Son Education was founded in 2023 with the mission to instill joyful learning and mindful growth. We aim to cultivate young people for a greater good and instrumental purpose.

Over the past few years, the mission has honed in on the middle years — grades four through eight — often overlooked and lost during a crucial time of building relationships around learning and development. At Son Education, we believe this window opens up an opportunity without the pressure of achievement and assessments. This window helps students explore ideas, create connections, make mistakes, and fall — all in order to get back up. In the process, we build grit and independence in the young lives we touch.

"On Grit and the Long Durée"

The MacArthur Fellow Angela Duckworth writes in Grit:

"It [grit] is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint… And that grit is the key to attain success because without grit, without effort, talent is nothing more than your unmet potential."

Parents often ask me what this means. If you are reading these words, and the quotes make sense to you, but you're unsure of how to make this into a reality for your children, welcome. You've come to the right place. I would add that in my decades of teaching and tutoring experience, that grit creates agency or the belief in one's ability. And agency is transformative for thinking, writing, and problem-solving because agency is the basis of ownership and confidence. When a student comes to me with questions about an argument or a claim and has difficulty writing a thesis — it's usually that the student has a hard time putting their ideas out into the world for fear of judgement because they are insecure. They are more than capable, but it takes a team of actors to support them to attain grit because independence is learned over a long period of time.

In November 2024, a mother was arrested for reckless conduct and fined $1,000 because her ten year old child walked by himself to the Dollar Store in Georgia. He went into town to buy something to make for his mother who was working. AirTalk's Larry Mantle had a segment on November 20, 2024, asking: "What is considered too much freedom for kids these days?" reflecting upon his own childhood riding his bike throughout Los Angeles in Inglewood, Baldwin Hills, and Leimert Park without phones, without surveillance cameras. He biked all day long with friends in tow in trust that he would return home before sundown. To have that freedom meant that they could explore, play, create, fall, get back up, and move forward again. I recall listening to his short segment that morning in my car because in the decades I have been listening to AirTalk with Larry Mantle, it may have been the one time I heard him arguing for a position which he rarely, if ever, does, as the longest running daily radio talk show in Los Angeles. What he reminded his listeners of that morning is what I think is the recipe for grit: the freedom to fall and to get back up in order to learn, on their own. These experiences are what it takes to be successful at a craft — writer, lawyer, mother, father, producer, musician, athlete, make-up artist, comedian, scientist — whatever you think you need to be, it's quite simple. But why are parents today so afraid to let their kids fall and fail?

I want to harken back to the marathon or the long haul that Duckworth highlights and something as a historian I have been deeply influenced by throughout my studies and writing: the longue durée. The Longue Durée is what French historian Fernand Braudel and the Annales School find important when thinking about history — the approach that focuses on long-term structures and processes over the short-term events or "hot topics." With all things in life as it passes, we only have some years with our children before they conquer the world and greet it for everything that the world will offer them, including the great highs of graduations and jobs or the happiness derived from realizing their dreams, big and small. It will inevitably also include the falls, punches, aches, and pains. Let's think about the middle years of secondary education as the key years to fail and grow that will teach them, at times, to punch through the pain encountered in the long durée of life. If we can set them up to face the challenges, haven't we succeeded as parents?

There was the title of one of four projects exhibited at the fifth Kwangju Biennale held in South Korea in 2002. The name alludes to five of the oldest and largest overseas Korean communities: those in Brazil, China, Japan, Kazakhstan, and the United States. There curator, Yong Soon Min, chose twenty-four visual artists to represent the five locations, and their artwork showcased Korea's diasporic cultural production formulated by the historical migratory routes that have influenced the artists' lives and their art.

There indicates a paradox of diasporic art. While some diasporic artists uphold the ideas of Korean national culture and belonging bound by homogeneity and blood ties, other artists directly challenge the meaning such narratives hold in their artistic expressions. As such, the show discussed multiple identity formations that resist dominant narratives, reflected differing experiences of class, gender, global, and national politics and indicated how the nation-state system is increasingly challenged by globalization. Yet, there are also artists who reinforce monocultural conceptions of national culture and cultural identity for diasporic subjects. In other words, diasporic art both undermines the master narrative of the nation at the same time as it reinforces them.

The fifth Kwangju Biennale held in South Korea in 2002 exhibited four large projects. Project Two: There, Sites of the Korean Diaspora showcased twenty-four artists from five of the oldest and largest Korean diasporic communities — those in Brazil, China, Japan, Kazakhstan, and the United States. There was thus an international large-scale exhibition and part of a biennale platform that provided a unique opportunity for cross-disciplinary analysis of artists, artwork, and cultural production within the field of Korean migration and diaspora studies.

I draw on artwork, interviews, internal documents and recordings, press coverage, art critiques, artist statements, and exhibition catalogues to articulate the production of Korean diasporic art. Key to diasporic art is that artists explore a shared history of trauma, suffering, or displacement and affectively reconstruct and nostalgically re-imagine their historical memories of such events. There indicates a paradox of diasporic art as it pertains to Korean artists. Whereas some diasporic artists uphold the ideas of homogeneity and blood ties, ideas central to the master narrative of the nation, other artists directly challenge the meaning such narratives hold in their artistic expressions. In other words, diasporic art both undermines dominant narratives of the nation at the same time as it reinforces singular conceptions of national culture, cultural belonging, and state affiliation for diasporic subjects.

Master Narrative of the Nation and Overseas Koreans

There was a transnational art exhibition that represented a significant moment within its local Kwangju setting as well as global art historical contexts. This article focuses on the There production as a site critical of exclusive conceptions of identity and belonging, and as such, it provides a possibility of reshaping the understanding and perspectives of Korean diaspora from one that is hierarchical in nature to one that challenges these hierarchies on several fronts.

First, the study of artists in diasporic communities challenges ideas of homogeneity (tanil minjok) and pure-blood relations (sunsu hyŏlt'ong) that have dominated discussions of overseas Koreans. These discussions, centered upon mainstream South Korean academic perspectives and public opinion, have largely confined the understanding of overseas Koreans within a master narrative of the ethnic nation. That narrative reifies a history of progress in order to overcome Korea's long and arduous history of suffering (sunan ŭi yŏksa).

Master narratives of Korean history portray the peninsula as having existed as a uniquely stable unit for more than 5,000 years. Twentieth-century national and cultural identity discourse has produced a strong belief in the homogeneity of the Korean people and its pure bloodline. The idea of homogeneity was coined in academic discourse in 1946 when nationalist scholar Yi Pyŏngdo first introduced the term tanil minjok in an article titled "The Homogeneity of the Korean People" protesting the externally enforced partition of the nation.

The idea of blood-kin relations extend back to Tan'gun, Korea's mythic progenitor and founder of the putative first Korean state of Old Chosŏn in 2333 BCE. The blood tie has been inculcated in various ways during the twentieth century. Korea's claim of being a homogeneous unit housing "splendid people" or paedal minjok was a twentieth-century construction.

Situating There

There's production is a good starting point with which to analyze how the five distinct communities that Yong Soon Min believed best visually represented the Korean diaspora are also those overseas Korean communities that South Korea desires to incorporate into a larger ethnic nation beyond the nation.

Wang-kyung Sung initially conceived of Project Two: There as part of the rationale for the 2002 Kwangju Biennale itself: to expand upon the localized identities of Kwangju and Asia. Sung's attitude is indicative of a growing number of people who would like to understand difference and variety from "globalized historical experiences and standpoints." Expanding the perspectives may be one of the only options to buffer against the oppressive hold of master narratives that still largely confine the discourse on overseas Koreans and cultural identity to the consanguineous link with the nation and its long history of suffering.

Min chose artists from Almaty, Kazakhstan; São Paulo, Brazil; Yanji, China; Osaka and the greater Kansai regions of Japan; and the two coasts of the United States to represent Korean diaspora at the 2002 Kwangju Biennale. Coming from the same era when Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha made strides in the U.S. art world, Min also was a pioneer visual artist, and her successful art practice combined the roles of artist, curator, and teacher.

Several tensions surface within There's production, including the overall artistic vision from the standpoints of artistic director Wang-kyung Sung and Project Two curator Yong Soon Min, the exhibition's reception, on-site working conditions, organization, participant imbalance, and print representation.

Kwangju: From City of Revolt to City of Culture

Talk of Kwangju may elicit one of several reactions from those who know something about South Korea and its metropolitan regions, but foremost in recent historical memory, Kwangju is the place where victims suffered and heroes arose during and after the May 18 Kwangju Uprising in 1980. The Kwangju Uprising of 5.18 was incited when riot police cracked down on pro-democracy students in front of Chŏnnam University.

The lingering questions and solemn shadows of the Kwangju Uprising left an indelible scar on the people of Kwangju. With such a legacy, Kwangju, as a site for artistic manifestations and cultural productions, happens from a local, off-center space — an evocative space where minor narratives may emerge.

The transformation of 5.18 from tragedy, into the fight for democratic struggle to local identity politics that then prevails as a celebration of culture on a global scale is part of the process of "overcoming 5.18." The Kim Young Sam administration first pumped funds into events commemorating the Kwangju Uprising, and studies show that the Kwangju Biennale was initiated by the central government and supported by local governments in an effort to transform Kwangju's image from a city of resistance to a "city of art."

Diasporic Art: Antidote to Master Narratives?

Two main methodological concerns are important to discussing the social dimension of art and its cultural production. First, each art piece and each artist's practice exists within a structure of social relationships, and the tensions of curating a biennale production such as There imbues such social and human dimensions.

The second aspect of methodological concerns attempts to argue that art is an antidote to the master narrative of the Korean nation. The cultural production of the There show exemplifies the possibility of a provisional act of emancipation from dominant narratives, constituted by cultural equality. Equality does not refer to a founding ontological principle, but to a presupposition that Jacques Rancière defines as a "condition that only functions when it is put into action."

Landscape

The examination of landscapes presented at the There exhibition draws from critical frameworks to show a mixture of mediums, style, function, and composition. Octogenarian Hee Man Suk was the oldest (1914–2003) of the twenty-four artists. The function of his numerous landscapes declared the importance of scenes of daily life, Manchurian landscapes, and family scenes. His landscape paintings illustrate his nostalgic visions of his hometown of Musan, Northern Hamgyŏng Province.

Y. David Chung's installation Stripmall was one of two installations presented in Project Two: There. A three-walled "intersection" enmeshed with charcoal drawings with three different video sequences embedded in the walls, Chung describes this piece as a formal attempt at depicting his experience of the sense of time and space within a strip mall site.

Jin Lee presented an eloquent photograph from a series titled Prairie, a work in four parts that follows the four seasons. Lee's photograph-based art engages landscapes within nature and captures identities as indexical traces of the passage of time. Lee states: "The prairie is such an interesting thing to look at because it's discussed in terms of a true American identity but also as a metaphor for democracy — it's made up of hundreds of different plants and that's what makes it so healthy unlike farmland which needs constant maintenance because of monoculture which is not a healthy way to grow."

History, Politics, and Society

A majority of the artwork from the There exhibition tells a story. In Leaving Home, Jun Chae recounts the histories of Japanese Koreans through symbolic representations that elicit a remembered history; abstract objects piled on top of the head of a solemn-faced woman wearing the traditional Korean garb, ch'ima chŏgori. Using mimetic mechanisms and surrealist abstractions, Chae's piling is constructed to rekindle the image of poor, rural women hoisting heavy goods upon their heads.

Fung-sok Ro presented his earthen ceramic sculpture The Gate. His piece depicts stages of development that Japanese Koreans underwent, emphasizing their ability to overcome each arduous "rite of passage" while residing in Japan.

Il Nam Park and Sung Min Kim are two Japanese Korean male artists whose work invokes narratives memorialized into Japanese Korean communal identity. Park's Gap is both a depiction of Park's own life-threatening experience during the 1995 Kobe earthquakes and a direct allusion to the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 when 6,000 Koreans living in Japan became the targets of attacks by Japanese police.

Sexuality and Gender

The viral male and adorned female bodies found at the center of Chŏngsuk Kang's Crossing and Susan Choi's Orientalism are different conceptions of portraiture. The body has now become the main subject matter, reflecting a difference in gender and generation. Choi's photograph engages the audience with the large, glossy, photographic print of herself and her model, seemingly giving both women the right to act and the desire to be acted upon.

