The Embrace (2013)

'The Embrace' studies two reunification monuments in North and South Korea. Mata Dupont has animated those monuments to play with Utopian ideas of reunification, and the significance of 'the embrace' as representation of the reunification in the South Korean national psyche. The two figures from the 'Three Charters for National Reunification' monument near Pyongyang embrace in joy, only to have their bliss dissipate and a new, and unexpectedly uncomfortable, era to emerge. The work references DPRK propaganda, K-pop, texts by Andrei Lankov and Lee Eung-joon, and the romantic notions of unification used by artists, filmmakers, and writers in South Korea during the late 90s and early 21st Century; the 'Sunshine Policy' era of soft-line attitude to the North.