Kyungah Ham has commissioned embroidery pieces based on slang and South Korean culture from black-market artisans in North Korea.
Since 2008, Korean artist Kyungah Ham has worked on a series of massive embroidery pieces with collaborators she’s never met. Ham, born in 1966, works with intermediaries to smuggle her designs from South Korea to the communist North, where artisans painstakingly bring her ideas to life, stitching words (in English and Korean), shapes, and colors by hand over hundreds or even thousands of hours. The designs don’t cross the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas directly; they’re typically smuggled back and forth through China, and the finished pieces return to Ham through a similar route. Her designs deliberately include elements she believes wouldn’t otherwise be visible in North Korea including internet slang, South Korean pop songs, newspaper headlines, and abstract designs inspired by Western artists like American painter Morris Louis.