(photo: Alex M. Lee.)

by Bay Fang

She calls it "yum-yum diplomacy," and when her press release first landed in my inbox, I thought it was a hoax. But Chicago-based installation artist Erin O'Brien really has built a model of the North Korean nuclear reactor at Yongbyon out of gingerbread, and really does plan to dismantle and eat it tomorrow as her Master's in Fine Arts thesis project.

What's more, her father, Pat O'Brien, really is in Pyongyang, overseeing the dismantling of the real version of this reactor. A retired foreign service officer, he has been stationed there since November, representing the State Department's Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund. In a statement in his daughter's press release, he said, "It seems we have a little family legacy evolving here."

Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, contains a nuclear reactor, a fuel-rod factory and a reprocessing plant, where weapons-grade plutonium is extracted from fuel rods. It has been central to the efforts by US diplomats, under the auspices of the Six-Party Talks, to de-nuclearize the Korean peninsula, and under a landmark agreement reached last year, North Korea began dismantling it.

It was also featured prominently in briefings around Washington, DC a few weeks ago, when the Bush administration released details of an alleged nuclear site in Syria, bombed by the Israelis last September, that apparently had the same dimensions and layout as Yongbyon.

33-year-old Erin O'Brien has recreated the entire site in detail, doubtless with consultation with her father, down to the frosting trim on the 50-mw reactor and a cooling tower covered in chocolate. She has filled the inside with jellybeans and gumdrops, with the anticipation of breaking it open "like a piñata." She says the project is a combination of influences from her dad and her mom, who was once the pastry chef at such Washington, DC culinary institutions as Kinkead's and Citronelle.

"A lot of my work is about finding home," said O'Brien in a telephone interview. "We moved every two years growing up, so this was about how my own nuclear family exists in a geopolitical world." O'Brien talks about how she often chats over instant-message with her father in Pyongyang or her mother, who now lives in Saigon. "It was normal to hear him say something like, 'Honey, the fuel rods are taking a little longer than expected - what are your graduation dates again?"

Indeed, when this reporter met the senior O'Brien in Pyongyang in late February, at a banquet for the New York Philharmonic orchestra, I asked how long he thought he would have to remain in the country, given the state of the negotiations, and he said that all he knew was that he had to get back to the US for his daughters' graduations - one in May and one in June.

Her father has just gotten back to the States, just as Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and State Department Korea office director Sung Kim land in Seoul in a fresh diplomatic effort to try to press the North to make a full declaration of its nuclear capabilities. Disputes over the declaration, which was due on December 31, have hindered progress on the talks.

Erin's gingerbread reactor is currently on display at a gallery at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at 847 West Jackson. The artist has invited hungry members of the press and the public to participate in a dismantling party tomorrow, starting at 11 am.