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    The “Real” DMZ

    Entering Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, in the unlikely town of Nottingham. The post The “Real” DMZ appeared first on Guernica.
    by Jennifer Hope Choi Apr 24, 2018 9 minutes
    DMZ from the north, 2005. Credit: David Eerdmans.

    A reproduction of an 1894 map hangs in my bedroom, depicting the seahorse-shaped sweep of land known simply as Korea. On it, there is no bold red line cleaving the peninsula in two. My maternal grandparents remember living in this whole country, but at 89 and 91 years old they belong to a dwindling population of those who can recall “before”—a time that, for the rest of us, may as well now be lore.

    It is perhaps strange I’d seek answers about this place in Nottingham, UK, one damp and brisk January evening. I arrived, not to visit the town’s most iconic attractions: a half-ton, seven-foot bronze statue of Robin Hood, or musty Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, purportedly England’s oldest pub. What I came to see is often described as the most fortified border in the world — Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, 5,000 miles west of its actual location, reimagined in an exhibition of videos, photographs, embroidery works, and installation sculptures then on view at the New Art Exchange gallery.

    “The Real DMZ: Artistic Encounters Through Korea’s Demilitarized Zone” is a vivid correspondence; an imagined dialogue, pried open by eight South Korean artists, as a way to engage with an otherwise inaccessible place. Nuance in this conversation arrives in unexpected ways.

    Through the ongoing embroidery project “Needling Whisper, Needle Country / SMS Series in Camouflage,” Kyungah Ham has initiated an otherwise impossible collaboration. On display are four four-foot-square canvases from her series, each a kind of rainbowed, psychedelic handmade textile concealing phrases from pop culture. Her method is a complicated process, smuggling patterns through China to

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