Chung Haessen Everywhere but
Nowhere
Project in collaboration with Love Difference
“flag: a piece of cloth, usually rectangular,
of distinctive color and design, used as a symbol, standard, signal or emblem”
(The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, forth edition,
Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000)
The project is to hang for a short period of time flags outside
various town halls. Their design has its origin in the way usual national
banners are made. The only difference of the flags used in the project “EVERYWHERE
BUT NOWHERE” is that they are all white, and no colors will be used
in them.
Chung Haessen, who has often been living outside her native country, i.e.
Korea, by this project points out questions of nationalism and personal
identity. Love Difference is both a political and an artistic movement which
promotes this project.
Flags usually work as national symbols or emblems. They transmit a geographical
and national identity by means of colors, stylized forms, and they follow
typical cloth divisions. For instance, there is the “three colors
vertical” type or the “three colors horizontal” type.
By combining typical colors they create a quite unlimited amount of variations.
To develop her artistic flags, Chung Haessen took these normal standardized
flag designs as a starting point. Then she just deleted all the colors,
like pressing the “delete” button of a graphic computer program.
Only the sewing lines of her four newly created and fully white flags still
make the old color divisions traceable.
Deleting the colors in this sense does not only mean to remove the specific
national connotation, but, in the meanwhile a space that can be potentially
filled with personal perspectives or identities is created. Every human
being's own screened or recorded flag lies as a possibility in the flag
created by Chung Haessen.
Go to
the artistic intervention at Almost Real, Utrecht
Download
the printable .PDF file
