An artwork that serves as an intriguing reminder of the Cold War won the 2004 Hermes Korea Missulsang Award held at the Artsonje Center in Seoul last Friday.

Park Chan-kyong was awarded the prize of 20 million won for his work ``Power Passage,’’ a multimedia work that looks at two events that occurred during 1975.

<##IMAGE##>By combining fiction and documentary film, text and sound, Park analyzes the division between North and South Korea and the space antics of cold war enemies _ the Soviet Union and the United States _ around two extreme meeting points.

A docking system, the ``Apollo-Soyuz Text Project,’’ was created as a passage enabling Soviet and American astronauts to shake hands while orbiting the Earth. Park compares this with a tunnel created by North Korea that attempted to go right underneath Seoul. ``The paradox of a tunnel is that any side can use it, no matter which side has dug it. In fact this goes the same for passages,’’ Park said.

The jurors expressed their admiration for the artist when they announced him as the winner, saying they were ``deeply impressed by the breadth and subtlety of the metaphors through which he expressed the historical, political and psychological realities of contemporary Korea in a way that also refers to the wider world and how it has been formed.’’

Hermes Korea created the annual award in 2000 to applaud and encourage talented up and coming Korean artists. Each year, through five nominating committees, three finalists are selected and requested to create a new work for the competition.

Competing with Park for the 2004 award were the Urbanism Research Group FlyingCity and artist-photographer, Jung Yeon-doo.

All three candidates made works that embraced society and extended their visions to include the dreams and fears of its people.

FlyingCity, concerned with the less powerful groups in the urban environment, made Seoul the focal area for activating the imagination. Jung Yeon-ho took children’s drawings and remade them, in all their childlike surrealness, into photographs.

As the award was presented, the jury spoke of the quality of the participants: ``We were all very impressed by the ways in which these artists have engaged not only with the social and political realities of the region, but also with its fantasies, desires and terrors,’’ said jury representative David Eliot of the Mori Museum in Tokyo.

FlyingCity’s dream city criticizes the callousness of a city’s bureaucratic structure, and pushes to beautify its environment. In ``All-Things Park,’’ the five core members aged between 30 and 35 developed a series of designs through talking with street vendors from along Chonggye Road to Tongdaemun. Giving a voice those who were evicted by council authorities for the renovation of the Chonggye Stream, the artists collected ideas for the design of an alternative city.

Social realities are given another twist towards the imagination in the work of second runner-up Jeon-Yeon-hoo’s photographs, many of which take fairy tale characters as their subject, including Cinderella, Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.

Bright crayon box spectrums and child-drawing dimensions expose the symbols of popular culture and fantasy and bring immediate delight to viewers.

The selected Hermes Missulsang award winner sums it all up. As Park makes space and power his subject, he reminds us of the influence of such creative endeavors, saying, ``Power, which cannot tolerate a vacuum, has never forgiven celestial regions for being open to terrains left open to the imagination.’’

boricha@graffiti.net