Hardly War, Don Mee Choi's UK debut, defies categorisation. Using artefacts from Choi's father, a professional photographer during the Korean and Vietnam wars, she combines memoir, image, and opera to explore her paternal relationship and heritage. Here poetry and geopolitics are inseparable twin sisters. Suggestive and subtle in its connections and allusions, there is an exhilarating freedom in its playful form, all while looking straight at the brutality of colonialism and dictatorship. ‘A dark and upsetting but also funny-angry scrapbook . . . Choi has inherited her father’s journalistic sense for the right detail. She knows when to get out of the way and let the material speak for itself.’ Kathleen Rooney, The New York Times
