Title of art	26연대 부락작전에서 Ⅱ/Village Operation of the 26th Regiment II			Sector	Korean painting (한국화)
Art specifications	38?28cm			Material technique	Ink on paper
Collection year	1998			Production year	1972
Gallery	Seoul Museum of Art			Artist	Chun Kyung-ja
Description of art	In 1972, Chun served with the painters embedded with the South Korean forces deployed to Vietnam (official name: Painter Group Monitoring the Front Lines of the Republic of Korea Forces in Vietnam War Hosted by Ministry of National Defense). In June 1972, the Ministry of Culture and Public Information coordinated with the Ministry of National Defense to embed a group of 10 artists to the Republic of Korea (ROK) forces deployed to Vietnam. Lead by Lee Madong, the group’s purpose was to capture and replicate the valiant actions of the ROK troops in the Vietnam War. Along with Kim Kichang, Park, Youngseun, Kim Won, and Yim Jiksoon, Chun was embedded with the “Fierce Tiger Unit” deployed to Sector B in Vietnam. The embedded team of painters visited the sites of battle during the stay in Vietnam, and their resulting works were shown at the Vietnam War Documentation Paintings Exhibition hosted by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea in the December of that year. Whereas most of the artists in the exhibition acquiesced to the typical styles of war paintings instead of fully expressing their respectively unique styles, Chun turned to her usual subjects of passion to portray fantastic and exotic scenery in her works. Incorporating the sentimentality in her travel paintings Chun gave a unique twist to her works based on the objective interpretations she made at the actual scenes of war. (1972) depicts the town of Song Cau during the Vietnam War. In order to witness the recon operation, Chun was embedded with the 7th Company of 26th Regiment in Song Cau. Surrounded by lush palm trees, the village scene is quiet and seemingly peaceful. Wooden houses can be seen through the palm trees, along with a man and a woman standing in front of the buildings. The scenery is more of a depiction of everyday life than a wartime situation. Chun sometimes found it refreshing to hear the thunderous roar of artillery fires ring throughout the hills. When the tremors of the shelling stopped, Chun felt that the scenery beneath the hills was the abyss of silence. Even when her life was at risk, Chun appreciated the scenery with a certain poetic aesthetic, which can be seen in the way Chun captured beautiful sight on her canvas instead of solely portraying the horrors of the battles she witnessed in Vietnam. Although the work does portray the actual moments Chun personally witnessed in the war, it sheds more light on her unique sentimentality than the horrors of armed conflict.
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