Some people who attended the opening reception of the 2015 Terrain Exhibition “Biennial” in August at 704 Highland Ave., may know more of what it’s like to live in North Korea. Or then again, they may not. It depends on what knowing amounts to.
Does it mean spending time at a pop-up hair salon getting a hairdo in the style of the ‘Great Leader’ Kim Jong-un? As the stylists clipped, patrons of the pop-up salon wore barber smocks decorated with the North Korean flag.
Across the street from this scene, in front of a porch at 700 N. Highland Ave., hung something even more surreal and dreamlike. A hybrid American-North Korean flag with Kim Jung-un’s face in the middle of it (the piece is titled “Kim Jong-un Americans”).
Once patrons received their Jung-un-inspired buzz cut, they were allowed to stand for a portrait modelled on the North Korean leader’s national portrait.
The bizarre scene was the creation of Aram Han, a Chicago artist with South Korean roots. Although absurd and comical on the surface, the art contains much deeper significance.
Han’s family is from North Korea, but her grandfather was the last of her relatives to actually see the country before he migrated to the south. He died before he could go back to visit his estranged family through a reunification program.
Han said the haircut station was in response to news reports that came out last year in outlets like the Washington Post and the Huffington Post claiming Jung-un had passed a state mandate forcing all men in North Korea to get haircuts like his. The claim turned out to be false.
Han’s work explores the cultural divide between two wildly divergent cultures and the texture of reality that’s lost between them. It also explores her own estrangement from the country of her grandfather’s birth.
What fills the void, she said, is often speculation and cartoonish representation, which is not necessarily to say that Kim Jung-un isn’t ridiculous in real life.
“I definitely use humor in the work and allow people to approach the work through humor, but underneath it are these other layers,” Han said. “I try to talk about things like politics and the situation between North and South Korea, or that between North Korea and America.”
The Terrain Exhibitions were co-founded in 2011 by renowned Oak Park artist Sabina Ott and writer John Paulett. This year, the exhibitions took place in cities across the country and the world — Dallas, Los Angeles, Oakland, Palm Springs, Denmark; and Cambodia to name some. Roughly two dozen homes across Oak Park were decorated with the works of artists from Oak Park, River Forest and beyond.
“Terrain is dedicated to featuring interventions into the conventional landscape of a front yard by emerging as well as established artists who have been invited to create a site — specific work. Artists create installations that challenge the space between public and private, decoration and function, figure and ground,” according to the project’s website.
Artists like Sarah Beth Woods and Bobbi Meier create works that prominently feature found materials. Meier’s “Treasures,” located at 634 Carpenter Ave., was by inspired the home’s lush garden.
“I have been making work from found domestic materials for some time and I was inspired to add to the profusion of natural organic growth with my own synthetic, over-the-top creations,” she noted in an email.
Woods installed a work called “Everything is Beautiful” at 720 Highland Ave. that has the same playful, but serious quality of Han’s work.
Woods described her work as a “hair weave in a garden,” noting that the weaves — dyed in colors that are bright and normally considered ‘feminine’ — reference African American style traits.
“The element of re-appropriation is important to me,” she said. “These are generally things that black women wear and that creates a lot of tension with people, but it’s really about the material and about the time I spent outside of Chicago surrounded by beauty shops.”
Woods said she fell in love with the art of braiding and pony tails and beads that she witnessed while teaching in Chicago public schools.
Addressing the Biennial, Woods, who resides in Chicago, said the event “put Oak Park on the map” before referencing the town’s “rich history of being supportive of the arts.”
‘Biennial’ runs through Sept. 30.
CONTACT: michael@oakpark.com