5 (Eun-Young JIN) Final 1
5 (Eun-Young JIN) Final 1
5 (Eun-Young JIN) Final 1
Abstract
This paper examines the artworks of the artists in the Asia, Politics, Art Project (APA
Project) from the perspective of performative narrative of the people, a notion sug-
gested by Homi Bhabha. The APA Project shows how the artworks of diasporic artists
inscribe otherness within the otherwise homogeneous space of the nation. The partici-
pant artists, as the second and third generations of zainichi Korean, do not hold the
memory of traumatic events suffered by the first minority generation. However, their
works utilize postmemory based on dim images of memories inherited from their
family histories. The elements, such as a grandmothers chimajeogori and the lyrics of
an old Korean song, are woven by Oh Haji into unique narratives that are distinct
from the pedagogical narrative of the people, emphasizing unity and continuity of the
nation-state. Kim uses chimajeogori in a multi-layered manner to reveal the existen-
tial conditions of students bounded by a violence that has historical roots, but she does
not treat it as a simplistic oppositional sign against the dominant national ideology.
These minority writers/artists and their works are illustrative cases of performative nar-
ratives that use and reconstruct images in the history and everyday life of a minority,
splitting the homogeneous space of the nation and suggesting new public and diasporic
spaces within it.
Keywords: Asia, Politics, Art Project, zainichi artists, Homi Bhabha, performative
narrative of the people, diasporas.
* This work was supported by the National Research Foundationof Korea Grant funded by
the Korean Government. (NRF-2013S1A5A8024015)
Eun-young JIN is Assistant Professor of Literary Counseling at Korea Counseling Graduate
University. E-mail: [email protected].
Bo-seon SHIM is Assistant Professor of Art and Cultural Management at Kyung Hee Cyber
University. E-mail: [email protected].
1. A Reading of Still Hear the Wound: Toward Asia, Politics, Art (edited by Chong-hwa Lee)
is a book that documented the APA Project (20062008) led by the Center for Asian and
Pacific Studies at Seikei University, Japan. At present, this book is available only in Japa-
nese. The above title is the title of the forthcoming English translation of the book Zan-
sh no Oto: Ajia, Seiji, Aato no mirai: .
2. Mun-sang Cho was a Christian college student in Keijo Imperial University during the
Japanese occupation. During the Second World War, he was forced to serve as an inter-
preter. He delivered orders from Japanese superior officers to war prisoners of the United
Allies. In the war crimes trial after the war, he was convicted as a war criminal. He pleaded
innocent, but when the prosecutor asked him, Are you true to your conscience and the
teaching of the Bible? he answered, I admit my sins and will accept your judgment. He
was sentenced to death by hanging and was executed on February 25, 1947, at the age of
26. See Seo (2007).
the ankles of the dead as indicated in the poem is an act emerging from a
blissful wish for them to stay peacefully in the next world and not come
back to this horrible life. Yet, the dead insist on coming back against all
odds. The poets question of Would you come back? creates a fine yet
significant crack within the tension between the forbiddance of the return
by the living and the manifestation of the return by the dead. The question
implies a deep wish that they would return, which makes the question
a positive invitation asking for the return of the deceased. Because the
assumption that the deceased would not come back is powerful and plausi-
ble, the poets wish that they would come back becomes more earnest and
desperate. Haunted and embraced by the voices of the deceased, the poet
writes in the poem, Sometimes in my dreams you hoot like a soul-owl
(Kim 2003, 23). Thus, in the mind of the living, the deceased are presented
as images that are powerful yet unable to find a safe home.
The poets reenacting of the ritual of breaking the ankle of the deceased
a shaman ritual originating from Jeollanam-do province for cleaning
a dead persons soulcontains the desperate yet hesitating invitation of
return. In the poem, the deceased Korean prisoner willingly and desperately
accepts this invitation from the future, the words he did not hear at the
moment he was dying. We hear the voice of invitation uttered between
sending well and returning well, whose meaning can be embraced
through the Asia, Politics, Art Project (APA Project).
In his essay DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Mod-
ern Nation, Homi Bhabha shows a theoretical approach that can be applied
to the interpretation of the tension between two contradictory wes: we
who break the feet of the deceased and we who invite the deceased. This
tension, within the frame of oppositional politics, is expressed through the
dichotomy between the universal subject (the majority) who would expel
the deceased following nationalist pedagogy and particular individuals
(the minority) who would invite the deceased through unique personal
experiences. However, he rejects this dichotomy between the majority
inside and the minority outside as irrelevant in representing the contradic-
tion within us.
