The MMCA Residency Changdong is an international program for artists and researchers run by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, South Korea. I was selected to participate in this residency in 2020, but the covid restrictions and the war in Ukraine made the trip impossible. The MMCA Residency Changdong kindly offered to work on the project remotely, being in the Urals and finding a new thematic angle.
It was decided to choose the life story of Pen Varlen, a Soviet artist of Korean origin (or Koryo-saram — a self-name accepted among representatives of this ethnic group in the Soviet and post-Soviet space). The biography of Pen Varlen, whose major exhibition was held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul in 2016 (curator: Park Hyesung), features an intriguing Ural period: from 1936 to 1940, he received his first art education at the Sverdlovsk Fine Arts School (now Sverdlovsk art school named after Ivan Shadr). Presumably, Pen, who came from a family of Korean immigrants and a native of Primorye, was sent to study in the Urals by his relatives and friends, who noted his early talent as a draftsman.
As collaborator of the project, I invited Egana Jabbarova, the poet and writer. Through the graphic works of the artist included in the funds of the Ural museums, and the textbooks of the Korean language of the period of indigenization, we consider the story of the breakdown of the language — visual and verbal — and the orthopedics of identity. The result of this collaboration will be an artist book. More details will be published in August.
Egana Jabbarova (Yekaterinburg)
Poet, writer, and candidate of philological sciences. Organizer and curator of the Mezha festival. Author of several poetry books. A winner of the “Poetic Debut” Award (2016). Long-list (2017) and short-list (2019) of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Prize. Participant in international literature anthologies in Kazakhstan, Great Britain and Switzerland.
