Nuclear Family

I want to offer a way for people engage in the nuclear peace movement that is tangible, edible and fun. The installation, titled ’Nuclear Family,’ is a natural blend of my mother’s occupation as a pastry chef and my father’s work overseeing the dismantling of Democratic Republic of North Korea’s nuclear reactor and my own performance and installation art. I built a scale replica of The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK)  nuclear reactor site at Yongbyon entirely out of gingerbread, using my mother’s gingerbread recipe.

The gingerbread reactor is surrounded by large scale redacted texts of emails and instant message communication between my father in Pyongyang, North Korea, my mother in Ho Chi Minh City, my sister in Seattle and myself in Chicago. There is a two-channel video that accompanies the work. In order to obtain the footage for the video, I had to send a video camera to my sister, who hand carried the camera to Vietnam and then my mother snuck the camera into North Korea. The video centers on my family in their respective “homes” and everyday lives. The video work explores the idea of family legacies and the parallel family legacies of the Bushes in the US and the Kim’s in North Korea in the current escalation towards nuclear entrenchment.

I hosted a press conference/performance where the public was invited to come dismantle the gingerbread nuclear reactor for peace.