Generational differences of Japanese Koreans factor significantly in Kang's bold address of gender and sexuality, one of the first paintings dealing with these issues in Areum circles. Her work quietly resists the male-dominated hierarchy of an association such as Areum, and her ability to use oversized male bodies composed in defeated positions is but one indication of the changing attitudes of third- and fourth-generation Japanese Koreans who no longer recognize the telos of return to the "homeland" as an option in their lives.

Abstraction

In juxtaposition to those narratives of struggle and the history of suffering that Japanese Korean artists interpreted, U.S.-based artists appeal to narratives based not upon real experiences but fantasy and myth. The L.A.-based artist Wonju Lim engages in historical memories of Greek myths and ancient folklore in dense, excessive, architectural installations. The piece she presented in 2002 at Kwangju, Elysian Field, is named after the place reserved for the souls of the heroic and virtuous in Greek mythology.

Fantasy is foremost on the minds of Jennifer Moon's superheroes. Moon's art practice is conceptual and performative. She enacts multiple subjectivities through her body in everyday life, as the business entrepreneur Deirdre Swan, the sex goddess Electra, and the superhero she was training to become on the installation gym set at the Kwangju exhibition site.

Conclusion

Within a diasporic framework, the spatial representation of five far-flung locations of Korean diasporic artists expanded the experience and expression of the collection of artwork presented at There. The geo-cultural corpus of the biennale structure critically develops the idea of diasporic art and proves that it can exist alongside a national frame. Discovering the artists through the 2002 Kwangju Biennale There exhibition clarified the powers of diaspora that lie in intercultural associations collected in a biennale platform, and help us to imagine alternative means toward understanding minor histories and differing identities.

Yet when sites of the Korean diaspora are explored in the specific intercultural activities of the Kwangju Biennale, even as diasporic art exists alongside national frames, an expansive diasporic consciousness does not necessarily overcome Korean national history and national consciousness — thus I call There a provisional emancipation from dominant hierarchies constituted by cultural equality.

The body of work I offer through the themes of landscape, history, culture, society, sexuality and gender, and abstraction lays claim to the unruly complexity of artists' senses of self and to the radical indeterminate nature of an action-centered approach to art. Diasporic art expands the space of Korean identity construction(s) by incorporating the creative expression of artists from different generations and multiple diasporic host communities, all underlined by vastly differing art practices.

The idea of paradoxes that undermine master narratives at the same time as they support them is one of several contradictions that characterize postmodern art — which works to subvert dominant discourses, but is dependent upon those same discourses for its very existence. The challenges to historical narratives as "facts" or "truths" are not new ones but have firm roots in the modern. The implications for examining paradoxes of the margins, of those excluded from the center, are what I explore in diasporic art, art making, cultural production, and the radical indeterminacy that interrogates sameness, oneness, homogeneity, and unity at the same time that it makes room for difference, heterogeneity, hybridity, and the provisional.

Y. David Chung is an artist and filmmaker known for his film and video works, installations, performances, drawings, prints, and public artworks. This interview combines two conversations on the concept of Korean identity and diasporic art: one that took place in 2008, after Chung finished filming his documentary Koryo Saram: The Unreliable People, co-directed with Matt Dibble, and the other in 2018. Hijoo Son and Jooyeon Rhee jointly designed the questions, interviewed Professor Chung, and redacted the transcript into its present form.

Decentering Korean Identity

Jooyeon: David, could you tell us why working on diaspora is so integral to your work?

David: The idea of diaspora has been really important to me for many years, even before recent academic research on diaspora, now called diaspora studies, became significant. I have traveled a lot since I was a kid [in the 1960s and 1970s], and I have seen a substantial Korean population living outside Korea. I was intrigued to see how Koreans in various places across the world shaped their existence outside Korea. Who are these people? How can they frame a structure for their identification with Korea? And, at the same time, how do they then shape their identities outside the country? In some cases, such as the Koreans in the former Soviet Union, who are called Koryŏsaram, people who are two or three generations away still latch onto the idea that they are Korean, even though they are not really Korean. I see similar cases among groups of Korean people in the United States and many places around the world. These cases have been intriguing to me; thus, diaspora became an important subject matter in my works.

Jooyeon: It's interesting to hear you say that second- and third- or, in the case of Koryŏsaram, fourth-generation Koreans who believe they are Korean "are not really Korean." This statement is related to the second question we wanted to ask you. Does your idea about diaspora and Korean identity change or expand as you create works about them? You have featured Koreans in Russia and Kazakhstan, and recently North Koreans. Do fourth-generation Kazakh Koreans, for example, cling to some kind of idea that they are ethnically Korean?

David: I think my ideas do change. Looking toward the Koreans in the Soviet sphere and in North Korea really changes the pivot of where the Korean diaspora come from. It decenters the previously dominant notion of Korean diasporic identity by shifting the geographical location of the origin, because it used to be so focused on South Korea. And it does expand the central idea of where the mother country is. It really does change a lot of ways you look at the diasporic community when you "decenter" the point of origin, because you look at it from their perspective, through the prism of their history and legacy. It's quite different from those who migrated to the United States or South America for economic reasons.

Hijoo: So you're talking about the political and historical reasoning or motivation for movement or forced movement in these cases?

David: Right. The circumstances of their movement shape their ideas about Korean identity.

Hijoo: On the one hand, different types of movement decenter the concept of Korean diaspora, particularly the ways in which cultural producers think about it or deal with it, or write and make artwork about diasporic issues. But from the standpoint of the North Korean refugees, for example, I don't know if we can use diaspora when referring to them. Would you say that these people decenter the concept of diaspora? To a great extent, their lives are still being determined by the South Korean state. Even before they arrived in South Korea, they were in China, Thailand, and all the other countries they had to go through. Do you think the existence of North Korean migrants and refugees "decenters" the concept of diaspora, since a majority of them live in South Korea?

David: Yes, I think so. For those who grew up in Pyŏngyang or elsewhere in North Korea but now live in the West or in post-Soviet countries, their childhood memories and ideas about how they grew up are completely different from those of people from the South. Their political views, for example, are quite different from those from South Korea. So I do think it makes a big difference.

North Korean Refugees as Diaspora

Jooyeon: I presume that your idea about "decentering" is informed by your recent work with North Koreans. Could you just talk a little bit about what you've been doing recently, especially since you have spent some time in Seoul and in Pyŏngyang?

David: Well, this is a project that's been going on and off for several years. About eight years ago, I did the first installation called Pyŏngyang, and it was a drawing and a sculptural work. Shortly after the installation, I wanted to expand that piece by working on a video or film project, but I put it aside for about five years before working on it again. I've been interviewing and working with some North Korean refugees and defectors in Seoul and talking to them about their experiences. Their stories really vary from people who have been in Seoul for ten years to people who just came to South Korea two years ago. I'm most interested in the human component of their lives and their stories about residing in South Korea. I do interview them just a little about how they escaped and the hardships they went through before arriving in South Korea. My main interest, however, is to hear about how they are looking at their lives now. Some of them want to go back to North Korea, and that type of thing is a very interesting example.

Jooyeon: Who are the ones who want to go back to North Korea? Is their desire to return due to the extremely displaced conditions under which they live[d] in South Korea?

David: Some have gone back, though I don't think any of the people I interviewed have returned. There are a number of reasons that they want to return. Maybe they miss their family back in North Korea, some feel like they don't fit in South Korea, many South Koreans can be very judgmental, and so on.

Hijoo: Looking at the scale of identities that you are depicting and encountering, would you say that they represent or are part of the "Korean diaspora," in the sense that the diasporic identity par excellence is one in which that history of displacement, suffering, trauma, pain, violence, and coerced or forced movement is imbricated in that term? In this sense, would you argue that North Korean asylum seekers and refugees are part of that Korean diaspora?

David: Yes, I think they are. For example, some of them are living beyond South Korea in different countries such as England, the United States, and Canada, so they would definitely be part of the Korean diaspora. You have to use this term "diasporic community" very carefully, because there is an official government definition. South Korea established a government institution that deals with Korean diaspora a few years ago, I believe, that interprets things in a certain way. So how do North Koreans residing in South Korea represent part of a diasporic community? That would be a hard question to tease out. I guess it would depend on how you define "diasporic community." The question is: Which one is their mother country? North or South Korea?

Hijoo: Right! Exactly! That's the conundrum!

David: Those refugees living abroad are definitely included in the "diasporic community."

Hijoo: But the conundrum of how to categorize those living in South Korea is yet to be determined, perhaps?

David: Yes, I don't know exactly how you would categorize them.

Jooyeon: Did you exhibit any of your recent video, Defector Project, on North Koreans, while you were in Seoul over the summer?

David: I haven't shown it in Seoul yet. The last time I showed a piece of it was at the University of California at Berkeley, when I was invited to give a talk there. But right now the project is in progress.

Jooyeon: Has your interaction with North Koreans in South Korea informed you in ways that further—or even differ from—what you have learned from ethnic Koreans in the Commonwealth of Independent States such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan? Obviously, North Koreans are Korean—they consider themselves Korean—but how is that negotiated, especially as they interact with South Koreans and shift their understanding of self?

David: As I said earlier, the ways they live really vary. There are some people who have migrated to South Korea and found work. These people are doing okay, though they still feel, of course, the prejudice because of their accent and where they are from. As you know, South Korea is a very hierarchical society. If you are a young man and you didn't serve in the military, then you are in one group of people who are to be discriminated against. If you are North Korean, then you are in a completely different group of people altogether. I think the experiences of the young women and men are different as well. So it's really hard to generalize their stories. But individual stories matter a lot. Some of their stories are quite horrific, such as young women being sold as wives to Chinese men, having kids, and then having to escape to Thailand. Almost all of the people I interviewed went to Thailand and then came up through Thailand to South Korea.

Hijoo: And the majority of them have been women?

David: There are a lot of women, but there were young men as well.

Hijoo: David, you are very well known in the community of South Korean artists and academics, but not necessarily with North Korean refugees. When you approach them, do you tell them who you are, and then they are open to talking to you, or is it just kind of how I often go about doing things: "Hey! I'm this person, I'm doing this ethnographic study, may I interview you?" How do you approach them?

David: Usually they are not familiar with my work. If they're other artists and academics, then they will be. So in that case, yes, then they certainly do. Specifically with the Defector Project, it doesn't really come up. They'll just think I'm someone making a film.

Reception of Diasporic Art

Jooyeon: This past summer, we were talking about your teaching work on film in Seoul, and we wanted to know if your work has been received in South Korea differently than in, let's say, Boston, Chicago, or Washington, where you have shown your documentary video Koryo Saram. Also, what kind of changes have you seen in Seoul concerning the subject matter of your film, the idea of Korean diaspora?

David: That's a good question. I think my work is looked at very differently over in South Korea than it is in United States. Earlier on, when I showed my work in South Korea, I was labeled as a minjung [people's] artist, maybe because my work deals mainly with socially marginalized people. I heard about this terminology, because minjung artists immediately associated my work with theirs due to the style of my work. Even as early as Seoul House [1987], the South Korean art world linked me with that style. I was immediately put in that camp back then.

Hijoo: Are you talking about this labeling as occurring recently or a while ago?

David: A while ago, in the 1990s. The films I showed back then were the works I had done on Los Angeles riots and the relations between the African-American and Korean-American communities. I think people in South Korea are always curious about what my political stance is. Even if they don't come out and say so, they are always searching for that. And then also, Jooyeon's question about the reception of artwork and artists from overseas in South Korea is very critical, whether you are Korean or Korean American, or whoever you are. Cody Choi, for example, had a very interesting take on all this stuff.

Hijoo: He changed his citizenship to South Korean? And he's based in Seoul now?

David: Yes. He's based in Seoul, but because he's spent so much time in Los Angeles—I think he has spent about twenty years there—he has found that he's considered Korean American and not Korean in South Korea.

Jooyeon: So, you're saying that the viewer's subject position—such as being South Korean—matters in the reception of your work, because that has implications?

