THREE CEMETERIES IS AN INSTALLATION THAT incorporates elements of photographs, texts and sound. It features images of three distinctive burial sites near the Korean Demilitarized Zone, hovered over by in situ ambient sound recordings from each location. One is a collective cemetery for North Korean and Chinese soldiers who lost their lives in the Korean War and North Korean armed spies killed in South Korea after the war. Another even shabbier one is essentially a heaping mound of 1,224 bodies of female sex workers who worked at a campsite town near five U.S. military bases. While anonymity characterizes these two mass funerary grounds, the public cemetery reserved for un-repatriated North Koreans who passed away in the South is evidently the most carefully maintained of the three: The demarcated sections mirror North Korean administrative districts and satisfy the hankering for returning home only in the afterlife. Clearly concerned with sociopolitical events on the Korean Peninsula in recent history, the artist Park Chan-kyong approaches the subject matter in a manner that is almost documentary. His audiovisual represen- tation of the three cemeteries is rather muted, and the texts identifying each site and explaining who has been buried there are written in a terse and matter-of-fact style. Yet, by conjuring up the uncanny subjects of the dead, Park lays bare the long-neglected ramifications of Cold War geopolitics, such as human displacement and victimization despite ideological division and conflict. These issues have only become more salient in today’s international politics. HIGHLIGHT THREE CEMETERIES BY PARK CHAN-KYONG ABOVE: Park Chan-kyong. Korean, born 1965. Three Cemeteries, 2009. Photographs, texts and sound. Purchased with the Carroll and Nolen Asian Art Acquisition Fund 55