According to Bhabha, there are two ways by which the people of the
nation are symbolically constructed. First, the people as a pedagogical
object is constructed by the authority of narrative that effectively or tran-
scendentally identifies one out of many. Second, the people constructed in
the performance of narrative, its enunciatory present, is marked in the repe-
tition and pulsation of the national sign (Bhabha 1990, 299). Performative
narratives intervene in the assimilative process of making one out of many.
Through endless representation and creation, they inscribe the signs of dif-
ferences and spaces of boundaries within the self-productive process of the
nation. In other words, within the nation, an inevitable tension exists
between the people constructed by pedagogical narrative and the one con-
structed by performative narrative.
Accordingly, we apply Bhabhas theory of performative narrative in
understanding a particular art project. We see that the art exhibition, the
APA Project, and its documentation, Still Hear the Wound: Toward Asia,
Politics, Art, show examples of a nation that is split and reconstructed by
the performative narrative of the people. In these projects (20062008),
zainichi Korean artists, curators, scholars, and feminists participated, col-
laborating with Japanese participants of Okinawan origin. They partici-
pated in the projects not from a position identified by simple oppositional
logics, such as minority versus majority. The narrative of the people they
perform, document, and transform resists the pedagogical narrative of
the people. However, they do not posit themselves as outside the nation, i.e.
as having a sort of a priori privilege to see and critique the totality of the
nation. We see that their individual and family histories and the narratives
emerging from suffering in their lives can be called a performative narrative
of the people that Bhabha argues is a contradictory force within the nation.
Through these projects, individual artists and critics with different
personal life stories went through deep conversations, commenting on
each others work, sharing writings, and discussing the project. The colla-
boration took place not only on the level of the present creation of artworks
but also on the level of rewriting past artworks about the memory of war
and pain within the context of the project. For example, Map of the Battle of
Okinawa (1984) by Toshi and Iri Maruki, gave inspiration to Soni Kum for
her video work. Jin-suk Choi, a zainichi playwright and literary critic,
explored the traumatic narrative of Okinawa history and experiences. That
the project took place in Okinawa contributed to the transformation of
personal creative work into a performative narrative of the people since
Okinawa is a place of pain for artists and intellectuals who were born and
grew up there. At the same time, Okinawa is a place where national rela-
tions cut across each other, creating diverse tensions. As a unique and dis-
parate culture in its own right and yet annexed as part of Japan, Okinawa
has been the outside forced to be incorporated by the inside. The history
of Okinawa has been a string of sacrifices and pain for Okinawa people and
a theme of Okinawan artists. With other outsiders, that is, zainichi artists,
and academics from South Korea, some having either a direct personal or
more indirect familial memory of Jeju Uprising and Massacre,3 Okinawan
artists found the possibility of sympathy and solidarity through the project.
However, this process is not a simple, linear creation of solidarity against
state power among individual minorities outside the state. In the process of
creating a new public subject, there appears the topography of splitting
inscribed by national identity, where Jin-suk Chois critical reflection on the
anti-return position that opposed the U.S. policy of returning Okinawa to
Japanese sovereignty in 1972 stands out (Choi 2009).
Within this critical engagement, Choi points out both the values and
limitations of the anti-return position suggested by Okinawa intellectuals in
the 1970s. One such intellectual, Arakwa Akira, suggested an anti-return
position as a critique of assimilation, that is, a moral orientation that rejects
the unification with the state from the perspective of the individual (Choi
2009, 111). However, Choi argues that the anti-return positions emphasis
3. The anti-return position is the manifesto of non-citizens outside the nation whose
voices oppose the violence of assimilation forcing Okinawan people and zainichi to
merge with the Japanese population.
The Borderline artist performs a poetics of the open border between cul-
tures. She displays the interstice, the overlappings and interleavings, the
hither and thither that is part of the history of those peoples whose identi-
ties are crafted from the experience of social displacement (Bhabha 1993,
23).
