Korean art is on exhibit, with protests from North and South
Chandelier by Kyungah Ham, a South Korean artist. A rare exhibition, at a museum in Switzerland, brings together works that, despite sharing a common cultural tradition, come from different worlds. Kyungah Ham; Sigg Collection, Mauensee via The New York Times.
by Catherine Hickley
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- Against a fiery sky, North Koreas former leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il watch with beaming smiles as missiles whiz above them in bursts of light and clouds of smoke. The painting The Missiles, by Pak Yong Chol is one of collector Uli Siggs prized possessions, acquired through persistence, persuasion and contacts forged during his term as Switzerlands ambassador to North Korea in the 1990s.
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4 May 2021 • 1:18pm
Pak Yong-chol s The Missiles (1994-2004), part of a new exhibition in Bern
Credit: Sigg Collection/Kunstmuseum Bern/The Artist
Uli Sigg must know North Korea as well as anybody who wasn’t born there. The Swiss entrepreneur, diplomat and art collector first visited Pyongyang for business in the 1980s, when he worked for a firm selling lifts. “At night, the city was pitch dark,” he remembers in a catalogue essay for a unique new show, Border Crossings, that has just opened at Switzerland’s Kunstmuseum Bern.
Hua Guofeng in North Korea (1978
Oil on canvas
250 x 174 cm
An ambitious new exhibition in Bern, Switzerland, has brought together artists from the bitterly divided nations of North and South Korea, which have long prevented artistic exchange.
In “Border Crossings: North and South Korean Art from the Sigg Collection,” 90 works by 30 artists made between the 1970s to the 2010s hang side by side the divergent histories of the two nations, which have been divided by a hard border since 1953.
The show, at Kunstmusem Bern, primarily hinges on the collection of Uli Sigg, who was the former Swiss ambassador to China and North Korea. He loaned 75 pieces that he acquired during the late 1990s when he was posted in the region, as well as works from South Korea and China that he began to acquire afterward.