Böcker av Don Mee Choi

Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's UK debut, defies categorisation. Using artefacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters, conjoined to the belly of a warring empire.

Elegiac and haunting, Mirror Nation by Don Mee Choi completes the KOR-US trilogy, along with Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016) and the National Book Award–winning DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020).Much like Proust's madeleine, a spinning Mercedez Benz ring outside Choi's Berlin window prompts a memory of her father on the Glienicker Bridge between Berlin and Potsdam, which in turn becomes catalyst for delving into the violent colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, with particular attention to the horrors of the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Here, photographs, news footage, and cultural artifacts comingle with a poetry of grief that is both personal and collective. Inspired by W. G. Sebald and Walter Benjamin as well as Choi’s DAAD Artists residency in Berlin, Mirror Nation is a sorrowful reflection on the ways in which a place can hold a “magnetic field of memory,” proving that history doesn’t merely repeat itself; history is ever present, chiming the hours in a chorus against empire.

A powerful work of cultural memory that recovers voices from Korea's heartbreakingly violent postcolonial history.