However, Has criticism of young zainichi artists is not relevant to the par-
ticipants of the APA Project. The young participants of the APA Project do
not treat the nation as an abstract idea nor reduce it to a matter of personal
taste and everyday expressions. Instead, they question the stable topos of
the people. In those in-between spaces, they suggest heterogeneous, dis-
sensual narratives that supplement and disturb the official narratives of the
nation. As such, their artworks operate as unique narratives on both indi-
vidual and collective levels, and in both poetic and political senses. We
now investigate the formation of dissensual narratives by diasporic artists
by examining a poetic essay of project curator Chong-hwa Lee and the art-
works of third-generation zainichi artists, Oh Haji and Soni Kum.5
The introduction of the book A Reading of Still Hear the Wound: Toward
Asia, Politics, Art, written by Chong-hwa Lee, is not simply a summary or
report of the project. The writing itself is a literary essay expressing the
sensibility of the borderline intellectual. This essay, like a patchwork, juxta-
poses the poetic writing of Lee and the writing of others. As indicated in
the following passage, Lees essay as a whole consists of poetic writing and
aphorism. She juxtaposes Kim Sowol and Shin Dong-yeops poems and
Jean Genets words. Lee, a project curator who immigrated into Japan in
the 1980s and whose family members experienced the Jeju Uprising, artic-
ulates the image of the azalea with multiple, non-male characteristics in
the introduction of the book. The azalea can be seen as a nationalistic
symbol. However, Lee reveals multiple layers of meanings within the proj-
5. The main objects for analysis include project curator and historian of political thought,
Chong-hwa Lees poetic essay, the fabric art of Oh/Okamura Haji, and video art of Soni
Kum. For analysis, we investigated Lees essay and photos included in the book A Read-
ing of Still Hear the Wound: Toward Asia, Politics, Art, as well as the images and testimo-
nies recorded on a DVD entitled A Reading of Still Hear the Wound II, made and edited
by Soni Kum. The DVDs content includes: A Reading of Still Hear the Wound (Maruki
Iri/Maruki Toshi/Soni Kum, 23 min), Seven Artists (Oh/Okamura Haji/Yamashiro
Chikako/Kinjo Michuru/Miyagi Akira/Ito Tari/Soni Kum, 134 min), and Sakima Gallery
(23 min). The analysis of the writings and DVD data was also complemented by the
authors interview with Chong-hwa Lee.
In South Korea, the rose of Sharon is often used as a symbol for govern-
ment rituals, politicians badges, and police ranks, or even as the name of
satellites. Although the azalea is not directly used for official narratives, the
flower is often used as a key symbol to produce a nationalistic emotion. In
South Korea, the male image of the rose of Sharon is coupled with the
female image of azaleas in the pedagogical narrative construction of the
people. In contrast, in North Korea, the image of azaleas holds an official
status within pedagogical state narratives, and this attribution causes a
misunderstanding that the azalea is the national flower of North Korea.6
However, in Lees essay we see that the azaleas are not a symbol with a
singular meaning that complements the male image of the rose of Sharon.
Lee names azaleas as the flower of bodily sacrifice, which is articulated
when compared to the rose of Sharon. If azaleas are the bodies of the
deceased, the rose of Sharon is the ceremonial emblem that covers them
with a solemn gesture. However, the bodies are not complete but fall and
scatter like the exposed collective bodies of the deceased (Lee 2009, vii)
because her azaleas are a transforming and metamorphosing goddess
(Lee 2009, vii). We find that azaleas in Lees introduction are not a mater-
nal plant with the official partnership of a paternal plant but multiple god-
desses embodying various deep emotions of the people. As further evi-
dence, Lee quotes from Jean Genets diary to show the metamorphosis of
becoming females that overcomes the simple dichotomy between male and
female: In this studio, a man is slowly dying consuming himself and
before our eyes turning himself into goddesses (Genet 1993, 328; cited in
6. In North Korea, art practices mainly combine the images of azaleas and state narrative.
For example, since the 1970s, a contemporary dance performance entitled The Azalea
of Our Nation continued to utilize the image of the azalea to strengthen patriotism. This
piece, one of the renowned revolutionary art works in North Korea, celebrates Kim
Il-sungs advance into colonized Joseon in 1939 and portrays the emotion of the female
soldiers who followed their leader onto the land of their country. See Lee (2008).
Lee 2009, ix). Thus, Lees azaleas turn into goddesses while falling as Genets
man turns into goddesses while dying.
