Kyungah Ham

I caught the Minneapolis Institute of Art's show, The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989, just before it closed last weekend. I didn't take very many pictures, but I wanted to share one piece. It's by Kyungah Ham, and the title is "What you see is the unseen / Chandeliers for Five Cities":


From a distance it looked like a photo or digital art, and I thought maybe it was not that interesting. 

But when I got closer and read the accompanying text, I realized it's embroidery:


Even zooming in on this picture doesn't give a good idea of its complexity.  

The panel text tells about the materials:

Materials: North Korean hand embroidery, silk threads on cotton, middleman, smuggling, bribe, tension, anxiety, censorship, ideology, wooden frame, approximately 1,600 hrs./2 persons

Ham has been working with anonymous North Koreans since 2008 on embroidery pieces. The panel for this piece gives this description:

...her computer-rendered designs were smuggled through intermediaries based in China or Russia, who passed on the work to North Korean artisans for stitching. Ham depicts the chandeliers swaying precariously or falling, a symbolic representation of the instability sown by other countries in Korea at various stages of its nationhood.

As with many exhibits, seeing this and reading about her work makes me realize how much I don't know about an entire area of modern art.