Blurring truth and fiction, Yang Ah Ham’s work has taken inspiration from observations on contemporary life, since the 1990s. Through her video works she explores alternative sociopolitical systems, creating moving-image panoramas that contemplate possibilities for shifting and reconstructing existing societal structures.
Undefined Panorama 3.1 examines the ways in which societal power structures and governments construct barriers that affect the most vulnerable. The huge scale of the wall-sized video projection reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Haywain offers viewers a single-point perspective of an assemblage of human figures acting out various roles in a neoliberal system. Those in power are protected behind a towering wall, safe from conflict and precarity, while the general populace struggles to maintain a stable existence on the other side. Yang Ah Ham nonetheless offers a possibility of hope, gradually inserting playful reenactments by her friends via green screen, in an attempt to challenge hegemonic structures through proactive solidarity and support of those who lie outside the system.
The work was originally commissioned by Seoul Museum of Art.