David: Yes. People always seem to be interested in putting you in a certain camp in South Korea. The understanding between Korean-American and Korean art and artists is very interesting. For example, look at the Void in Korean Art exhibition curated by the Samsung Museum. It's very interesting to hear Korean peoples' comments about Korean-American artists such as Kimsooja, Byron Kim, and Do-ho Suh. There are also Korean artists in the show, and it's actually one of the best-curated pieces in South Korea that I've seen. It had to do mostly with the quality of the art and with empty spaces in artwork. The overall feedback was that these artists are taking parts of past Korean art and interpreting it.

Hijoo: What does that mean?

David: I don't know, but, for example, Byron Kim's celadon paintings are interpreted as directly referring to Korean celadon.

Hijoo: So the Korean markers became the markers because they are legible to South Korean viewers?

David: Right. They're using these objects to reference Korea and Korean art history.

Hijoo: What was the Do-ho Suh piece?

David: It was a soft, fabric piece, a really beautiful gate produced out of fabric. It's a huge piece, a twelve-foot hanging Korean gate hand-sewn together. And Kimsooja had a video about the wandering migrant in which one sees the back of her head and there's water going by.

Hijoo: A Needle Woman series.

David: Yes. It was interesting to see how Korean-American artwork is so different when it's shown in South Korea compared with any other country. Precisely because the viewers are South Korean, they have a natural bias to connect the work to their country. And of course they're going to pick the celadon pieces instead of Byron Kim's Synecdoche [an ongoing work composed of four hundred portraits of sitters' skin tones].

Jooyeon: David, so you are saying that South Korean viewers tend to receive diasporic artists' works politically. But, your current topic of concern—the project you are in middle of doing—is about North Korean immigrant refugees and asylum seekers. However you want to shape that category, it is in itself a very political project. So I don't think you're going to get away from that type of questioning.

David: Not at all. I understand that.

Hijoo: Of course, it's interesting, though, because isn't it important to tell the stories that you are trying to tell?

David: I was very interested in how culture and self-awareness come from traditional storytelling and how those stories form who you are. I was interested in Korean stories and American stories, in what is subject matter. I was thinking about what defines subject matter for immigrants to South Korea. How is it defined for people who are moving from place to place? How does subject matter become defined? If I'm referring to a biblical scene, then I'm obviously referring to Western ideas, and so this was a sort of investigation into what all that was about. I was interested in folk stories, especially Korean folk stories, so it was a blending of all those things. I created a specifically commissioned work, Mega Morning Calm, for the Asia/America: Identities in Contemporary Asian American Art [1994] exhibition, curated by Margo Machida and Vishakha Desai, the gallery directors at that time. They wanted a mural for the entranceway to the Asia Society [in New York City]. The title comes from the Korean creation story of Tan'gun, and that's why it's called Mega Morning Calm.

Hijoo: Oh, because it's a mega-narrative.

David: Yes. It's like the ultimate narrative, or the first narrative.

Hijoo: I've seen the piece. Wasn't there an implicit critique of that narrative? Or, were you interested in bringing the mythical origins onto canvas as subject matter?

David: Yes, I was interested in subject matter. What is subject matter? And I wanted to choose this creation story. Every people has a creation story, and no one knows about the Tan'gun story, which is a fascinating one. As you know, Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il claim direct lineage to Tan'gun, and there was some linkage to Everwhite Mountain (Paekdusan) and some war imagery in the installation. Just the story itself…I really loved the story about the bear and the tiger. It was a subject matter that I actually wanted to work with.

Hijoo: But it's a myth.

David: Well, some people believe that it's real. And there's a Tan'gun cult.

Hijoo: Well, yes, of course. People call Tan'gun harabŏji [grandfather]. What do you think about the idea about pure blood ties, that the Korean people are one large family that goes back to this progenitor, Tan'gun?

David: Well, I think that it's interesting. The kind of thing I was looking at in the film Koryo Saram is that there are so many Koreans living abroad—some seven million? I think it's precisely what I wanted to drive at in the film: the idea that identity and culture are temporal. They are made up in the mind. It's a question of how much you want to attach yourself to it. I think that some people don't want anything to do with it and others find it an important thing to latch onto. My work is looking at just the experience of a person from one culture who is mixing with another culture.

Hijoo: But this idea of attachment…you're definitely attaching to your body of work this Korean history. Just look at the titles of your earlier works from the 1990s—street scene, bar scene, apartment, and so on—and then look from those to the titles of your works from Turtle Boat Head [1992] to Mega Morning Calm.

David: The Turtle Boat Head piece is obviously about the Hideyoshi invasions and the turtle warships. Again, I wanted to interject subject matter into the body of work. Once again, I went to the grocery store with that. I felt like I hadn't finished with that theme. This time I actually built a grocery store with paper and wood, and the project was largely based on my father's experience growing up during the Japanese occupation, surviving two wars, and being pushed down to the South.

Hijoo: He's originally from North Korea? Pyŏngyang?

David: My mom is from Kaesong, and my father is from a small town outside Pyŏngyang. They both lost everything during World War II and came to South Korea after the occupation, not during the war itself. It was sometime between 1945 and 1950, so Turtle Boat Head was largely about that experience. My father was in the Korean navy for twenty years, and he'd always talk about these turtle boats. So it's largely a piece about that story.

Hijoo: So, was the piece Turtle Boat Head commemorative?

David: I think that this interjection of culture largely comes from autobiography or at least is informed by that, more than it presents itself as a grand historical narrative.

Hijoo: It's autobiographical, but it's also historical. These are some main, conventional narratives of Korean history.

David: Well, I find this whole politicization is a global thing. People don't talk as much anymore about the artistic merits of a piece. They talk much more about politicization.

Jooyeon: On the topic of the politicization of artwork, do you believe your interaction with artists in South Korea has given you any insight into or posed challenges to your diasporic identity or your work? Were there moments of misunderstanding, miscommunication, understanding, or conflict that you encountered that you might want to share with us?

David: I don't know if my interactions with artists in South Korea pose any challenges to my diasporic identity. If anything, they confirm my understanding that our approaches are very different, because a lot of artists in South Korea would not have the same concerns. Well…there are a lot of artists, writers, filmmakers, and people who are working with the topic of Korean diaspora. When this trend first started, it was really misunderstood, like the art exhibition called The Decade Show.

Hijoo: Yes, in 1990.

David: 1990. That's when the curators grouped marginalized people, without really distinguishing between what made them marginalized, as if there were no distinction among ethnic, cultural, or political reasons for marginalized groups in the United States. I think the understanding of the diaspora has become much more mature now. It's become really different. People understand it much better in both the United States and Korea, actually. In South Korea, there's much more awareness about diasporic people there now. And there isn't the earlier attitude that was, sort of, either you're Korean or you're not. Now they understand, "Oh, okay, you're a foreign Korean." They accept that.

Hijoo: That's really interesting that you say that about The Decade Show. Then there was the Whitney Biennale in 1993. Do you remember how Byron Kim's work on skin colors was really highlighted? And then, of course, there was Yong Soon Min's 2002 There: Sites of the Korean Diaspora show at the Gwangju Biennale. And, subsequently, do you know the Zainichi writer Kyung-sik Suh, who has written books about the Korean diaspora?

David: No. I may have read some of his work.

Hijoo: So, you're not aware of the Korean Japanese….

David: Oh yes, completely, parts of my family are still in Japan.

Hijoo: Your film was really eye-opening for so many of us, the communities that were able to see it. Maybe one day you could show it in North Korea. You're right, there has been a trajectory in which conversations and especially cultural producers have been really key to helping to open the discourse, if I can say that: opening the conversation to think outside conventional narratives that reduce everyone into one pot as in The Decade Show, which you mentioned.

David: The Decade Show made no distinction between those who voluntarily migrated and others, who were forcibly brought over. But of course there is now great awareness of those things. I remember being back then on a panel of Korean immigrants, rape victims, and American Indians. [Laughter.] The title of the panel was "Marginalized Victims." Of course, that would never happen today. In South Korea now, and the United States and other countries, there's a lot more awareness about hybrid cultures, ethnic identity, ethnic nationalism, all these different ways in which people identify themselves, and also the artwork as well.

Capitalizing on Korean Identity in Popular Media

David: In South Korea there's just a lot more understanding of diasporic issues, and the topic is really present in the popular media. On the topic of North Korean refugees, there are television shows about North Koreans who now live outside North Korea, so it's not this hidden thing anymore.

Hijoo: The North Korean beauties! Did you watch the show? What did you think?

David: I'm always amazed at how all of these things are really present in the popular media.

Hijoo: It's not a hidden thing. It's actually commercialized, popularized, and in that sense narrativized. But when I see the famous show with the North Korean beauties, and the producer is a famous woman producer, I would say there's a certain narrative that's constantly pushed on the audience: these women tell their stories of going to hell and back, but ultimately they've faced the challenges, survived, and overcome hardship!

David: That's a whole strange world. Really bizarre.

Hijoo: It seems that South Koreans always put North Koreans in a positive light. Whether through a savior narrative or a victor narrative, it definitely seems as if there's a positive twist, which I know is not always the case.

David: So, a lot of changes have certainly happened, and there's a lot more awareness of the diasporic community.

This article contains references to figures reproduced in the original publication. View the full PDF with images →

Abstract

This article examines diaspora in the context of intimacy in order to focus on individual conditions of art-making, taking into account global conceptions of diaspora that have appealed to celebratory, emancipatory, pessimistic, or desirous formulations about diaspora and art. Through a discussion of paintings by Himan Sŏk, a Chinese Korean (Chosŏnjok), and Jun Ch'ae, a Japanese Korean (Zainichi), the author proposes that diasporic art can be analyzed in terms of the transpersonal relations that surround the intimate vicinity of the artwork in three ways. First, these works of art are neither structured from above nor resistant from below. Second, they express an idea of doubleness bound at once to a larger organizing collective and to the individual experience. These artists imbue their paintings with ethnos and nation and the personal and intimate, and a comparison of their works reveals social relations that form around the objects and evolve as art is produced, exhibited, written about, and discussed. Third, transpersonal relations surrounding the artists and artwork underscore a two-tiered idea of who transindividuals are to others and to themselves, a concept of identity that is especially pertinent to diasporic artists who are postcolonial subjects, as it allows for differing "selves" according to context-specific settings. The transindividual is, thus, shown to be a critical concept of integration in understanding identity.

The claim of the identity of the object speaks, whether the sciences hear it or not, whether they throw to the winds what they have heard or let themselves be strongly affected by it. —Martin Heidegger (1969, 27)

Introduction

This article examines diaspora in the context of intimacy and transindividuality in order to focus both on the individual and affective conditions of art-making and on the collective and social reckoning of art. The integrative concept of transindividuality opens up a discussion about identity that recognizes differing "selves" according to context-specific settings. It focuses less on the global appeal of diaspora that has formulated certain readings of diaspora and art, whether celebratory (Boym 2001; Suh 2005, 2014), emancipatory (Said 2000), desirous (Demos 2003), or pessimistic (Ryang 2001). Diasporic art shares a history of trauma, suffering, and displacement—a history oftentimes reconstructed affectively or reimagined nostalgically. This kind of art can be analyzed as a function of institutional and collective associations, constituted by transnational and transpersonal relations that surround the intimate vicinity of the artwork in three ways.

First, the artworks of the diasporic artists Himan Sŏk and Jun Ch'ae, though embedded in the histories of Chinese Koreans or Japanese Koreans, are neither structured from above nor resistant from below. The artwork and cultural production of these artists relate to the construction of identity and daily life in what Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih conceptualize as "minor transnationalism," allowing for "micropractices" of cultural expressions produced as "networks of minoritized cultures within and across national boundaries" (Lionnet and Shih 2005, 7). The term "micropractice," in the case of an artist, can be defined in contrast to "macropractice." The context of "artistic macropractice" may refer to those who are internationally recognized or institutionally sanctioned (represented by major galleries, graduates of renowned university art programs, or both). For the micropractice of an artist, however, context is neither theorized nor textually learned. Rather, there is a sense of the unsanctioned, improvisational, or even provisional context, unrecognized by global markets. Another way to think about this micropractice is to consider that while the audiences of Sŏk and Ch'ae are constantly changing—even today, as their work circulates abroad—ultimately, the audience will not grow in the sense of art markets and accessibility. Although their works can be viewed, discussed, and written about as part of, for example, artwork of Korean diaspora (as in this article), they will always be minor, even if they are global or transnational—an interesting conundrum of "minor transnational" artists. Yet another way to think about this irony is that whereas these two names are virtually unknown in the world, they are remarkable in their own institutions and communities.

