Korean-Japanese artist channels her childhood trauma to create chandeliers by upcycling discarded items
- Artist Songhe Kim uses discarded American toys, stuffed animals, Japanese dolls, and lucky cat figurines to make chandeliers
- She suffered trauma growing up as a third-generation Korean in Japan, and channels this into her art
Looking at the works of artist Songhe Kim you don’t get much sense of the psychological trauma that informs them. Yet beneath the colours and cute ornaments is a past marred by bullying and racial discrimination.
Born in Tokyo in 1982 and growing up in Japan as a third-generation Korean, Kim felt she never quite fitted in.
“I used to go to a Korean high school and their uniform has a distinctive style, so you can see from what I’m wearing that I’m Korean. Other kids would harass me on the streets or sometimes they would tell me to go home and go back to Korea,” she recalls.
Military aggression and political disputes between the Japanese and Koreans run deep and date back almost two millennia. Conservative politicians and far-right groups mine the tensions for slogans.
The existence of kenkan, or “hatred for Koreans”, books in Japan and hyomil, or “hatred for Japanese”, literature in South Korea is a sign of the divide between the two countries.