From these conceptions of the flower, Lee introduces three different
versions of azaleas to challenge the dominant images of them. The most
well-known version is the azalea of Kim Sowol, a renowned Korean poet
during the colonial era.7 His azalea as an image of femininity represents
bodily sacrifice and sadness. However, Lee juxtaposes his azalea with other
images of azaleas portrayed by two Korean poets, Shin Dong-yeop and
Si-jong Kim, through which the images of azaleas are elevated from femi-
nine symbols of sacrifice to transformation and metamorphosis. In the
introduction, Lee quotes Shin Dong-yeops poem San-e, eondeok-e (In
the Mountain and on the Hill). To Lee, the azaleas are the beautiful flower
of his blooming on the mountain and on the hill while his face cant be
found ever. Whose face is this? We find a clue in Shin Dong-yeops poem
Jindalle sancheon (Azaleas Flooding the Landscape).8 Azaleas bloom
because those languished while waiting went to and died in the moun-
tains where guerillas fought with rifles against the combat planes firing
bullet rains over their heads. Here, azaleas grow and bloom on the bones,
blood, and water from rotting bodies of the dead guerillas. Shin Dong-yeop
portrays dead guerillas as those napping in the shadows of azaleas with
their rifles put to one side.
This partisan image of Shin Dong-yeops azaleas resonates with Lees
narrative of her life. Her hometown is Jeju-do, and some of her fathers
generation participated in the uprising as guerillas, so naturally, her family
histories include memories of the Jeju Uprising. Few people on the island
are unable to relate to the event given the scale of the massacre. The azaleas
expressed by Lee, as a flower of bodily sacrifice and offering, represent her
own family history and at the same time destabilize the pedagogic narrative
of the people. The narratives of struggle take the azaleas blooming land
out of the conventional national boundary and inscribe it in the liminality
chi writers resisted the incorporation of the flowers into the single narra-
tive of the state. Rather, they used them to perform the narrative of the
people in destabilizing the given frameworks of the nation: they inscribed
new narratives of azaleas within the dichotomy between Japan and Korea
in order to signify the resistance of the colonized against the colonizing
and, at the same time, within the dichotomy between North Korea and
South Korea to denote the resistance of poetry against ideological division.
In a similar manner to the way Si-jong Kim portrays the azaleas, Chong-
hwa Lee, by employing a patchwork of images of azaleas, presents a multi-
plicity of images of azaleas creating heterogeneity within the space of the
nation. Azaleas are a symbol not of individuals but of a collective. In Lees
introductory essay, this collective symbol transforms national homogeneity
into a collectivity of struggling beings, which in turn inscribes heterogeneity
within a new imaginary nation state where struggling beings find their place
as people. In this patchwork that prompts metamorphosis, we find the
nomadic aesthetics of constructing spaces suggested by Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari. According to Jung-woo Lee:
existence nurtured under the shadows of the nation-state. With keen sensi-
tivity to their own personal experiences as minorities, which results in the
connection of politics with aesthetics, they invent new public narratives
that deconstruct the canonical state narrative. They bring fine grains of
memory out of their personal experiences and then craft them to crystal-
lize new narratives of the people. The images from their memories also
construct unlimited versions of empathetic narrative as the images of aza-
leas are the exposed collective bodies of the deceased that spin off multi-
ple narratives.
Rebecca Jennison, one of the scholar participants of the APA Project, ana-
lyzes the works of third-generation zainichi, Oh Haji and Soni Kum, and
explores artistic narratives of the non-witness generation who grew up in
dim traumatic memories inherited from their ancestors. She argues that
the works of these two artists show the characteristics of postmemory, a
notion suggested by Marianne Hirsch. Postmemory means the memories
of later generations who are distant from the parent generations who
directly suffered traumatic events. It may be said that postmemory is dis-
tinct from memory in that postmemory is mediated, while memory is
unmediated. According to Hirsch, however, postmemory is a powerful
and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its
object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an
imaginative investment and creation (Hirsh 1997, 22; cited in Jennison
2009, 9). The postmemory of the second and third generations, children of
survivors of traumatic events, is characterized by rupture and break because
their memories do not bear direct witness and experience. In dealing with
these predicaments, the postmemory of later generations, generated despite
being distant from the traumatic events, has a potential for critical reflec-
tion on the past to form new empathetic narratives.
Following Hirshs interpretation of postmemory, we see that postmemory
is distinct from nostalgia, which Fredric Jameson postulates as one of the
Figure 1. Oh Haji,
Three Flowers,
2004.
