Mixed installation, drawings, videos, performance, etc. 2024

Title of the exhibition: Park Kyong Ju solo Show “I am Fiction“

Opening: 2024.11.15 (Fri) 6 pm

Term: 2024. 11. 16(Sat) ~ 2024. 11. 22.(Fri)

Place: RichCake (Römerstraße 27, Bad Ems, Germany)

Artist talk: 2024. 11. 15(Fri) 6: 30 Pm

Host: Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral

On the 6th February 2008, Tran Thanh Lan, a young Vietnamese woman, was found dead in a small town in South Korea. Jumped to her death from a balcony, according to the police report. ● Artist Park Kyong Ju doesn’t buy this version. For 16 years she has been working on this case and treating it in her artworks. It has been on stage at the theatre, it has been in the Seoul Museum of Art and now it is in Bad Ems. ● Her installation at RichCake not only highlights the case of Tran Thanh Lan, but all such crimes throughout the world. Human rights abuses, modern slavery and exploitation are the topics of the Korean artist Park Kyong Ju, who sees profiteering marriage brokers at the centre of this vortex. During her residency at Bad Ems, Park Kyong Ju has carried on with her mammoth project. ● Coincidentally, she experienced similar insecurity due to immigration laws. Her exhibition at RichCake draws parallels to her own experience with German immigration and her tortuous quest to obtain her residency permit. ● The exhibition is organized in cooperation with the Stadtmuseum Bad Ems, where some of Park Kyong Ju’s works are exhibited as well. ● In cooperation with the Stadtmuseum Bad Ems, where some of Kyong Ju Park’s works are exhibited as well. – Agnes Schofield (Artist Residency Schloss-Balmoral, Curator)

About Park Kyong Ju

Park majored in printmaking at Hongik University in Seoul, and experimental film and photography at HBK Braunschweig in Germany. Her initial work was created with the use of diverse media such as photos, videos and performances, but this has transformed by crossing over different genres, including live music, social innovation, broadcasting and TV, theater and musicals and film through collaboration with migrant workers, migrant women and refugees. She has served as a nonstanding member of the Committee of the Arts Council Korea. Since 2009, she has been the CEO of Salad, a social innovation art company, producing and distributing culturally diverse content with immigrant artists living in Korea. She is based in Seoul and has been living in Bad Ems as a Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral Fellow since April 2024.

Description of Works 

In this exhibition, artist Park Kyong Ju expresses the psychological connection between the fact that Tran Thanh Lan, a Vietnamese woman who died 26 days after entering Korea, had no alien registration number, and Park’s reality of living in Bad Ems, Germany with a fiction residence permit (Fiktionsbescheinigung, Fiction certificate). Through this exhibition, the artist intends to remind us of immigrants who live like ghosts in a strange land beyond the border. They are ghosts who are here but do not exist. The artist seeks to criticize the reality that while neoliberal capital freely crosses borders, borders are still closed to the socially disadvantaged, such as women and freelance artists. Additionally, artist Park hopes to create an opportunity to discuss what alternatives are needed for the future. This solo exhibition, ‘I am Fiction.’, consists of works newly created during the residency period in Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral. These works are being shown to the public for the first time. Artist Park, who lives as a ghost at Balmoral Castle with a fictional residence permit, drew her psychological map with calligraphic Drawings on discarded wood collected from the basement of the Artist Residency Schloss Balmoral (Work title: I Am Fiction). Park also visited the underground storage of the Museum Bad Ems and selected several artifacts that had never been shown to the public and existed as ghosts in the City Museum Bad Ems. She is showing them to the public for the first time in her solo exhibition. In exchange for borrowing the museum’s artifacts, artist Park lends her calligraphic Drawings to the museum and displays it at the City Museum Bad Ems during her solo exhibition. (Work title: Come to Fiction Ems). Park Kyong Ju draws calligraphy-style drawings with Chinese ink on discarded wood and turns them into libations, revering the writing as a spiritual entity (Work title: Ghost House).

“Come to fiction Ems”, The Docent Mrs. Pohlman from the City Museum of Bad Ems is giving a performance explaining loaned artifacts at the exhibition opening. 2024