Peace to all people in the world
statement
Video installations, drawings, radio installation
2010-2011
Korean Air Lines Flight 007, a Korean Air Lines civilian airliner that was shot down by Soviet jet interceptors on September 1, 1983, the coast of Cape Soya, the northernmost point of the island of Hokkaido, over the just west of Sakhalin island over prohibited Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers and crew aboard were killed. The Soviet Union initially denied knowledge of the incident, but later admitted shooting the aircraft down, claiming that it was on a spy mission. The incident was one of the most tense moments of the Cold War, and resulted in an escalation of anti-Soviet sentiment in South Korea and the United States.
The opposing points of view on the incident were never fully resolved; consequently, several groups continue to dispute official reports and offer alternate theories of the event. The subsequent release of transcripts and flight recorders by the Russian Federation has addressed some details. But nothing was really truth.
As a result of Cold War tensions, the search and rescue operations of the Soviet Union were not co-ordinated with those of the United States, South Korea, and Japan. Consequently no information was shared, and each side endeavoured to harass or obtain evidence to implicate the other.
Flight 007 has been the subject of ongoing controversy and has spawned a number of conspiracy theories, many of which are rooted in Cold War disinformation and propaganda campaigns, the suppression of evidence such as the flight data recorders and unexplained details such as the role of a USAF RC-135 surveillance aircraft.
Time Magazine, 1983
Korean Air Lines Filightn 007 passenger footwear from the crash site
Seven years ago I went to Cape Soya, the northernmost point of the island of Hokkaido, Japan, off the coast of the Sakhalin Island, where the Korean passenger airline flight numberKAL 007 exploded. Standing in the cold winter wind that was as sharp as knife I saw the dark sea there. On the beach, I discovered a white wooden tablet, the size of 70cm x 10cm. The tablet had an inscription in Korean. It said “Peace to all people in the world.” This tablet was a memorial to the people who died aboard the KAL 007. The memorial was silent as it stood there, looking out to the sea and taking on the cold waves. Just as this memorial stood there as non-existence, as if there was nothing to it, many people died without a word during the Cold War era. I decided then to bring back now the voices of those nameless beings, Non-Substance.
People will ask me, “Why do you want to talk about Cold War now?” It’s been twenty years since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Cold War ended. Just as a countless number of people silently fell victim to the ideological extremes of Cold War, today dispossessed
Others worldwide are still dying away in a countless multitude due to invasion, war, and religious and ideological conflicts, as they have five hundred and seven hundred years ago.
Forgotten history repeats itself. The present is the past forever emanating in a different form. I want to invoke, through the “KAL 007” project, the voices of those who have been pushed to the other side of the world of the living, keeping in mind Freud’s warning that all things repressed inevitably return, and also trying to give us answer to skeptical Spivak’s question “Can the subaltern speak?”
1983 pencil drawiing, 2010