Three Korean artists are making their mark at Uzbekistan's first-ever Bukhara Biennial, using unconventional materials like clay, rice, and kimchi to explore themes of identity, memory, and belonging. The inaugural international art event, themed "Recipe for Broken Hearts," is taking place in the ancient Silk Road city of Bukhara, bringing together 200 artists from 39 countries under a unique mandate: all works must be created exclusively on Uzbek soil in collaboration with local artisans.

This requirement has sparked meaningful conversations between contemporary global art and Central Asia's rich craft traditions. Among the more than 70 collaborative works produced for the biennial, three Korean-connected entries stand out for their powerful representation of cross-cultural cooperation and the Korean diaspora experience.

The participating Korean artists include the Venerable Jeong Kwan, a Buddhist nun and chef who gained international fame after appearing on Netflix's "Chef's Table" in 2017; Choi Yun, a Korean media artist; and Darina Kim, a Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist originally from Uzbekistan. Each artist approaches the theme through different mediums, from fermented soybean paste to native clay, addressing profound questions about identity and cultural memory.

Uzbekistan holds special significance for Korean cultural expression, as it is home to Central Asia's largest Korean diaspora community. Despite being nearly 5,000 kilometers away from Korea, the country houses the Koryo saram, which literally means "Korean person." This community represents the seventh-largest ethnic group in Uzbekistan, with roots tracing back to 1937 when Koreans living in the Russian Far East were forcibly deported to Central Asia under orders from Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The biennial intentionally uses the term "Koryo saram" instead of the more common "Korean diaspora" to highlight this community's unique history and agency.

The Venerable Jeong Kwan brought her philosophy of temple cuisine to the biennial through a series of food meditation sessions. On September 5 and 6, she led these spiritual gatherings at the Khoja Kalon Mosque, where participants sat on brick floors that were once part of a former mosque. Each table featured humble dishes, including kimchi prepared with the local Koryo saram community using indigenous ingredients.

Koryo saram translators were present at each table to bridge language barriers, relaying Jeong Kwan's Korean words into English. She opened each gathering with a short Buddhist ritual, emphasizing food as spiritual practice. "It's a ritual of gratitude toward nature and life, a path of emptiness and an offering of healing," she explained to participants.

Korean artist Choi Yun spent months creating what she calls a "monument to disconnection" using materials that literally ground us to the earth. Diana Campbell, the artistic director of the inaugural Bukhara Biennial, invited Choi to participate after seeing her work at the Busan Biennial. The invitation came with the biennial's two non-negotiable conditions: produce everything on Uzbek soil and collaborate with local artisans.

Following a research trip to Uzbekistan in January, Choi based herself in Rishtan, located in the Fergana Valley and known as Uzbekistan's renowned ceramics capital. There, she worked alongside master potters Bunyod Yunusov and Behzod Yunusov, who had grown up in the craft. The collaboration proved challenging, as Choi's media art background required controlled, test-driven workflows with repeatable results for hundreds of near-identical units, while her collaborators worked largely by intuition and tradition, never needing identical outcomes since craft objects are typically meant to be unique.

The result is "Dark Age is Better, Desert is the Future" (2025), a towering sculpture assembled from approximately 900 handmade ceramic smartphones. The work poses questions about what we see when screens no longer illuminate and what kinds of connections remain when digital ones disappear. Production took about two months, but installation became a trial under the blazing sun, with limited handlers, scarce equipment, and almost no on-site staff, forcing Choi to spend days mixing paint and lifting materials under the open sky.

"The project was a truly unique experience from creation to installation," Choi told The Korea Herald on September 6. "Residents would stop by to help; women from the neighborhood joined in and worked alongside me. It's not the kind of experience you get to have often." The piece draws conceptual parallels to Nam June Paik's "The More the Better," created for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, but Choi flips the premise by making monitors that don't function, shifting attention from images to what she calls "the time of the ground" – the slow, cyclical temporality beneath our feet.

"Paik Nam June's work was originally created to commemorate the 1988 Seoul Olympics, a landmark moment when Korea first opened itself to the international community through a global event," Choi explained. "In that sense, one could draw a parallel between the Seoul Olympics and the Bukhara Biennial, both serving as stages where a nation reintroduces itself to the world through culture."

Darina Kim, born in Tashkent and now based in Berlin, brings a deeply personal project that weaves together memory, material, and meaning in ways that mirror the biennial's collaborative spirit. Her work grows from her family's remarkable collection of approximately 1,500 works by Korean artists in Uzbekistan, including paintings by Anatoli Lyegai and Christophor Kan, two pillars of the Koryo saram art lineage.

Campbell discovered this collection, learned of Kim's long-held plan to animate selected works, and invited her to participate. The resulting 16-minute film, "1937," reinterprets deportation-era images through hand-drawn 2D animation and original sound, maintaining the watercolors' "human touch." Additionally, Kim presents "Hive Settlers" in collaboration with Uzbek ceramicist Azamat Nashvanov.

In "Hive Settlers," Kim creates rice bees – a pointed metaphor shaped from rice flour, which is central to Korean cuisine but not used in Uzbekistan. "The gesture is simple and sharp: Koreans as rice bees settling within a Central Asian hive, integrated yet distinct, productive and networked, shaping and being shaped by place," Kim told The Korea Herald on September 6. After studying Bukhara's architecture, she focused on the muqarnas pattern, honeycomb-like vaulting that became a formal connection to her longstanding sculptural work with beeswax.

"Survival itself becomes the recipe," Kim says, reframing historical rupture as a living method. Her work demonstrates how the biennial's collaborative approach can transform personal and collective memory into contemporary art that speaks to both local and global audiences, embodying the event's mission to create meaningful dialogue between cultures through creative expression.