Who canonized the formation of history and whose bodies are yet to be written about as part of that history? The exhibition continue to explore the history of modernization in East Asia through the lens of gender and the agency of tradition at Arko Art Center, coming from Korean Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2019. Questioning the canon of the heterosexual male as much as it questions the West, this is also an argument over the many boundaries and borders of modernity that are carved into today’s aporia. In particular, in its critical understanding of the problems of the modernization process in Asia, this exhibition investigates how tradition is invented and generated, and seeks the emancipatory potential of tradition in Asia through a perception of gender complexity that goes beyond the canon of modernity.

In a new installation specific to Arko Art Center, Hwayeon Nam and siren eun young jung brings vibrant audio-visual installation next to each other in the first gallery, and the second gallery turn out into a black box theater for the film of Jane Jin Kaisen. Hwayeon Nam explores the work of the twentieth-century choreographer and dancer Choi Seung-hee, who embraced a grand ambition for East Asian dance and constantly collided with modern borders as she generated modern inventions while struggling with ideologies and notions of nation. Constructing a genealogy of queer performance in Korean society, and examining the notion of queering and its aesthetics, for the past ten years siren eun young jung has based her work on yeoseong gukgeuk, a fast waning genre of Korean traditional theater that features only women actors. Jane Jin Kaisen interprets the Bari myth, a story of a daughter who was ousted from her community, as a new potential of escaping borders and separation, and as a liminality interrupting West’s colonial-modern. In the work of these three artists, “tradition” serves as a significant medium throughout the process of digging into, researching, discovering, rethinking, and finally interrupting the modality of the East Asian modernization.

Generating a complex narrative assemblage of historical interventions, the three artists in this exhibition seek to resist and create ruptures in the logic of systems and power, and they are keen to question how the development of civilization, violence of convention, and the norms of such history take place in our times. Saturated with the performance of tactile knowledge and the experiences of affect that are manifested through the sounds, rhythms, waves, series of scattered images and bodily movements, the exhibition attempts a space for the veiled, the forgotten, the exiled, the condemned, and the silenced. Here, they murmur, sing, cry, pause, laugh, express, move, and dance, and finally speak out loud. “History has failed us, but no matter.”

* The title was taken from novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

First, to learn and present the existing tradition, such as seung-moo (Buddhist dance). Second, to imagine and newly produce, informed by clues from past legends—for instance, working with the theme of Joseon Dynasty days and working around the concepts of their good-for-nothing leisurely men (hanryang), straw-hatted child (choripdong), the totem pole of the Great General (cheonhadaejanggun). Third, to choreograph the Eastern and the Asian, such as the notion of bodhisattva. Such are my three plans.

—“Choi Seung-hee and Women Celebrity Dialogues,” Choonchoo, March edition, 1941

In previous works such as Orbital Studies, Imjingawa, and A Garden in Italy, Hwayeon Nam investigated the methodologies of how movement conveys the various facets of an object by investigating it via archives. Her new work, Dancer from the Peninsula, focuses on the history of dancer Choi Seung-hee (1911–1969), specifically the period after 1941 when she defected to North Korea, and how her art mirrors the trajectory of her own life and that of the mid twentieth century. After touring around Europe, North America, and Latin America, Choi declared her ambition to invent a uniquely modern East Asian dance, one that transcended the boundaries of Joseon (Korea). Japan initiated the Pacific War in December 1941, the year that Choi returned to Korea and it was during this period that she 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 (能) and Japanese court dance bugaku (舞楽). Living mostly in China during the war, she stressed the importance of modernizing Peking opera and the need to establish a new modern East Asian dance. Bridging these complex cultural positions, she had many names: not only was she Joseon’s Choi Seung-hee and Japan’s Sai Shoki (the Japanese pronunciation of Choi Seung-hee), she was also an internationally acclaimed dancer. During these tumultuous times, she witnessed the independence of Korea and the collapse of Japan in Beijing; in 1946, Choi defected to North Korea.