In Ohs works utilizing textile fabrics, the symbolic objects that are most
repeatedly appearing are her grandmothers chimajeogori (a traditional
Korean two-piece dress) and the flowers on it. Her works Three Generations,
Three Times, and Three Flowers (2004) were made out of white chimajeogori
and hemp cloth owned by her late grandmother. In Three Flowers, white,
red, and pink flowers are embroidered on the cloth made of her grand-
mothers white hanbok (Korean traditional clothing). This piece was installed
with Three Times and Three Generations. The latter is a frame containing the
photographs of her grandmother, mother, and the artist, herself while the
former is a print of juxtaposed photographic images of the three women.9
For her grandmother, who emigrated from Korea to Japan and suf-
fered severe discrimination while residing in Japan, the chimajeogori and
azaleas are cultural objects of sadness and longing that endlessly returned
her to her motherland and mother tongue. Ohs identity is distant from that
of her grandmother who could feel free and comfortable only when she
spoke Korean while Ohs generation can speak Japanese fluently. She recog-
nizes that her grandmothers language and chimajeogori are symbols of dis-
crimination in her space of residence, but she is not necessarily forced or
motivated to use those symbols. Her grandmother was not able to commu-
nicate with Oh about her lifelong story, even though they lived together
under the same roof. There was only painful silence between the two
women (Jennison and Hein 2011).
In response to this inability to communicate, Oh invites her grand-
mother out of the silence and into her imaginary story. On the red flower
petals she crafted, Oh inscribed the lyrics of old Korean songs she heard for
the first time in her life. She also created new clothes that are neither hanbok
nor kimono (Japanese traditional clothing). As such, Oh creates a new narra-
tive out of national signs, like the chimajeogori. The stories of her grand-
mother are revived through creative work, rather than fading into oblivion.
Her works introduce multiple ways of interpretation for viewers by
contrasting traditional images. The hybrid wedding dress in Figure 2 looks
like a kimono to Koreans, but in the eyes of the Japanese it looks like a han-
bok. Oh dualizes her identity and creates new objects containing discordant
9. In Three Generations, the images of three women wearing chimajeogori are put together
side by side: on the left, the image of her grandmother, on the right Ohs image, and at
the center, the image of her mother. The cloth on which the images are printed is hemp
cloth originally prepared by her grandmother to wrap her own dead body. It was kept
intact after the funeral, and Oh used it for her artwork. In each image, all women stand
on the road of a small island near the Jeju-do. Oh traveled to the island to take the photo
(Kim 2009, 179180).
Figure 2. O
h Haji, Wedding Dress for Figure 3: Oh Haji, Kahan, 2007
Minority Race, 2000.
12. Soni Kum, Artist Statement, 2013, accessed March 3, 2012 http://www.sonikum.com/.
Conclusion
Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to
itself. . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often
arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as
well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism . . . is
itself in the least contingent and accidental (Gellner 1983, 55; cited in
Bhabha 1990, 294).
utes to the invention of a diasporic space. This encounter can also make a
contribution to reflexivity and creativity in weaving new spaces. The APA
Project seems to have served as a place of conversation and collaboration
that made it possible for diverse stories of migrant generations, Japanese of
Okinawan origin, and those with postmemories of the Jeju Uprising to con-
verge and for young artists to rewrite these stories through their aesthetic
languages. Through the project, they learn and experience the predica-
ment of other minority artists, which resisted the authority of the states
pedagogical narrative of the people.
The Asia, Politics, Art Project, which was designed as a workshop to
learn, remember, and share the predicament of others, reconstructs not
only the special dimension of nations by cutting across national boundar-
ies, the project also weaves the temporal dimension of the nation by con-
necting the past with the future. This reconstruction of time does not fol-
low a linear logic of regression to the past or progression toward the future.
Rather, it follows a logic of ritual that invites, soothes, and sends off spirits.
Metaphorically speaking, the zainich artists and writers heal the broken
feet of the deceased so that they could return to the present, and thus sym-
bolic logic is distinct from the linear logic of national progress. With the
help of the imagination and the mediation of artistic and literary practice,
the new ankles (boksappyeo)13 of the deceased in the past transcend the
boundaries of a nation tainted by painful memories of the colonized and
toward another kind of diasporic experience in Asia.
13. Boksappyeo in Korean means the ankle. Boksa and ppyeo mean peaches and bone,
respectively. Koreans call the ankle boksappyeo because of the similarity in appearance
between the ankle and peaches. So in this paper, attaching the new ankle, boksappyeo,
onto the feet of the deceased symbolizes both the healing of spirits and an artistic prac-
tice of patching different images together.
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