The second level of analysis takes an intimate examination of the idea of doubleness bound at once to national community and to individual experience. This is the condition that Svetlana Boym described as "diasporic intimacy" (Boym 2001, 251–258). From the standpoint of the artwork, I suggest that diasporic intimacy is a trope that embeds the meaning of both ethnos and nation and the personal and intimate. Furthermore, relations form around the objects and evolve as the art is produced, exhibited, written about, donated, bought, and, in some instances, destroyed. In his lifetime, Sŏk traversed Korean, Chinese, and Japanese borders for education, marriage, and work, and his artwork similarly traveled throughout these countries for exhibition, purchase, and study. Thus, the transnational context of his art production is evident.

Ch'ae's case differs. In 2002, he donated most of his paintings and cartoon drawings to the Gyeongnam Art Museum, a provincial museum in the city of Ch'angwon, his birthplace. The museum held Ch'ae's first and only South Korean solo exhibition in 2007 (Yi 2011). Both Ch'ae and Sŏk were included in the 2004 Gwangju Biennale's exhibition There: Sites of the Korean Diaspora (Son 2012). Further, Ch'ae's work was part of an exhibition titled Art of Prayer: Evidence+Prayers+Happiness, which showcased 156 artworks by forty-eight Japanese Korean artists. Displaying a special assemblage of Japanese Korean art owned by collector Jung-woong Ha, the exhibition toured eight art museums in Seoul, Busan, Gwangju, Jeonbuk, Jeju, Daegu, and elsewhere from June 2013 through the end of 2014. Thus, even though Ch'ae himself is difficult to contact and visit in his old age, his work continues to be featured in transnational shows focused on Japanese Korean history and culture.

Third, within this minor transnational context, the transpersonal relations that surround the artists and their artworks underscore a two-tiered idea of the transindividual identity—that is, who one is to oneself and to others depending on the social context. As is evident in both artists' experiences during the Pacific War (1931–1945), Sŏk and Ch'ae chose to maintain differing "selves" or "faces" in changing contexts and specific settings. In discussing identity in their cases, the idea of the "transindividual" is helpful as a concept of integration, rather than of separation or demarcation. "Integrative transindividuality" considers the making of the individual as a process that extends over a long duration of time and works to configure an identity as a unified and whole personhood (Balibar 1997, 8–13). It is a Heideggerian recognition of the fact that in one being and one body, difference—or many selves—exists in sameness or the same body (Heidegger 1969).

All three ideas considered here—minor transnationalism, diasporic intimacy, and transindividuality—contribute to this effort to constitute the diasporic artist as grounded in the process of individuation, which requires separation from one's society. As an individual comes into being, she or he goes through ontogenesis as a process or development of an individual from the earliest stages to maturity, a durational aspect of transindividuality. In other words, when discussing doubleness within diasporic intimacy, I am not referring to a split sense of a modern self, or the hybrid, heterogeneous, multiply-situated, interstitial sense of a postmodern self. The distinct faces or parts of the self as understood by self and by others are realized through a continual separation from one's social conditions, and all of these parts or faces are, and have always been, part of a whole, which the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon called the pre-individual or metastable self (Combes 2012). The latter metastable self is the grounding basis upon which the transindividuality functions foremost as an integrative concept. In sum, minor transindividuals such as Sŏk and Ch'ae and their artworks and art-centered activities present the affective emotional sensibilities whose bases constitute both collectivity and individuality (Read 2016, 114).

The Artists Himan Sŏk and Jun Ch'ae

Himan Sŏk (石熙滿; 1914–2003) was born on August 20, 1914 in Musan, Northern Hamgyŏng Province, the second of Mr. and Mrs. T'aejun Sŏk's six children. Sŏk's life can be generally categorized into six phases: childhood in Northern Hamgyŏng Province (1914–1931), migration to Manchuria when he developed an interest in art (1931–1935), studies abroad majoring in Western Art at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts (1935–1938), art-related activities and teaching in China before the Cultural Revolution (1939–1965), banishment in a work camp during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and post-Cultural Revolution art-making and teaching activities (1978–2003).

Jun Ch'ae (蔡峻; b. 1926– ) was born in Sangam Village of Ch'angwŏn City in South Kyŏngsang Province, on the opposite end of the peninsula from Sŏk's birthplace. For several reasons, Ch'ae's background is more difficult to access than Sŏk's. First, Ch'ae left Korea indefinitely at the age of two with his parents, who were tenant farmers in Ch'angwŏn, so he has little to no recollection of his homeland. And, unlike Sŏk, Ch'ae never returned to South Korea until the age of 81, when he held a solo survey exhibition at the Gyeongnam Art Museum. Third, his father sold everything before leaving their homeland for Japan in 1928. Thus, there was nothing to return to in Korea during the colonial period and the difficult economic times his family faced after the colonial period. Furthermore, Ch'ae became a member of the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan (Ch'ŏngryŏn), the North Korean-affiliated Zainichi community, and worked as a cartoonist for Ch'ŏngryŏn's newspaper Chosŏn shinbo for some fifty years, and visited North Korea twice—all of which aligned him with North Korean political ideology. In other words, both Japan and South Korea deemed Ch'ae dangerous.

Geographical proximity was one of the major factors that determined where the Sŏk and Ch'ae families migrated during economically and politically charged times. Sŏk's family moved in 1934 to Manchuria; Ch'ae's family moved in 1928 to Japan. Himan Sŏk was born into a family that was fairly stable financially, but due to his father's and elder brother's mismanagement of the finances, the family was forced to move in 1934 to Yongjŏng (C. Longjing) in Heilongjiang Province, where Sŏk continued painting and drawing. One ironic blessing occurred in 1921, on his seventh birthday, when he broke his right elbow. Because the family could not afford to take him to the hospital, the injury left him handicapped in his right arm, which allowed him, at the advice of his schoolteacher, to contemplate drawing in order to lead a "normal" life. As luck would have it, he was born left-handed; thus, the inability to use his right arm did not affect his deft art practice.

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This article continues with detailed analysis of Sŏk's and Ch'ae's artworks, their diasporic intimacy and transindividuality, a discussion of the condition of being Zainichi, and the ontogenesis of Jun Ch'ae's late-career paintings. For the complete text with figures, please see the full PDF.

Conclusion

Diasporic intimacy is connected to the function of diasporic art, enabling artists to express the possibility of activating individual feelings of loss without succumbing to resentment, anguish, and suffering. Neither the art nor the transindividuality of Ch'ae and Sŏk can be considered solely liberatory, celebratory, or pessimistic. How can we read the artwork of such minor transnational individual artists—individuals who were representative of, and important in, their collective communities but minor, or even unknown, outside their immediate localities? Does the accumulation of their paintings that include things, images, books, faces, objects, and representations help us to remember the past events involving Koreans in China and Japan?

One reading sees the literal realism in their work, as in the political cartoons. Whether they provide a critique of South Korea's subordination to Japanese economy, a reminder of the Zainichi plight and campaign against the fingerprinting of Koreans in Japan, or the larger recognition that all Asian states must succumb to the power of a "kingly" United States, there is a one-on-one reckoning in these cartoons with the reality of the minority status of Koreans living in diaspora. Yet, the shift from this direct, unforgiving critique of political hierarchies and social inequities to the intimate portrayal of the constituted self, offers yet another story. The story of the transindividual must take into account the history of constituted identity both of the collective, context-specific history as ethnic Koreans in China and Japan and of the intimate, self-loving self in his numerous moments of individuation and ontogenesis.

Yet another way to see these images is as a celebratory reckoning of the beauty of nature, the strength in the fullness of life, and the remembrance of an awe-inspiring landscape. We find here in equal proportions the pessimism of life as a prisoner of consciousness, working the land in labor camps during the Cultural Revolution, and of life as a marked Zainichi outcast. Any attempt to answer these questions must address the intimate conditions of art-making and the construction of individuals and their transindividuality that function in the accumulation of works of art. This diasporic intimacy suggests the possibility of transforming the painful condition of displacement into the pleasures of exile, a release that allows a remembering without becoming the proverbial pillar of salt. More than the "emancipating" effects of cultural expression or provisional moments of emancipation and celebration, the monstrosity of the transindividual fuels diasporic art. The constituted individual renders life to beings through individuation, the process of separating oneself from one's environment that allows the solitude for these artists to produce so much and for so long.

이 글은 한국어로 작성되었습니다. This article is written in Korean. View the full PDF with footnotes →

1. 들어가며

남한 정부는 최근 해외동포법의 정책과 법률을 전환하는 과정에서 재외 한인의 지위와 문화적 소속, 그리고 '같은 민족(co-ethnic)'이라는 뜻을 지닌 동포의 개념에 관하여 논의를 거치게 되면서 국가의 이미지 그리고 민족 정체성에 대해서 재고하고 있다. 더불어 디아스포라의 개념과 역사적 경험도 한국학계와 언론에 등장하고 담론화되기 시작했다. 그리고 이러한 과정에서 재외 한인들이 가진 정치적, 문화적, 경제적 자본을 국가 발전과 세계화를 위해 사용하고자 하는 움직임이 나타났고, 자연스럽게 이들과의 연대를 확장하게 되었다.

해방 후 해외 이주 정책의 수립에 영향을 미쳤던 요소들은 크게 세 가지로 나누어 볼 수 있다. 그것은 정책적으로 추진되었던 세계화, 한국적 문화 정체성의 추구, 그리고 같은 한국인으로서의 '동포'라는 개념의 규정이었다. 이러한 정책 수립의 과정은 단일 민족과 순수 혈통이라는 헤게모니의 영향을 강하게 받았다. 해방 이후 "수난의 역사"를 극복해야 한다는 탈식민의 과제 속에서 재외 한인들은 개척자이자 외교관이자 미래의 자산으로서 국가 경쟁력을 해외로 확장할 수 있는 잠재력을 가진 존재들로 묘사되곤 했다.

이 글에서는 남한 내 문화적 정체성의 구축을 위해 추진되었던 정책의 추이를 살펴봄으로써, 한국이 세계화를 지향하는 초국가적인 맥락 속에서 '같은 민족'이라는 뜻을 가진 동포라는 개념이, 민족국가라는 이데올로기하에서 국가적 개발과 이익을 위해 활용되었다는 점을 지적하고자 한다.

2. 해방 후 한국의 문화 정책과 문화 정체성 형상화

'같은 민족'을 강조하는 전략은 해외 한인을 동포라는 개념에 포함시켜 국제적인 연대를 확대하는 방안으로, 해방과 분단 후 남한의 문화 정체성을 구축하기 위한 문화 정책의 주요한 일부분이었다. 한국적 문화 정체성을 만드는 것은 대한민국 문화 정책의 핵심적인 요소였다. 문화 정책의 수립과 시행은 식민지화, 분단체제의 고착, 그리고 세계화 과정 등의 역사적 경험 속에서 추구되었다.

김영삼 정부의 "새 한국의 창작"이라는 슬로건은 창의적 민족성의 계발, 지역 문화의 육성, 문화 및 관광산업의 진흥, 민족의 통일, 그리고 한국 문화의 세계화를 표방하였다. 이러한 흐름은 김대중 정부의 문화 정책 전략에 있어서도 마찬가지였다. 다만 김영삼 문화 정책의 전략이 추구한 통로를 넘어서 문화 산업을 디지털화된 사회로 앞장세웠고 북한과의 통합과 교류를 보강했다.

3. 담론과 개념을 위치시키기: '세계화'와 '동포'

1990년대 중반부터 세계화 담론이 정치적, 사회경제적, 그리고 문화적으로 한국의 정책에 영향을 미치기 시작했다. 김영삼 정부는 호주에서 열린 APEC(아시아태평양경제협력체) 직후 1994년 11월에 세계화 정책을 공식적으로 발표하였다. 한국의 세계화 정책은 일반적인 국제화라는 의미와는 크게 두 가지 차이점이 있다. 첫째, 한국에서 세계화는 오히려 민족국가에 대한 감정을 자극하며 해외 한인의 공동체조차 한국의 중요한 구성원으로 규정하는 경향이 있다. 둘째, 세계화 정책은 순수하게 시장의 원리에 따르는 것이 아니라 국가와 재벌 간의 유착에 의해 통제를 받았다.

