Regardless of Nationality explores nationality's fluidity, playing with how migration transforms countries and migrants alike—echoing the symbolic dive from Paestum's Tomb of the Diver (c. 470 BCE), where a lone figure leaps from solid ground into water. An antique-futuristic mural of framed laser prints with silver leaf decoration—evoking kintsugi repair of broken ceramics—features maps and divers on varied backgrounds, overlaid with scrawls in fictitious Latin and Korean-like alphabets plus ambiguous contract stamps.
The work provokes questions of homeland and belonging while challenging foreign artists' exclusion from Korean public funding, advocating fluid regulations. Images generated via Stable Diffusion using the diver figure and prompts from Park Kyong Ju's migrant cultural rights report (UPR 42, Republic of Korea). DAKA is a non-profit organization, in which I had the honor of being one among other directors helping to promote cultural diversity and protection of foreign artists, students, and art school graduates. Whether the exhibited mural speaks of the past or the future is still an open question.
exhibition view, Fluid Ground, Alternative Space LOOP,2023, Seoul
Tomb of the Diver, Detail from the underside of the top slab of the grave, showing a man diving into wave