Counterbalance: The Stone & The Mountain, curated by Daehyung Lee, brought together three Korean figures from three different generations to consider the ways in which individual stories relate to national histories and what the rest of the world might come to understand from how this plays out within Korea.

The first generation was represented by the late journalist Kim Kimoon. The installation “Mr. K. and the Collection of Korean History” presented 1,412 photographs from Kim’s personal collection, discovered by artist Lee Wan at an antique market and purchased for approximately $50. The photos follow Kim’s personal life as it unfolded within the arc of 20th-century Korean history, from Japanese colonial rule to the Korean War and subsequent division of the Korean Peninsula, the establishment of the Republic of Korea, and the country’s more recent exponential economic growth and democratization. Lee Wan’s curation of Kim’s photographs stood in contrast to his own collection of artifacts, which made explicit commentary on global economic realities. Here, the presentation of Kim’s photographs offered a more poetic reading of the ways in which lives are layered, complex, and in ever-evolving relationship with the surrounding political circumstances of one’s life.

Cody Choi, representing the second generation, was born in 1961 and lived through the rapid growth of the Korean economy in the 1980s before moving to the United States at age 22. As an immigrant to the United States, Choi was among a generation of Korean diasporic artists who employed parody and appropriation as ways to process culture shock and mediate Eastern and Western backgrounds and art. His practice often considers identity and dislocation in the context of global, neoliberal politics and economics. Among Choi’s contributions to Counterbalance: The Stone & The Mountain was “Venetian Rhapsody,” presented on the roof of the Korean Pavilion and borrowing from the aesthetics of the neon jungles of Las Vegas and Macau in order to critique global capitalism.

Like Choi, Lee Wan—born in 1979 and representing the youngest generation in the exhibition—is interested in the ways in which external political and economic forces shape individual lives. For his presentation here, Lee spent five years traveling throughout Asia and working in different locales to produce the raw goods required for a typical local breakfast. “Proper Time” is one product of that research. The installation consisted of 668 clocks, each one engraved with the name, birth date, nationality, and occupation of an individual worker who was interviewed by Lee. Each clock moved at a different pace, determined by the amount of time the individual whose name is on the clock must work in order to afford a meal.

In the story of a life, the interplay between personal and political is sometimes indistinguishable—in the same way a stone may at first be indistinguishable from the mountain of which it is a part. Counterbalance: The Stone and the Mountain took this opportunity to make apparent these differences and the ways in which decisions and policies that may seem general are in fact highly personal.