다시 말해 남한에서 말하는 세계화와 민족주의는 서로 모순된 개념이 아니었다. 세계화는 민족주의적 요소들을 포괄하며 이뤄진 정책 전략의 개념이었다. 신기욱은 남한의 세계화 추진이 출발점에서부터 확실하게 민족주의적 성향을 띠었다고 주장한다.

1999년 12월 3일에 제정된 재외동포법은 해외에 있는 동포들과의 연대를 통해 새로운 한민족 공동체를 건립하고자 하는 야심찬 계획에서 비롯되었다. 그렇지만 재외동포법은 많은 논란을 야기했는데, 국적을 취득하기 위해서는 자신이나 부모가 대한민국 국적을 소유하고 있다는 것을 호적등본을 제시함으로써 증명해야 했기 때문이다. 이 조항으로 인해 1948년 대한민국 정부 수립 이전에 해외로 이주한 구소련이나 중국의 '재외동포'들이 실질적으로 국적 취득에서 배제되는 결과가 초래되었다.

4. '같은 민족'으로서의 '동포'라는 개념

해방 이후의 이민 정책은 세계화에 따른 문화 정책의 수립과 신자유주의적인 논리에 바탕을 둔 문화 정체성 구축에 있어서뿐만 아니라, 디아스포라에 있어서도 이들을 동포, 즉 '같은 민족(co-ethnics)'으로 해석하는 도덕적이고 감성적인 측면을 중심으로 반영되었다.

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5. 결론

세계화라는 목표, 그 안에서의 한민족의 문화 정체성 형성을 위한 정책 수립, '같은 민족'으로서의 동포라는 이데올로기, 그리고 정부 수립 이후 재외동포법에 나타난 국적의 정의 등을 통해 우리는 한인 디아스포라와 한국 내의 한국인 사이에는 끊을 수 없는 줄이 연결되어 있음을 볼 수 있다. 한국은 이들을 한국인으로서의 역사적 경험, 혈통, 친족적 유대관계 등을 공유하는 존재로 보고 있으며, 이산의 경험과 고통을 겪은 이들로서, 혹은 해외 한인의 모범적 사례로서 파악하고 있다.

경상남도 남해군에 '독일촌'을 건립한 것과 같은 사례는, 독일에서 한국으로 귀국한 재독 동포들에게 '집 떠나서의 집(home away from home)'을 제공했을 뿐 아니라, 이곳을 한국의 관광지로 조성했다는 점, 그리고 조성형 감독이 이 마을에 대한 다큐멘터리를 제작하여 이를 사회적 이슈로 부각시켰다는 점에서, 다양한 요구들이 조화를 이룬 성공적인 사례라고 할 수 있다. 이러한 접촉 지역을 새로 마련했음에도 불구하고 여전히 이 공간 안에서 한국 시민권을 우선시하는 정책은 결국 국가주의 체제로 수렴되는 퇴행적인 것이 될 수밖에 없다고 생각된다.

Overview

This special issue of Cross-Currents, titled "Diasporic Art and Korean Identity," is the fruit of a two-day conference on "Korean Diaspora and the Arts" held at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem in May 2017. The contributors explore new delineations of the political, social, cultural, and emotional landscapes inhabited by Koreans living in diaspora. Korean diasporic artists investigate the meaning of "Koreanness" through their paintings, political cartoons, theater, film, documentary, photographs, and multimedia art. The topic of diaspora—which Gabriel Sheffer defines as "ethnic minority groups residing and acting in host countries while maintaining material and sentimental ties to their homelands"—has received impressive scholarly attention in the humanities and social sciences, and Korean diaspora studies has been part of this trend (Sheffer 1986, 3).

Seven million Koreans currently live outside the Korean peninsula, making them the fifth largest diasporic population at a time when 250 million people worldwide live outside their homelands. This special issue on Korean diasporic art presents creative expressions of a shared history of trauma, suffering, or displacement, affectively reconstructed or nostalgically reimagined, produced in China, Cuba, Japan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, and the United States. The contributors demonstrate how artists are particularly able to captivate audiences and innovate ways of articulating the multiple aspects of the everyday condition of diasporic existence in situ. In this sense, art possesses the potential to lead us beyond dichotomies. In particular, Korean diasporic artists' experiences and expressions pose questions about the North and South Korean states' efforts to manage and understand cultural belonging that have, in turn, worked to homogenize Korean identity. Such efforts can backfire on state policies and strategies concerning overseas Koreans and displaced communities as they marginalize certain diasporic individuals or groups and, even more, reify others. Thus, state promotion of a "national identity" and definitions of cultural belonging pose a serious challenge to grasping the complexity of Korean diasporic identity (Smith 1991, 16–18).

In response, this issue has three specific objectives: (1) to comprehend the contingencies of diasporic subjectivity from a multisite perspective, especially as "re-diasporizations" occur more often and to more people; (2) to convey the importance of diasporic artists and their art's agency by incorporating macro, meso, and micro levels of understanding and analysis; and (3) to interlink, and thereby reduce, the distance between scholarship produced in Korean- and English-language publications. The contributors to this issue investigate Korean diasporic subjectivities formed according to temporal and spatial realities. These subjectivities attend to the ways diasporic agencies manifest themselves in artworks and creative processes that enable us to apprehend and ground Korean diasporic identity within lived experiences.

New Directions in Studies of Korean Diaspora

During the last two decades, studies of Korean diaspora have experienced significant development in both Korean- and English-language publications. Why has there been an expanding interest in diaspora studies, especially in the Korean language? One way of answering this question is to ponder the various positions concerning diaspora, especially their approaches to and treatment of the growing community of overseas Koreans. South Korea's approach has been to seize and capitalize on the growing "co-ethnic" people power for economic, cultural, and political gains.

It is important to consider the circumstances under which these publications were written. The fact that the urgent project of building the nation was first and foremost on the minds of intellectuals in the post-1945 era may be a reason for the predominant number of writings on Korean Americans. In other words, nationalist scholars produced knowledge about "co-ethnics," or overseas Koreans, in an era when reconstructing the newly independent sovereignty in the aftermath of Japanese colonialism took precedence. The overall conclusion drawn from the early historiography and literature on diaspora reflects the master narrative of overcoming the long and arduous history of suffering and the devastation of the nation.

Contrary to the Korean-language sources that are determined by national allegiance and state boundaries, English-language sources represent diasporic subjects as flexible, malleable, and, at times, indeterminate. Responding to the question of why there has been expansive interest in Korean diaspora studies, then, is easier in the English-language sources, since the widening conditions of diasporic existence makes more space to counter master narratives with alternative narratives within the histories of diaspora. Such expansion has widened the topics of investigation to include many more ethnic groups and other social formations undefined by religion, race, or even nation when considering diasporic populations.

In particular, this issue aims to contribute to the burgeoning study of Korean diaspora by presenting ways to think about how art can articulate the histories and cultures of Korean diaspora communities as multiply situated and newly contextualized. The newness is reflected in three important ways. First, the contributors closely engage with diasporic artists, their works, and the trajectories of their physical, intellectual, and emotional movements as an attempt to explore possibilities that intervene, disrupt, and destabilize the conventional "master narratives" of the ethno-nation based upon ethnic homogeneity (tanil minjok) and pure-blood relations (sunsu hyŏlt'ong) that dominate Korean migration history and diaspora studies (Son 2012, 156–158). Second, in order to map out the interrelationships, associations, and spheres of confluence among these multiple sites, the contributions to this issue necessarily include comparative histories of migration, nation, art, artists, and cultural production on macro (global and national), meso (local), and micro (intimate and personal) scales. Third, the conjuncture of understanding the contingent, multiply situated position of diasporic art and artists holds promise and potential to bridge the gap between Korean diaspora literature in Korean- and English-language publications.

Korean Diaspora and Diasporic Art

As more and more people have gained transnational mobility, can new types of overseas Koreans—such as cosmopolitan mothers temporarily living abroad for their children's education and expatriate Koreans migrating for work or study abroad in places like Mongolia, Philippines, or the United Arab Emirates—be regarded as newly emerging categories in Korean diaspora? Can we also categorize those who escaped from North Korea and settled in South Korea or elsewhere as part of diaspora? For those North Koreans residing in South Korea, the tripartite labeling as "defectors-asylum seekers-refugees" is no longer a viable form of state identification, because they are "penetrant migrants" who demonstrate the conundrum of living in diaspora in Korea as fully "Korean" and also wholly not "Korean." Are they then diasporic even when they migrate from one side of the division to the other? Do diaspora cultures also include adult transnational adoptees who experience displacement especially upon returning to their birth country?

Just as the definition "Korean diaspora" is putative, the term "diasporic art" is also disputable. Who names a "diaspora," and what exactly is "diasporic art"? We have attempted to answer the latter question as creative, affective, and at times, nostalgic re-imaginings through art, but still, these are pressing questions that all of our contributors attempt to answer. We suggest that a network of relationships surrounds a particular art object or artworks in specific interactive and transcultural settings.

Unpacking the Multiple and Multisite Narratives

In this special issue of Cross-Currents, three articles, an interview, and a photo essay further the discussions on identity and cultural belonging. The contributors convey that artistic media and creativity can project a range of the emotions experienced in and created by diasporic lives.

In "The Forgotten Childhoods of Korea," Ji-yoon An analyzes two autobiographical films that are based on the filmmakers' childhood memories. These films are significant on a diegetic level. Their narratives of abandonment—which address broader social issues such as international adoptions, dysfunctional families, and the Korean diaspora and, at the same time, focus on a child's perspective—eliminate the often tempting over-sentimentalization of the narratives of transnational adoptees.

In "Performing in the 'Cultural Borderlands,'" Iain Sands challenges the ethnonational conception of Korean diaspora by focusing on North Korean women's dance and performance theater in South Korea. The women negotiate new identities in South Korea, and their dance performances demonstrate the ways in which they willingly transform their gendered and marginalized position.

In "The Diasporic Intimacy and Transindividuality of Artists Himan Sŏk (1914–2003) and Jun Ch'ae (1926– )," Hijoo Son analyzes diasporic art in terms of the intimate transpersonal relations that surround the art of Chinese Chosŏnjok artist Sŏk and Japanese Korean Zainichi artist Ch'ae. Son's overarching observation—that these artists' works are neither structured from above nor resistant from below—thus expresses an idea of doubleness bound by both collective and individual experience of diaspora.

An in-depth conversational interview with Korean American artist Y. David Chung presents an artist's engagement with diaspora in his art practice that spans nearly three decades. Michael Vince Kim questions the meaning of Korean identity in his photo essay and artist statement, "Far from Distant Shores: Identity Limbo in the Korean Diaspora." The arresting images of diaspora individuals and communities in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Mexico, and Cuba tell stories of deprivation, empowerment, adaptation, and connection.

Conclusion

The distinction between master and counter narratives within the histories of diaspora, or the schism between studies of Diaspora with a capital "D" and diaspora with lowercase "d," is still significant today. Taking into account Edward Said's and James Clifford's genealogies of creative societies as part of anti-foundational, and therefore non-nationalist, positions, it is important to consider intellectual efforts, economic forces of cultural industries, and the arts profession as equally integral to a study of diasporic cultural production.

It is impossible to forward any debate or engage in critical dialogue with North and South Korean specialists in the field of Korean diaspora studies without acknowledging the writing of national history as necessary for certain positions, even as critical challenges are posed against these categories of the nation-state. In other words, the national agenda will not disappear. Despite their geographical distance from each other, Koreans in Central Asia, Mexico, Japan, China, and Cuba are unequivocally part of a history of Korean migration, and their emotional and cultural affiliation with "Koreanness," however complex or straightforward, cannot be adequately explained without providing the history of colonialism and division, contestation over "postcoloniality," and the ongoing politics of a divided nation.

