CH’ONHADO (ALL UNDER HEAVEN)
Ch’onhado (all under heaven) spans a 23-foot scroll, superimposing personal garment diagrams with Korean historiography.
Photographs of anti-trusteeship arson attacks from the Kyunghyang Shinmun archives; colonial religious scholarship by Swedish, Australian, and American missionaries; Joseon geobukseon warships; silk paintings of retreating intruders; mythical sino-centric maps; haenyeo divers and dockworkers; textures of dried anchovies and netted shadows. These are porous histories, mirrored and spliced and multiplied. The pattern is defined. Cut the line and chronology falls in a crumpled heap. I prefer a crumpled heap, history at my feet, not stretched above my head.1 Where we perceive a chain of events, [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet…The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.2
1 Lis Rhodes, “Whose History?,” in Film as Film: Formal Experiment in Film: 1910–1975, (London: Arts Council / Hayward Gallery, 1979), 119-20. 2 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Early Writings: 1910–1917, trans. Howard Eiland & Others, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Inkjet on silk georgette and kōzo paper, handstitched seams. Panels: 26. Measures: 17 x 275 inches. Media: Inkjet on Silk Georgette and Kōzo 90g, handstitched seams.
Printed February 2024, Installed November 2024
Printed February 2024, Installed November 2024