on Don Mee Choi

The Waist of a Nation

This trilogy, reflecting on geopolitics and its assorted repercussions, as well as the recent history of Don Mee Choi’s native Korea, was published in the United States between 2016 and 2024, and has now been brought out all at once for British readers, in large-format volumes. Their trajectory is broadly chronological, beginning in the aftermath of the Second World War. Choi trained initially as an artist, and it is wise to approach the books with that in mind: these are works of visual art as much as of poetry, of prose as much as they are verse, of facsimile and image (doodles, photographs, film stills) as of words, of memory and imagination as documentation.

Hardly War bears the dedication ‘for my father’, who was a photojournalist in various warzones, at home and elsewhere. All three books might have borne this dedication: he remains a touchstone throughout, and his photographs, stills from his footage and anecdotes about him pepper each book, though most insistently the first. For example, the opening piece, ‘Race=Nation’, tells us that ‘I was born in a tiny, traditional, tile-roofed house, a house my father bought with award money he received for his photographs of the April 19, 1960 Revolution’. That revolution overthrew South Korea’s (officially the Republic of Korea’s or ROK’s) first US-installed puppet president, Syngman Rhee, seven years after the de facto end of the Korean War split the country into its enduring capitalist and communist halves. In response, at least partially, ‘My early education ...