"History has failed us, but no matter," reads the incipit to Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, a novel about the lives of four generations of Korean people, from Japanese-controlled Korea in the early 20th century to the 1980s Japanese economic boom.
Hyunjin Kim, the curator of this year's Korean Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition in Venice (until 24th November), was struck by this sentence that clearly expressed the will and resilience of people, the strength to stand up again under hardships caused not just by the personal failures one may experience in life, but by the course of history.
Moving from this theme, the curator decided to dedicate the pavilion to feminism and gender diversity and include in its spaces works by artists who could engage visitors with an in-depth discourse on these themes and issues and in particular on women who were written out of history.
The choice fell on three women artists - Hwayeon Nam, Jane Jin Kaisen and siren eun young jung - who carried extensive researches on the traditions and history in East Asia, in connection with gender themes. Inside the pavilion the artists wove three different complex narratives that still display some connections.
Hwayeon Nam's video "Dancer from the Peninsula", follows the story of Seunghee Choi (1911–1969), a legendary but controversial choreographer and modern dancer.
Born during the Japanese colonial period, Choi trained with a Japanese dancer, but was still perceived as a "dancer from the peninsula".
She toured Europe, North America, and Latin America, and hoped to develop a uniquely modern East Asian dance that could transcended the boundaries of Korea. Choi returned to Korea after Japan initiated the Pacific War in December 1941 and performed for Japanese soldiers in China as a part of their morale-boosting campaign. At the same time, she announced new works inspired by classical Japanese musical drama noh and Japanese court dance bugaku. During the war, she lived in China and, in 1946, Choi defected to North Korea.
Nam's video rediscovers Choi, but also re-focuses on her art via rare footage and images from archives, and the project is completed by a small garden installed behind the Pavilion, inspired by Choi's 1936 song "A Garden in Italy".
Jane Jin Kaisen's video "Community of Parting" is inspired by oral storytelling embodied by female shamans and looks at the ancient Korean shamanic myth of Bari, a princess that was abandoned because she was born a girl. She was then transformed into a goddess who mediates at the threshold of life and death.
Kaisen reads the myth as a gendered tale of migration, marginalization, and resilience that she tells via images, sounds and archive material. The video, filmed in various locations including Jeju Island, South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, the United States and Germany, features the ritual performance of shaman Koh Sun Ahn, a survivor of the 1948 Jeju Uprising and Massacre in South Korea.
Kaisen's extensive research since 2011 into Korean shamanism and her long-term engagement with communities affected by war and division resonates in narratives by South Korean, North Korean and diasporic women.
siren eun young jung is another artist who carried out an intense ethnographic research project: for a decade, she explored the lost art of "yeoseong gukgeuk", a variation of the better known "changgeuk", in which all parts are played by women.
"Yeoseong gukgeuk started at the end of the 1940s, after the Japanese occupation," siren eun young jung explained to Irenebrination. "At the time there were women who used to entertain, a bit like geishas, and who sometimes would sell their bodies."
"They had musical skills, so, after the occupation they were employed in the music scene. Yet, because of their gender and position, they were stigmatised by society. So they tried to get together and create their own organisation to protect themselves. They created this kind of genre and theatre in which women played all the roles."
"Yeoseong gukgeuk" had its heydays in South Korea of the 1950s and '60s, but lived in the shadows of other genres, with performers being derided by the traditional and contemporary theatre and being also forgotten. For this project siren eun young jung did the sort of research scholars forgot to do, "I started digging in archives, and interpreted their contents in the frame of sexual politics," she says.
"I also went looking for survivors, like second-generation 'yeoseong gukgeuk' actor Deungwoo Lee, the most brilliant male-role actor still performing today. These performers have almost disappeared, there are barely five of them left nowadays. Talking to them is fascinating as they can tell how they transform themselves and how they can make their body like that of a man," siren eun young jung states.
"In Western culture there is a drag culture, but we don't have that kind of name in Korea, so I tried to find out and interpret it and name it," siren eun young jung explains.
Raising questions around sexuality, tradition and political resistance, siren eun young jung's "A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise", is an audiovisual installation, in which it becomes clear that, while the men represented by "yeoseong gukgeuk" actors may seem like stereotypes, performers like Deungwoo Lee through the elegant and beautiful exaggerated ballim (gestures) and theatrical acting style, shake and provoke the biased notion of gender, representing a unique gender that transcends any specific definition of masculinity.
siren eun young jung's intervention is divided in two parts with one video showing a "yeoseong gukgeuk" performance and another focused on an energetic performance of transgender electronic musician Kirara, lesbian actor Yii Lee, disabled performer/director Jiwon Seo, of Disabled Women's Theater Group "Dancing Waist", and drag king Azangman, who has strived to create a drag culture and community at the feminist-queer intersection.
There is a clear parallelism between the two videos: in both the videos the artist presents performers who have been or are marginalised.
"In Korea we have a very heterosexual patriarcal and conservative society and people from minorities aren't really visible," siren eun young jung explains. "I feel that through my work I have to try and find different visible strategies to cure our society; as an artist I have a strong responsibility to intervene and challenge this kind of socially acceptable normativity through what may be perceived as uncomfortable modes of anomalous performativity."
History may have failed them, but the protagonists of the installations in the Korean Pavilion have found through art, dance, music, and performing new patterns of resistance and resilience.
Image credits for this post
1, 12 and 13, 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21 The Korean Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice, Installation Views, Courtesy of the Korean Pavilion
2, 3, 9 and 11. The Korean Pavilion at the 58th International Art Exhibition, Venice, Installation Views by Anna Battista
4. Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula, multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable, 29', 2019. © Hwayeon Nam. Photo: GIM IKHYUN. The image is taken from Yūsaburō Takashima and Byung-Ho Chung, ed., The Century’s Beauty Dancer Sai Shōki (Tokyo: MT Shuppan, 1994), 100
5. Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula, 2019, multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable, 29’. © Hwayeon Nam. Photo: GIM IKHYUN. Jinyangjo, taken from Choi Seung-hee, Autobiography of Choi Seung-hee (Seoul: Imundang, 1937). Courtesy: Hongcheon-gun
6. Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula, 2019, multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable, 29’. © Hwayeon Nam. Photo: GIM IKHYUN. In Paris, 1939, Soorim Art Center (Ha Jungwoong Gallery), Photography Exhibition of the dancer Choi Seung-hee from the Ha Jungwoong Collection LEAP & EXTENSION Catalogue for the opening exhibition of Soorim Art Center in commemoration of Kim Hee-su (Seoul: Soorim Cultural Foundation, 2016), 42.
7 and 8. Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula, 2019, multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable. © Hwayeon Nam Hwayeon Nam, Dancer from the Peninsula, 2019, multi-channel video installation, dimensions variable. © Hwayeon Nam
10. Jane Jin Kaisen, Community of Parting, 2019, stills from projected film in double-channel video installation, 1h12'22”. © Jane Jin Kaisen
14, 15 and 16. siren eun young jung, A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise, 2019, audiovisual installation, multi-channel video, stereo and 5.1 surround sound, dimensions variable. © siren eun young jung
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