Join dynamic contemporary artist Jin Joo Chae in this Studio Korea session. Jin Joo Chae employs printmaking and mixed media and is concerned with American coverage of the tense dynamics between North and South Korea. Using fragile and fragrant media–newspaper and screen-printed chocolate–she manipulates dominant political narratives to suggest more complex and physically embodied realities. Playful modes and materials are subverted to suggest a helplessness and desire for transformation. The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea shows at Julie Meneret Contemporary Art.

$10 Members, $20 Non-members

The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea  with Artist Jin Joo Chae

11:30 AM | Registration & Light Fare

12:00 PM | Discussion

Commentary on Jin Joo Chae’s The Choco Pie-ization of North Korea

Hats off to Jin Joo Chae and Julie Meneret for this striking opening to 2014. Jin Joo Chae grabs the headlines of the day–literally–and goes for the consumptive jugular in an exhibition rich. No news story dominated the evening news for such a string of consecutive nights–some 26 by one count–than the heated rhetoric and rising tensions involving North Korea in March and April 2013, following on the DPRK’s missile and nuclear tests. The year ended with a surge of reporting on the purge under Kim Jong Un; more news this spring with the findings of the UN’s year-long query into human rights violations.

These events are newsworthy, yet Jin Joo Chae elevates the dialogue substantially with her commentary on North Korea today and foil to the heightened, oft overwrought, coverage by American and international media of events on the Peninsula. With a rich palate and keen eye, chocolate “gracing” the front of official news copy from the North, she reminds us of the artifice of propaganda and does not fail to cast a swath of chocolate on the image of North Korea’s young ruler (an offense that would land the artist a lifetime in the gulagwere she in North Korea).

Jin Joo Chae tests other notions of authority, including of a press that pays scant attention to the complexities of this last of Cold War vestiges and which is quick to sound the drum of war when tensions mount. She questions the authority of commercialism and consumption in our society through the commoditization of Choco Pies as a “bonus” in the Kaesong Industrial Zone, prompting swift trade of the sweets on the North Korean grey market (earning some $10 in purchasing power). This serves as a sad reminder of the North’s isolation and suffering of the ninety-plus percent of northern Koreans not among the elite. The denial of dignity runs deep, be it on a grand scale like the gulag or in small ways like the artifice of the trade in Choco Pies. And at its bare essence, the exhibition reminds us that we are humans all, that we desire sweet things, all wish for a sweeter life–a reminder of the attractions we all share and which transcend politics, division and borders.

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