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by Jeremy Hatch
Tonight at 8:00, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will open their new exhibition, transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix, with a big party involving Campari cocktails and Thomas’ Apartment, the LA-based-Vietnamese-American-alterna-rock phenom.
That’s a lot of hypens, I know, but it’s entirely appropriate for this exhibition. Just look at the title. First: “trans,” which means transcendent, in several senses but most of all transnational; and “POP,” which refers both to pop culture and Pop Art. The second half of the name, “Korea Vietnam Remix,” alludes to the 16 featured artists — all of whom are from Vietnam, Korea, or their respective communities in the United States — and their works, which explore the historic and current relationships between the three countries in terms of pop culture and using Pop Art strategies.
That three-way relationship has been fraught at times and friendly at others. The countries are relatively far apart on the Asian continent, but they were brought together by their common invader, the United States. The Vietnam War opened a path for tens of thousands of Koreans to come to Vietnam — a diaspora that paved the way for Vietnam’s “Korean Wave” in popular culture during the ensuing peace. The works themselves employ a wide range of techniques and media, from paint to digital video and everything in between.
The curators are Viet Le, who is an independent artist and curator, and Yong Soon Min, who is an associate professor in the Studio Art department at UC Irvine. The works were previously shown in Seoul, South Korea and at Irvine.
If you come to the party tonight, admission is free for members and $15 to the general public. If you can’t, though, never fear: the works will be on display until March 15. For further insight, you might want to check out this review of the show in Modern Painters and this review of its Irvine iteration.
Image: from Xavier Collection, Courtesy of Goethe Institut
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Korea was not invaded by the United States. In fact one major element contributing to North Korea and Stalin's decision to invade the South was the US's seeming disinterest in occupying or defending it.
@KWillets: Your first sentence is technically correct.
However:
1) When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, the North Korean Army was backed by the PRC, not the USSR.
2) In response to this invasion by North Korea, the US (and eventually, UN forces) occupied South Korea and invaded North Korea within months.
Then, as you probably know, the PRC intervened on behalf of North Korea, and the war stalemated for 3+ years before all four sides called it off.
While it's true that the US and US-led forces occupied allied South Korea, and invaded enemy North Korea, the sentence "shared invader" alludes to this sense of the US as an occupying foreign power, a situation that both Korea and Vietnam experienced.
Kim Il Sung spent his pre-dictator career in the USSR, moved into NK with the Soviet occupation, and sought Stalin's permission before invading the South in the summer of 1950. I believe it was winter before the PRC committed forces, after Stalin said no and told Kim to move back to Manchuria.
US forces had been in the South since WWII, filling in for the Japanese who were previously occupying the country.
I'm sorry to be nitpicky, but historical revisionism is so strong in Korea right now that many native Koreans aren't educated to know these facts, with over half of recent high school graduates not even knowing who started the war. The Korean teacher's union is unfortunately controlled by NK, from all appearances.
No worries, discussion is interesting! That's fascinating if what you say is true; I was simply repeating my memory from a general history of the US I read once upon a time, and what you said seemed to conflict with that. Mostly, I just wanted to clarify the sense of the line you took issue with, since it wasn't meant to be taken quite so literally. Cheers!
I confess I'm in the middle of reading a history of the war, so don't take my verbal diarrhea too seriously. However much of Korean contemporary and even "pop" culture consists of loyalties and disloyalties to different groups and their versions of history, so I suppose it's relevant in that sense.