New Potsdam Conference

To this day, every Korean schoolchild learns where the origins of the continuing division of his / her home county lie: in Potsdam.
53 years after the end of the Korean War in 1953, the internationally renowned Korean artist Eun Sook Lee and German artist Thomas E.J. Klasen are setting about the task of rewriting history. Herself the child of a family divided between North and South, himself son of an east-west family, they are world-wide the first artists to present and exhibit at the venue of the Conference, on the banks of the Cecilienhof. There, where in the first summer following the capitulation of Nazi-Germany, the USA decided to drop an atomic bomb on Japan, which was still fighting, and the heads of state Stalin, Churchill and Truman sealed the division of the world in East and West and North and South, Eun Sook Lee and Thomas E.J. Klasen are now reversing the process.

Thanks to her unique technique a work created out of traditional weaving and modern, artificially made laminates and his art of creating spaces in the size of a house consisting of two alienated halves, which were originally alike. In the style of archaic east-asian symbols of heaven and artistically exaggerated elements of the geopolitical Status Quo of the Korean peninsula NPC glided around the waters surrounding the Cecilienhof, the UNESCO World Heritage Site and the park landscape of the Kings of Prussia for the duration of the Potsdam Conference, from July 17th till August 2nd 2006.
During the daytime the work of art wass illuminated by the energies of nature, in the few hours of night time the NPC, composed of hundreds of individual works of art, radiated with the power of UV-light, just like a swimming crown.
The artists residet within their artistic creation for the 15 days’ duration of the performance and underwent social and traditional transformations of consequence. In the interior of the building and during the exhibition the division of Korea was overcome, abandoned to the floods of the cleansing waters. Here, a place shall be created for a united family in a common house Korea in a world calling for peace.

Eun Sook Lee and Thomas E.J. Klasen have been honoured by the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace through its founder Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon to ambassadors for peace.