The artwork and relations surrounding the art demonstrate that the current discussions inadequately address the lived history and experiences of Korean diaspora, and in particular those North Korean resident penetrants who straddle a divided peninsula. The opening or cross-pollination based upon discussions about diasporic art thus helps rejuvenate the ongoing and age-old identity question.

In I'm Laughing Because I'm Crying: A Memoir, Youngmi Mayer navigates her life of laughs and cries through the dualities of being Korean and White, and in a New York Times interview, Mayer states "There is no biracial community made up of biracials speaking their own biracial language…" What is missing more is the language of mixed-race Korean-Black, -Latino, and -Pacific Islanders. These Amerasian adults have, as of late, been in the spotlight with the accomplishments of Kyle Hamilton of the Baltimore Ravens which follows Heinz Ward's retirement in 2012, a pro-Bowler who was the first Korean-Black NFL player. In a different context, a Belgian court has found its government guilty of crimes against humanity in 2024 for forcibly taking mixed-race children away from their Congolese mothers during Belgium's colonization of the Congo [1909–1960]. One of the plaintiffs, Simone Ngulula, stated that the decision restored her dignity. In the art world, Samantha Yun Wall recently held her first solo show in Los Angeles and was awarded the 2024 Betty Bowen Award. Yun Wall's drawings of monstrous oddities and animal matter tackle the pain, violence, mystery, tension, and triumphs of women of the Korean diaspora through her powerful illustrations of bodies embroiled in dialogue. The conversations she engages in are complex ones that focus on decolonizing her identity as a black and Korean mixed-race person.

The entwined bodies of The Space to Grow 2024 present stark contrasting black and white figure whose hands embrace the body and whose feet grip the ground to remanifest the ground that then redefines the figure. This gestalt dance of dualities plays with the hands and feet in resistance, creating tension, and center the face. This piece is one of, and perhaps the only, artwork of Yun Wall's that is not anonymous. In our conversation, she notes that her art practice began to explore her past in the aftermath of the unexpected death of her sister, a biological half-sister with whom she grew up in Germany and South Carolina. She images her sister whose face conjures up a spiritual state of speaking in tongue or finding release from this world and seeing into the next. A shamanic ritual may also lead the audience as witness into a provisional state of return so that the soul can be guided safely into the next life. The colors are so black and so white, but the fusion surmises an oncoming future, and at the center lies the power of a woman in commotion.

In Wild Seeds №2, Yun Wall conjures the monstrous in her grappling with the duality of mixed-race life. Born in Dongduch'on at a U.S. Army base town, Yun Wall left Korea at two years of age and grew up on another U.S. base in Germany with her Korean mother, white step-father, and two younger sisters until their divorce relocated the family to South Carolina. In effect, she grew up believing that her step-father was her biological one because her mother intentionally wanted to protect her identity as a half-Black kid in a family with two half-white siblings. Her work conjures writings on art and diaspora recognizing those who have to reconfigure a sense of self in the aftermath of a displacing move elsewhere, away from home, and to a host place that is new. It is equally a sense of self that develops through creative means but from a minor place. Another way to think about her work is to understand them as drawn neither structured from above nor resistant from below even as they are bound, at once, to Korea and to her individual experience as a mixed-race woman.

Wild Seeds №2 is framed by florescent white arms, one leg, and the grip of the feet and hands. The woman creates space through the forced, extruded limbs, slim and long, pushing the ground to create a new monstrosity. Several contrasting visual cues draw in the viewer. First, whiteness is defined and legible as limbs or anatomy whereas blackness is vague, hairy and misshapen. Second, the drastic change from the black and white limbs to the skin-colored hands and feet draws attention to the edges and seams where the figure emerges. The black back of the head is unnamed, but again, in its blackness, it remains vague and hairy. Does the head belong to the black monstrosity or the white anatomy? Yet another way the hands and foot are pronounced is by reckoning with the force of their grip as well as the litheness of their hold. What the image creates is a space for shadows and reflection wherein newness is borne between the black and white. The space holds tensions through a forceful making, but nonetheless it expresses a desire for play, renewal, and disavowal. The new visual language of Yun Wall's illustrations, thus, reconfigures the space on the margins toward stark contrasts, spiritual vindication, and future anticipation.

Yun Wall's illustrations are thick with deformation and delivery. In Wild Seeds №2 the feverish upward gaze of the white eyes sees a foreboding future. She portends an unleashing of the body, tamed by the hands and feet. It's exhilarating to walk into a room of Yun Wall's drawings as they ensconce you into a deterritorialized zone of possibility that is the project of decolonization. Decolonization by definition is a simple concept because it is the process by which colonies become independent of the colonizers. But anyone who endures settler colonialism knows that while the expulsion of military or governing colonizing forces may announce the start of decolonization, the mind of the colonized is not so easy to un-colonize. It took the Belgium courts almost 80 years to recognize the harm done to mixed-race Congolese children. Yun Wall's drawings is part of the process of decolonization, and her art questions and searches for a freer expression. Her Blackness and the duality of a biracial identity — the nimble hands, the stark colorization, the grounding feet, the monstrous forms — continue the project and the necessity to decolonize.

Recently, there has been a firestorm regarding an article by J. Mark Ramseyer in the International Review of Law and Economics. Considering that I spent years working with former Korean "comfort women," women and girls from former colonies of Japan coerced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military during WWII, I was sideswiped by his claim that the "comfort women" were sex workers and that their testimonies are a matter of "pure fiction." He writes that "comfort women" contracted with private middlemen with sufficient incentives to work as prostitutes, knowingly. He presents the case of a ten-year-old girl who was offered money to go abroad and writes that "even at the age of 10, she knew what the job entailed." When leading scholars of both Japan and Korea from Harvard and globally pinpointed a spate of errors in Ramseyer's article, the journal raised "concern" on its online version.

Ramseyer admits to his colleague, "I haven't been able to find it [a contract]. Certainly, you're not going to find it." Despite his own admission that no contracts actually exist, it is curious, in the era of #MeToo, that an article titled "Contracting for Sex during the Pacific War" was published at all with so many factual errors.

The controversy has reminded me that nothing changes unless those in power are willing to change. The timing of Ramseyer's piece emerges in the middle of on-going legal disputes over not only comfort women but also forced labor during wartime between South Korea and Japan. And a legal journal publishing an article posing as an academically well-researched and credible examination, in fact, does matter because of its peer-reviewed platform and because of the law professor's cultural capital validated by the Harvard name. The fact that a white, male professor's viewpoint is receiving such attention sits in stark contrast to the glaring absence of the "comfort women," their voice, their accounts, and their bodies in contestation against a Japanese government that just has difficulty facing its history of colonial violence. The power imbalance cannot be overlooked.

I first read about the "comfort women" in newspaper reports on Kim Hak-sun who was the first "comfort woman" to testify before the United Nations in 1991. And I met them in the mid-1990s when I returned after college to Seoul and Tokyo to study and work. After being silenced by shame, trauma, and a patriarchal social order for decades, the first "comfort woman's" testimony emboldened others to come forward, in part supported by the growing feminist movement in Asia. Since January 8, 1992, the women and their support groups have never missed a Wednesday demonstration in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul which makes it the longest running weekly protest in history. In retrospect, I see Kim Hak-sun as the originator of the #MeToo movement for the "comfort women" who still demand that Japan apologize, compensate, and teach its history squarely.

Beyond the testimonies, the idea of young teenage girls engaging in a contractual sexual relationship for profit affronts the very core of many Koreans whose experience with Neo-Confucian discourse upheld chastity to the point of death. My grandmother (born 1922) was married off at age sixteen because her parents were afraid that she would be caught by "comfort woman" recruiters during the colonial period (1910–1945) and taken away. Chung-ok Yun, the co-founder of the non-governmental organization I volunteered for (The Korean Council for Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan), told me that she devoted her whole life and fortune to the cause of the "comfort women" because when she was a young girl in colonial Korea, her parents sent her off north to relatives in order to avoid being captured herself, and she spent her life feeling guilty for her privilege and also wondering what happened to all those girls. This system was part of a wider disciplining order of colonial coercion during "the total war mobilization" era (1937 to 1945). Such anecdotes and family stories have been handed down through generations and remain the vestiges of a patriarchal culture. No cavalier law professor from the hallowed halls of an Ivy League institution can deny this belief system.

While working for The Korean Council, I primarily translated the "comfort women's" testimonies at international conferences including the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the International Labor Conference, Land Is Life Conference in Okinawa, and the Men, Women, and War Conference in Derry, Ireland. I remember how Chung Seo-woon's testimony re-traumatized her each time she recounted the sterilization, the rapes, the suicide attempts, the longing for her Mom and Dad, the opium addiction, and the return home to find that her father had died in prison, and her mother was pushed to suicide, and what it felt like for me to translate those moments into English having to form those same words with my own mouth and tongue. As a Korean American woman who grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, the simultaneous translation of their accounts in front of international audiences in Geneva, Okinawa, and Derry was always an out-of-body experience, a dissociative effect of inhabiting two lives at once.

Ramseyer admits to not having read any Korean sources because he does not speak or read Korean. However, he should have come across these testimonies in English as I spent time translating them. Asianist scholar defenders describe his research as "formidable, exacting, and carefully marshaled," but he has not even taken time to read the collective accounts of the women who were there.

The "comfort women's" historical memory is resurrected each time through oral testimonies that are "doomed to remain disrupted narratives." Lawrence Langer's Holocaust Testimonies call the Holocaust survivors' testimonies "disrupted narratives" that do not function like other stories, told and retold, as anecdotes to be remembered, or as tales with lessons. Langer writes "the losses they record raise few expectations of renewal…in the presence of their anguished memory, we are asked to share less what is recovered than the process of recall itself." While Ramseyer dismisses the oral testimonies as unreliable, self-interested accounts, the "comfort women's" lived experience resuscitates and reaffirms their collective voice even as they now face false accusations that dismiss the truth of their past.

I want to re-center the focus upon the demand for Japan to account for its history of colonial violence against these women's bodies in light of the fervor deployed by apologists, nationalists, and anti-feminists. In my discomfited feelings, I think back to the process of recall through which these women bravely told and continue to tell their stories against the grain of political tide. Finally, I remind the readers of the "comfort women's" voices, and that for this Korean American woman who shared meals, stories, airplane rides, hotel stays, and as someone who protested weekly with them on Wednesdays at noon, there is something to the retelling of their past atrocities, the presence of their physical scars and violated bodies, and their continued fight for justice and redress that remains undeniable.

Anecdotal Preface

27 July 1994. 12:00 p.m. Wednesday demonstration #150.

I am standing, amongst 50 to 60 women, young and old, in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul. In front of me, a line of young, uniformed men barricade a metal shield covering the 50 meter gateway entrance to the Embassy. In front of them, a line of former "comfort women," who barely reach the top of the shields, are facing the men, shouting, screaming. Against the Japanese government that has not recognized and compensated these women's enforced sexual servitude during the Pacific War.

In numbered order, the 150th consecutive demonstration by the Korean Council and the former "comfort women," today's particular protest was held directly in front of the gate of the Embassy, not across the street, where the demonstrations are usually held. Due to the proximity between the protesters and guards and in light of the one and a half year's worth of demonstrations, not to mention the unbearably humid 110° weather condition, today's protest was more intense and emotionally charged.

Little by little, the uniformed men began to step back across the street to maintain the distance, but each very slow step only came with a tremendous amount of resistance. There was great tension at the gate, and the halmuni tried to push against the police shields and pull them aside. After a while, the older women, and I, were forced back to our original place of protest.

This was, for me, an experience that demanded my only taking a step back to rethink the bounded spaces and represented ways in which I had been raised. We thought to have remained.

Introduction

On 14 August 1991, Kim Hak-sun, the first former Korean "comfort woman" to present her public testimony, broke the dam of silence and unleashed what would become a flood of controversy surrounding the "comfort women," drafted for military sexual slavery by Japan during the Pacific War (1931–1945). Since then, the question of why the former "comfort women" would talk about these experiences — now, over 50 years after the fact — sparked a curiosity and drove research efforts that eventually led to the Republic of Korea, where the author spent a summer speaking with former "comfort women" themselves and with scholars and activists in the field.

