O Tannenbaum 소나무야, 2021
2 Channel video projection, seven posters
Variable dimension
The 10th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, QAGOMA, Brisbane, Austrailia
Minouk Lim’s striking video works combine public intervention with song to confront social inequalities. Over the past decade, she has focused on the idea of a ‘Liquid Commune’, the mingling of oceans and tears, as a metaphor for sharing experiences of grief. Lim reflects on more than a century of turbulence in Korea: from Japanese occupation, Cold War polarisation and decades of dictatorship, to the uneasy coexistence of reckoning and forgetting in present-day South Korea.
Since 2017, she has been researching the German folk song ‘O Tannenbaum’ (‘O Christmas tree’) and its evolution across cultures and times, having served an extraordinary range of ideologies. (For example, under Japanese occupation, two different versions of it became both the national anthem and the song of independence fighters). In APT10, she presents a two-channel video combining historical manifestations of ‘O Tannenbaum’ with an installation of poetic and associative references — elements that contribute to her expansive ‘emotional atlas’.
