 (0) 179 9084493, info@bluhmpr.de