Currently, as scholar Alice Yun Chai argues, a strong and supportive global feminist coalition, especially within the Asian-Pacific region, has played a large part in bringing this issue to the forefront. As scholar Chungmoo Choi states, there is a system at work involving the oppressive practices of Confucianism that has prolonged the silence of the former "comfort women."

The task force and individual researchers have unearthed information answering some of the questions concerning the conditions of this particular practice, and scholars have drawn attention to the historical context surrounding the practice of military sexual slavery. The focus of this study is the halmuni's testimonies — what motivated them to come forward and to give their oral and public testimonies.

I will argue that the former "comfort women's" resistance represents a form of reclaiming a womanhood, a personhood — that their last means of seizing and maintaining human dignity and self-worth was through their testimonies. I see their resistance as their way of giving meaning to their lives, of retrieving for themselves a sense of recognition. Whether by governments and societies or not, their forms of resistance are central to understanding who they are.

According to findings at the time, as many as 200,000 women were drafted for sexual slavery, approximately 80% of whom were Korean. These brothels existed in China, Hong Kong, French-occupied Indochina, the Dutch-occupied islands of Java, Sumbuwa, Surawest, Burma, and the Pacific Islands of New Britain and Trobriand, as well as Korea and Okinawa and Ogasawara Islands in Japan. Those forced or recruited to work in these stations included Korean, Taiwanese, Chinese, Filipino, Indonesian, and Dutch women.

Methodology: Complications with Oral History

Several important methodological questions arise concerning the use of oral testimony as primary source. The construction, interpretation, and (in this case) translation of oral histories posed a great challenge, as all testimonies were originally written in Korean and translated into English. Beyond the language, numerous inconsistencies and flat-out contradictions within different versions of the written testimonies of the same women raised doubts.

The inconsistencies I found from the varying versions of the same person's story — in the written form, not to mention about 25 different women's testimonies, many of which I have two or more copies — brought doubt not only to the credibility of the primary sources but also to my own intent: when relying on such a subjective and questionable source in oral testimony, how could I write a convincing paper validating their words and the "reality" of their memory?

Drawing on the parallels of Holocaust survivors' testimonies, I begin with the question of time and memory. Lawrence Langer, a specialist of the Holocaust experience, explains that time has passed and the historian does not trust a memory in which the past has begun to blur and which has been enriched by numerous images since the survivor's return to freedom. Another aspect of the problem with testimony and memory is the abstractness of a recovered truth and the concreteness of an experienced moment.

The many "truths" reflect the several currents that flow at differing depths, respective of each person's understanding. It is indeed these many currents of memory that challenge the existing understanding of history and work to destabilize existing mentalities. Witnesses in the testimonies do not search for the historically correct version of events — they are concerned less with that past than with the present. They generate narratives less predisposed to remind us of what was, and more inclined toward a self-consciously represented reality.

With my project, however, there are several layers of mediation involved. In the case of the "comfort women," there is the interpretation of the interviews, the translation from Korean to English, and finally my own evaluation and use of the halmuni's words. Although I agree with the general concept that it is impossible to "bring down" the memories of the Holocaust to the human realm, I feel that the layers of mediation are unavoidable and occur with any raw data or archival material. My concern about the "reality" of their memory or the veracity of their words, thus, became focused upon the mediating character of one's work.

I will conclude with one final note. It may seem that these women's experiences, the violence, the barbarity, and the brutality, are beyond words. Indeed, the halmuni's oral testimonies, because of this challenge, will always take on and will always require more imagination and energy to reassess or evaluate the various mediations in the attempt. Penetrating the comfort zone of silence and disregard is there, and the choice is left open. The very person who testifies in order to make people aware appeals at the same time to silence — yet they have come forward and given public testimonies because the notion of the inexpressibility does not justify silence.

Female Subordination During the Pre-Colonial Period

In order to examine part of the rationale that worked to maintain the "comfort women's" prolonged silence, shame, and dishonor, it is necessary to give context to the Confucian ideology which was established during Korea's modern era, the Yi dynasty, also known as the Chosŏn period (1392–1910). It was during this time when the foundation of the male-dominated socio-economic, political, and cultural structure was established. This historical context is necessary to set the grounding for my discussion of the Korean woman's subordinated status under a male authority.

The Colonial Mentality: Sadae Juŭi

During the Yi dynasty, Confucian ideology was widely practiced, and it established the social, political, and economic practices in Korea. Accordingly, the absolute authority of the first monarch, Yi Sŏng-gye, otherwise known as T'aejo ("grand progenitor"), was a Chinese concept subordinated to the Chinese emperor. This orientation characterized Korea's foreign policy and dependence upon their good will and protection — sadae juŭi, meaning "serving the great." The structure endured for 518 years, and the ideology would continue for much longer, influencing Japan's colonization and the U.S. occupation.

"Virtuous" Ideals of Confucianism

The change in the dynastic cycle from the Koryŏ dynasty (918–1391) to the Yi reflected not only a shift from the practice of Buddhism to Confucianism, but also a fundamental change in modulating women's behavior. Yi administrators criticized the "loose morals" of Korean women during the latter part of Koryŏ's rule. In 1432, the Yi government published Samgang Haengshil-do (The Three Principles of Virtuous Conduct), a book replete with exemplary cases of "virtuous women" which would serve as a guide to all Korean women. Then in 1475, Queen-Consort Sohye compiled Naehun (Instructions for Women), an influential textbook for women covering four areas: womanly behavior, moral conduct, proper speech, proper appearance, and womanly tasks. From 1392 to 1485, these Confucian virtues were encouraged, resulting in a more legal, systematic control of women.

The "virtuous woman" ideal, established by law, espoused the overwhelming rules of what women were and how they were supposed to act. Women did not have names — they were identified by their position relative to men. Before marriage she was so-and-so's daughter; after marriage she was so-and-so's mother. Only the name of her husband's family (sumang) was entered in the registry. Even in the registry of the son-in-law, only the name of her own family was recorded. A woman's life was controlled first by her father, then her husband, and finally by her son.

The rules of the Yi dynasty also believed that the disorders of the Koryŏ period were in part due to women's frequent social outings. "Inside" and "outside" meant that the woman's role was confined to the household, while her husband would support the family from the "outside." Interestingly, one word for wife was anae, meaning "inside person," and if the anae committed adultery, the husband should be punished — if the family head was found guilty of a major crime, the whole family bore the consequences.

Above and beyond all of these rules was the most significant and symbolic "virtuous" ideal: that of chastity. One scholar, Chungmoo Choi, describes the latter as "patriarchal ideology dressed up as Confucian morality, which demands that a woman's chastity be claimed only by her legal husband." Traditional Korean women were taught to believe that the loss of chastity was worse than death itself. One scholar continues: one reminder of the way Korean men have controlled women's bodies is the miniature dagger (changdo) dangling on a string of tassels. By wearing the dagger, the gentlewomen claimed both high fashion and moral virtue — use the dagger to take her own life in the event that her body was even touched by any man other than her husband.

Sacrificing one's life in order to protect one's chastity is by no means a passive action, and many of these "comfort women" did kill themselves. For those who never did, the testimonies and their morally stigmatizing past would have ascribed them into social purgatory. Thus, one factor that worked at the "comfort stations" in order to maintain their "virtuous" ideal of chastity was this: while they may have resisted at the stations, when they re-entered their own country, they had not committed the ultimate act of sacrificing their lives in order to protect their chastity. Rather than going through the main gate without such honor, many of the women entered from the outside, through the ch'iksa (a reception area for servants at the entrance of a traditional Korean home).

Why the "Need" for "Virtuous" Women

The oppression is amplified in light of the paradox that the patriarchal ideology ironically disregarded these same ideals in order to shield their men — to save a brother or father from being conscripted for war. In either case, the system which gives men the legal and social power to "represent" and to exploit women is what is at the core of the chŏngsindae issue.

One historian would argue that women's vulnerable disposition was created because men saw women as powerful and dangerous. In China, the cults of footbinding, chastity, and the "virtuous women" ideal were men's reactions to women's resistance or aggressive behavior to economic necessity, and to the urbanization and industrialization of the late 19th century. There is the common fear of losing a privileged social and economic status enjoyed from the benefits and rewards via exploitation and oppression.

Historical Legacy of Female Tribute and Sexual Slavery

The "virtuous" ideals of chastity, discipline, and self-censorship (symbolized by the ornamental dagger) was part and parcel of the "comfort women's" silence. Korean women's self-censorship has had a long historical legacy. There has been a continuous practice of objectifying women's bodies and thinking of them as material tribute for military expansion from time immemorial.

Korea's own history can be written in terms of its continuous foreign invasions, and with each invasion the "continuity" was this: Korean women were taken as sexual slaves or material tribute in order to pacify and serve their military potent neighbors. For the women of the Yi dynasty, the "virtuous" ideal of remaining chaste even at the cost of one's life caused a tremendous amount of self-sacrifice during the Japanese (Hideyoshi) invasions of 1592. The aid of the Chinese (Ming) army played an important role in ending the seven-year war. However, there are records of Korean women being raped not only at the hands of the Japanese military but also by the Chinese soldiers who supposedly came to defend Korea. Many women committed suicide in order to avoid such dishonor.

There were also two Manchu invasions known as the Ch'ŏngmyo Horan in 1627 and Pyŏngja Horan in 1636. In both, Korean women were taken as captives. After the wars, Korean women managed to return to Korea only after paying a high ransom to the invaders, but return was not welcomed because families assumed that these women had been "dishonored" and/or "used." This precedent — that returning women were treated as damaged — created the historical legacy of Korean society's rejecting women who had been in the hands of foreign occupiers.

Colonial Period and the Ianshō ("Comfort Stations")

"Dark Ages" (1910–1919)

With the ideological and historical context of women's submissive and subjugated status in mind, I enter into the colonial era (1910–1945). Before I present the "comfort women" system, an understanding of the historical conditions is required. During the colonial era, the "great" is continued — but this time, the "great" is alluding to Japan.

The specific circumstances of Japan's colonial administration shed light on how the practice of enforced sexual bondage could be carried out on such an institutionalized magnitude. Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 marked the first defeat of a western power by a non-western nation, thus strengthening Japan's political and strategic basis in its imperial pursuits. The Protectorate Treaty made Japan's annexation of Korea official on 22 August 1910.

As censorship and suppression were fierce, but nine years of such maltreatment culminated with the March First movement of 1919, where students, professors, workers, and citizens galvanized to protest the colonial regime. Influenced by Bolshevism, but more importantly, heeding the idealist calls of Wilson's "Fourteen Points" which emphasized national autonomy and self-determination, demonstrators paraded throughout the country shouting "Long live an independent Korea." This peaceful protest sparked a nation-wide uproar in the ensuing months in which over one million people participated.

"Cultural Period" (1920–1931)

Under the new leadership of Admiral Saitō Makoto, the "cultural period" (Bunka Seiji) was born — attempting a so-called "renaissance" to gain internal consent of the Korean people. The overall policy, though, remained the same: the colonial state and bureaucratic apparatus forced the Korean people from the native Koreans, either by accommodating towards the Japanese or feeling alienated and rebelling against the colonial authority.

"Cultivation" for Mobilization and War (1931–1945)

A new phase of colonial tactic would arise as Japan recovered from the world depression and dealt with the Chinese threat to its continental interests. This created the backdrop for Japan's invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Subsequently, this led to the formation of the "cultural period's" end and the dawn of forced assimilation (Shi gaihō), the destruction of the Korean communist party, and the repression of a united front.

This "cultivation" was for the preparation of what would become a mass mobilization of the vast Pacific. The Naisen Ittai movement — loosely translated, "Japan and Korea as One Body" — emerged as what became the most infamous and ignominious colonial policy, crucial to Japan's war machinations. This required "transforming" the Korean people into imperial subjects: attending Shinto religion, following Japanese holidays, changing the imperial oath, attending education in Japanese language only, and the humiliating and degrading sōshi-kaimei — adopting Japanese names.

Simply stated, in the last years of Japanese rule, Korean society had all but perished under war mobilization and political repression. The prisons were overflowing with thousands of political prisoners; millions were uprooted from their homes; food rationing had dwindled; party and all objects were appropriated for their silver content; and Korean language publications had disappeared. On 15 August 1945, Japan finally surrendered after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is within this colonial historical context when the recruitment of the chŏngsindae took place.

