"It is about the power of the Choco Pie to change a society as they [North Koreans] learn about the concept of capitalism,” Jin Joo Chae saId of her solo show The Choco Pie-zation of North Korea, now exhibiting at the Julie Meneret Contemporary Art gallery.
Using newspapers, snack packaging, and chocolate, Chae created installations that filled the space with loud but curiously subversive displays of consumerism. On the walls are North Korean newspapers screen-printed with chocolate syrup spelling out “Choco Pie,” the popular South Korean marshmallow sandwich cake, in the font of its American counterpart Coca-Cola. Like Coke, Choco Pie is a symbol of capitalist success. As Chae points out, this success is now permeating North Korean culture in spite of heavy government restrictions.
Perhaps the best example of how ideological boundaries between the two countries are bleeding is Desire, Want, Need, an interactive installation. In it, a bag of rice filled with money sits atop a pile of unopened Choco Pie boxes. Viewers are invited to take a pie and deposit the value they believe it to be worth into a rice sack sitting on top. Meanwhile, a LED board shows the fluctuating price of the sweets in US dollars.
Desire, Want, Need is derived from real events: the emergence of a black market for Choco Pies in North Korea. At Kaesong Industrial Complex, an industrial park in the country host to over 100 South Korean companies that is considered a landmark of cooperation between the nations, the PIES are given to workers as a type of bonus. It started with South Korean companies giving the pies out as snacks, then realizing how effective they were at incentivizing workers. Workers, who earn an average monthly income of only $150, began reselling the pies for as much as $10 each. Last year, after the complex closed for five months due to tensions between the two countries, a tighter budget was enforced upon reopening, cutting the number of pies workers received from up to 20 a day to a maximum of two per day.
Chae's show recreates this informal economy in a quite literal way, prompting viewers to assign their own prices to Choco Pies and thereby consider how value is ascribed to consumer goods in general. Is it determined by capitalist society, the government, or individuals? For Chae, it seems to be all of the above. For what The Choco Pie-zation of North Korea shows most clearly is how disparate ideologies can pass between even the most impenetrable borders.
Through February 23, 2014
JULIE MENERET CONTEMPORARY ART
133 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
MAP![]()
Black Market, (2013). Suitcase, Choco Pie boxes, Video. 35h x 28w x 28d in. Courtesy of Julie Meneret Contemporary Art gallery.
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Using newspapers, snack packaging, and chocolate, Chae created installations that filled the space with loud but curiously subversive displays of consumerism. On the walls are North Korean newspapers screen-printed with chocolate syrup spelling out “Choco Pie,” the popular South Korean marshmallow sandwich cake, in the font of its American counterpart Coca-Cola. Like Coke, Choco Pie is a symbol of capitalist success. As Chae points out, this success is now permeating North Korean culture in spite of heavy government restrictions.
Perhaps the best example of how ideological boundaries between the two countries are bleeding is Desire, Want, Need, an interactive installation. In it, a bag of rice filled with money sits atop a pile of unopened Choco Pie boxes. Viewers are invited to take a pie and deposit the value they believe it to be worth into a rice sack sitting on top. Meanwhile, a LED board shows the fluctuating price of the sweets in US dollars.
Desire, Want, Need is derived from real events: the emergence of a black market for Choco Pies in North Korea. At Kaesong Industrial Complex, an industrial park in the country host to over 100 South Korean companies that is considered a landmark of cooperation between the nations, the PIES are given to workers as a type of bonus. It started with South Korean companies giving the pies out as snacks, then realizing how effective they were at incentivizing workers. Workers, who earn an average monthly income of only $150, began reselling the pies for as much as $10 each. Last year, after the complex closed for five months due to tensions between the two countries, a tighter budget was enforced upon reopening, cutting the number of pies workers received from up to 20 a day to a maximum of two per day.
Chae's show recreates this informal economy in a quite literal way, prompting viewers to assign their own prices to Choco Pies and thereby consider how value is ascribed to consumer goods in general. Is it determined by capitalist society, the government, or individuals? For Chae, it seems to be all of the above. For what The Choco Pie-zation of North Korea shows most clearly is how disparate ideologies can pass between even the most impenetrable borders.
Through February 23, 2014
JULIE MENERET CONTEMPORARY ART
133 Orchard Street
New York, NY 10002
MAP
Black Market, (2013). Suitcase, Choco Pie boxes, Video. 35h x 28w x 28d in. Courtesy of Julie Meneret Contemporary Art gallery.
Th