Creation of the Ianshō

Origins and Expansion

With the mass mobilization efforts of the early 1940s in mind, I take a step back to review the specific conditions under which the ianshō ("comfort station") system originated. Lieutenant-General Okamura Neji, the Japanese Army commander of China, admitted to being the one who set up the first official ianshō in Shanghai, 1932. He stated that long ago there were no "comfort women" — because of two or three cases of rape, the army requested that a unit of "comfort women" be set up. The Japanese government's initial statement was that the army had no role in the matter. Yet, despite his bold disclosure, Okamura was wrong in two of his assumptions. First, the system was not created in reaction to the 1932 Shanghai Incident. Rather, Japanese military leaders had learned a "lesson in war" in August 1918, when the troops experienced a rampant spread of sexually transmitted diseases from Russian women who were raped by Japanese soldiers in Siberia. Second, the system was documented in Japan and Korea well before Okamura's stated date.

Substantial evidence of the ianshō system exists. As Japan's full-scale war against China began in 1937, involving as many as 800,000 Japanese soldiers, a great upsurge of "comfort stations" occurred in Chinese cities. In 1941, as Japan declared war against the U.S., vast areas of Southeast Asia and Southwest Pacific became home to even more ianshō. Professor Yoshimi accordingly distinguishes four types: military-run stations controlled directly by the Japanese forces; privately-run stations (the most common) frequented by military forces; privately-run stations open to ordinary citizens though military priority was given; and privately-run brothels with no Japanese government affiliation.

Daily Life and Resistance in the Ianshō

The regulations of the ianshō were strict. Rules stipulated that entry was allowed to soldiers and military personnel only, a certificate permitting the visit was required, and the charge was fixed at ¥2 for soldiers and officers with pay of ¥5 permitted to stay overnight. The rules viewed the women as an "imperial gift" — "not trading in love affairs with the women, not laying any property claims over them, as they were public property."

Resistance was tremendous in the beginning. The kicking, yelling, screaming, hysterical youths were sexually violated as soon as they were captured, or at their first beatings. Many women discuss being trained to serve men and practicing how to use a condom. Escape was an especially popular form of resistance. However, strict restrictions to their mobility and the surrounding environment made it very difficult. One woman states that for the first two years, they were never taken out. In another building, ghosts appeared in the toilet at night — the rumor that prevented them from going there at night also prevented escape.

Kim Bok-Dong halmuni describes her constant moving — transferred from one place for two months to another, following the front line fighting. Hyong-soon tells of her desire to "expose the barbarism of the Japanese" with her story of escape: "In the beginning, they caught the girls who tried to escape and took them to a room in the basement. Then, they lined the rest of us up there. The soldiers beat them brutally, cut off their breasts and with a knife, sliced out their inner organs and threw them at us, saying, 'If you try to run away, this will happen to you.'"

In order to keep "sanitary" conditions and "healthy" women, these women received weekly check-ups and received regular injections of something called #606. Others stated that they never had check-ups, but after they became pregnant or contracted venereal disease, some soldiers brought tablets to induce a miscarriage. Some women refused to use condoms — as for the use of condoms, some soldiers thought they received a shot of #606 and would be protected.

Means of Mobilization

Contrary to notions that these young girls were thought of as "expendable" and contrary to the stereotype of the submissive Korean woman dictated by Confucian guidelines, there were various forms of resistance against their recruitment — not only from the young women themselves but also from the parents. According to the women's testimonies, the Japanese military recruiters found ways to coerce, kidnap, lure, or trick the women and their families. None of the testimonies in my possession describe being sent with the consent of their family members.

One testimony clearly refutes the "expendable" notion: when three servicemen came with guns to take the daughter, her father caught one of the servicemen, pointing to his own neck, crying: "Kill me before you take my daughter away." The serviceman pushed the father and attempted to attack — then calmed down and handed over a pack of cigarettes, explaining that the daughter would be able to go to school, acquire professional skills, and earn money.

To counter resistance against recruitment by Korean families, the Japanese soldiers had to use different ploys and tactics. A document entitled "Causes in the Recruitment of Workers for Military Comfort Stations" shows the attempt to gain internal consent by employing local people in the villages for the recruitment process. Yoshida Seiji notes the increasing use of deceit: "In a grazing field, we said to the shepherdesses: 'We are conducting a vaccination, all of you get into the car.'"

Fear and Intimidation

There were daily means of intimidating or placing fear into these women. Some were beaten when they refused orders. One woman spoke of an officer who gathered them in the yard and cut their neck with a sword, after which he thought it necessary to teach them obedience. The women were taken to a hole and forced to witness the execution of a captured Chinese soldier — the soldiers said, "we are showing you so you will become courageous," when the girls were in fact terrified.

Their Return Home

The surviving "comfort women" who managed to return to their homeland would encounter difficult times ahead. The Japanese soldiers suddenly disappeared, and the women survived raising fruit and sweet potatoes. As some of the 20 women had committed suicide, and the army did not inform them that the war was over — the happiest period, if I think about it now, was the time when we lived together, just ourselves.

The Korean halmunis have memories of doing work outside the realm of sexual slavery. As mentioned before, there was not a fine line delineating women's work during the war. When the war was ending, some planted potatoes and lived off these products. Throughout their time as "comfort women," the people who managed to care for these stations — some planted gardens, treated malaria wounds, gave injections, bound wounds, and stopped bleeding.

Mun Ock-ju states: "We wept that we had been able to return to their family in Taegu — she continues to say that when she returned home or out of joy or out of knowledge of her predicament. She continues: "I am not sure whether it is out of joy or out of knowledge." Mun Ock-ju who managed to return to their homeland would encounter difficult times ahead.

Japan's Rationale

After reading the words from the former "comfort women's" oral histories, it may be appropriate to highlight the different pictures one can imagine from the Japanese government's perspective. The language of military sexual slavery pervades the Japanese government's literature — "comforting" the soldiers, on one hand, and to "maintain discipline" on the other.

The military wanted to provide release from their everyday harsh lives sexually and psychologically, in order to maintain the morale of the soldiers who endured long periods of battles with little rest and relaxation. To some, the women were presented as "imperial gifts for the Japanese military." The Chief of Staff of the Japanese Army's Expeditionary Force in North China Division noted the following in his 14 March 1932 journal entry: "Lately, the soldiers ran about looking for women…the army recognized the necessity of setting up appropriate institutions toward the resolution of the soldiers' sexual problems."

From this psychological viewpoint, one could argue that a war mentality conflicted with the Confucian ideological precedent. In other words, the idea of complete and unconditional surrender of a soldier's will and life for the nation took away the authority and autonomy ordained him in a patriarchal society. For soldiers who were deprived of their independence, having sex with a woman was a chance to at least temporarily regain their autonomy — to become almost independent, and "free." The particularly aggressive and violent behavior demonstrated the day before going to the front lines became a pattern throughout the testimonies.

Post-Colonial Period to Normalization (1945–1965)

After the Pacific War, the victorious allied forces set up tribunals for the trials of Germany and Japan's war crimes. The international military tribunal at Nuremberg and the tribunal for Japan in Tokyo punished some war crimes. There was no trial, much less attention, given to the Korean women who were forced to be sexual slaves by Japan. However, the military trial of 1947 in Batavia/Java condemned one high-ranking Japanese officer to death for crimes involving military sexual slavery in Indonesia — the only case in which these crimes were prosecuted.

The conditions following the Pacific War resulted in Allied Occupation and financial support for both Japan and Korea. The U.S. had attained sheer economic supremacy, but the global trade imbalance — the "dollar gap" — meant foreign nations could not purchase American goods. Japan's recovery program was created for two reasons: to revive Japan as a functioning economic member and to prevent the Sino-Soviet world of communism from drawing it away from the rest of the Pacific region.

In Bruce Cumings's overview of the Cold War, he explains that the rationale for the "long peace" from the east-west bipolar world was sustained by a strong military design — not just about containment of the Soviet Union, but a "double containment" that both the U.S. and USSR agreed upon. There was a "double peace" from the east-west bipolar world that sustained the need for a strong military design. It was the Korean War that "came along and saved us," as Secretary of State Dean Acheson stated.

It is within this complex structure of American hegemonic desires and Japanese economic dependence upon both these countries for economic build-up which created the conditions for Koreans. The Confucian ideology and its structuring framework that was put into place within east Asia did not allow the past colonial injustices and sufferings of women to be heard, especially the topic of comfort women. Even if people cared and wanted this issue to be debated, Korea's geo-political position did not allow their concerns to reach the forefront of international concern. Finally, the post-colonial, socio-economic and political structure that was established in the Pacific rim also goes to explain why the Japanese government's previously published documents did not gain the popularity or attention they deserved.

Conclusion

An inquiry into why there was such a prolonged silence from the surviving Korean "comfort women" about their experiences as military sexual slaves under Japanese colonial rule has revealed the Confucian ideology and its structuring framework. The socio-economic, political aftermath in Korea's founding as a subordinate state in the Pacific rim also goes to explain why these women's voices were not heard for so long.

I have discussed how others view their disclosure, how I myself understood it. But here, in my concluding space, I want to allow some of the halmuni's voices to be heard. All speak from anger against the Japanese for denying their involvement and the need to tell the "truth." Their motivation ranges from anger at their humiliation, shame, and disgrace — yet, they speak. Their stories are out there, and their voices will flow.

However, even the sparse numbers cannot prevent my thinking that these women were brave, courageous, and somehow spirited enough to be compelled to break through the seams and cracks of their social strongholds and voice their untold histories. There is certainly a sense of empowerment for some to watch one another gain international attention, to travel to various parts of the globe to testify and shed light on the past. For me though, there is a significance and a compelling gravity — not because of the mass media attention or the empowerment they give to each other, but because they have not allowed their past to go unnoticed. They thought it important enough to voice their stories. They made the decision to go public with their dignity and their existence as women and as humans.

Their stories are out there, and no one can stop them.

In Their Own Words

Noh Chong-Ja:

I live in a rented room without running water or a toilet. The 40,000 won (about $500) rent takes up all my money — I get by on social security. But the 30,000 won and the 10 kg of rice we receive in payment is not enough. To be honest, I think of suicide. But until May, I have decided to tell myself that I need to endure, and erect a grave for my father who died away from home. Without a husband or child, I have nothing to fear, and I could not close my eyes, even in death, without exposing my shame and the loss of my reputation.

Kim Hak-sun:

I only want to say one thing to the Japanese government: even if we were paid ¥20 million for damages, we will not get back our past life. We hope this will enlighten the younger generation, and that it will enlighten them. I, as a person who has suffered indescribable humiliation, am determined to dedicate myself to solving this issue by telling of my experience.

Kang Soon-Ae:

Before my husband died, I refused to speak up, feeling dreadfully ashamed of having my past exposed. But now that my husband has died, and as resentment grows such that even my own living brother avoids me because of having been a comfort woman, it is my firm determination to restore my honor before this abominable society.

Mun Ock-ju:

Out of shame, I remained silent about my past, earned my living as a housekeeper and led a life full of worry. Despite unmentionable pain and deep suffering, I could not take my life. When I recently read in a newspaper article that the Japanese armed forces even abducted small school children as "forced prostitutes," my nightmares from that time were revived in my memory. Since then, I cannot sleep properly, even with sleeping pills.

Kim Yong-Sil:

I have lived a life of shunning people, out of fear of revealing my deep suffering. Despite unmentionable pain, I decided not to marry because I was so ashamed of my disgraced past. I suffered a deep-rooted bitterness. This year it was a great shock for me to see on TV former "comfort women" disclosing their past. That encouraged me. After long and deep thought, I made up my mind to bring to light the atrocities committed by the Japanese army. Without a husband or child, I have nothing to fear, and I could not close my eyes, even in death, without exposing my heart-breaking rancor.

I tell the world about the barbarous and heinous atrocities committed by the Japanese and appeal to all the fair-minded people of the world. How can we pardon their crimes? The Japanese authorities are still reluctant to acknowledge such crimes. They ought to conduct a thorough investigation, clearly reveal the truth, apologize, and provide appropriate compensation — and pledge not to repeat such crimes.