The works that Choi Seung-hee produced after 1941 remain the cornerstone of her legacy, forming the basis for both the creation of East Asian dance and what later developed into North Korean dance-drama. The context of this period complicates Choi Seunghee’s legacy, but Dancer from the Peninsula does not focus on the conditions surrounding her life or judge her as a person. Rather, it focuses on her art and her research at the time, exploring the process through a framework of outside forces, aspirations as an artist, individual will to survive, and multiple bodies that have split in the collision of two contrasting timeframes—both the imminent tomorrow and the remote future that her ideals were headed toward. It also presents the trajectory of her life as the contour of an abstract and contradictory space that she dreamt of and ran toward, but could never reach. Is it possible for Choi Seung-hee to yet again be mobilized, not as an historical figure, but as an artistic force, not as the narrated past, but refracted through an ontology of the present?

Born in 1979, Hwayeon Nam lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. Nam has worked on choreographic movements through archive materials, capturing the various phenomena surrounding social systems, time, and space. She is also interested in rethinking the structures of cultural reproduction related to human desires, delving into the stories contained in artifacts, the history of colonial annexations, and the advent of the natural sciences, especially astronomy, flora, and fauna. With a focus on performance and video, her work lies in the linguistic performativity of questioning contemporary values and temporal notions of the present. Nam’s solo exhibitions include Imjingawa (Audio Visual Pavilion, Seoul, 2017) and Time Mechanics (Arko Art Center, Seoul, 2015). She has participated in group exhibitions Reenacting History (MMCA, Gwacheon, 2017), wellknown unknown (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2016), All the World’s Future (56th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2015), and Nouvelle Vague (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2015). Her performances include Orbital Studies (MMCA, Seoul, 2018), Dimensions Variable (Festival Bo:m, Seoul, 2013), and A Garden in Italy (Festival Bo:m, 2012).

As an extension of siren eun young jung’s ongoing Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–), A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (2019) transcends being a mere homage to the narratives within the genre of yeoseong gukgeuk or a spatiotemporal analysis of the period when the genre was active; it pictures an “impossible” genealogy that is transferred and expanded through the practice of today’s queer performers. The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project, a decade-long ethnographic research project into the unique theater genre of yeoseong gukgeuk, seeks to critically deconstruct the oppression-bordering conventions around gender, tradition, and historical consciousness. The most distinctive formal trait of yeoseong gukgeuk is that women perform as men. Each actor’s technique of playing a man varies according to their own analysis and understanding of the male role. The men represented by yeoseong gukgeuk actors may seem like stereotypes—barely breaking away from social conventions—but at the same time the performers represent a unique gender that transcends any specific definition of masculinity. Their performances shake and provoke the biased notion of gender.

Presenting the performance of a second-generation yeoseong gukgeuk actor Lee Deung Woo, A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise also calls forth four performers that provide a genealogy of contemporary queer performance. Lee Deung Woo is the most brilliant yeoseong gukgeuk male-role actor still performing today, who has also constructed a unique aesthetic with her extremely exaggerated ballim (gestures) and theatrical acting style. Lee’s style of acting and the subsequently generated image embody the paradoxical presence of yeoseong gukgeuk, forgotten and unwelcomed by both the traditional and the contemporary theater. The performance and music of electronic musician KIRARA actively incorporates the sense of physical disjuncture and segmentation that she experiences as a transgender woman. Lesbian actor Yii Lee has always provided the male-centered and gendered theater scene with an independent and unorthodox alternative. Seo Ji Won is a disabled woman, performer and director of the Disabled Women’s Theater Group “Dancing Waist” where she has developed a very exceptional action aesthetic. DragKing AZANGMAN has strived to create a drag culture and community at the feminist-queer intersection. The practices of these women oscillate between the formal challenge of escaping conservative theater genres and the body’s own uncomfortable and irregular modes of anomalous performativity that are prompted by each of their physical experiences. At the same time, they summon the history of the almost extinct art of yeoseong gukgeuk, bringing it back into the context of queer performance.

The ontological tradition of oral transmission, which is the basis of pansori and which yeoseong gukgeuk has followed, has been expanded to include more physicality and more performance. By flowing, stopping, deferring, or layering moving bodies, the methodology of oral transmission mirrors and impacts an “inter-body transmission” of queer bodies. The work is therefore an endeavor to repeatedly awaken the “queer turn” within an artistic practice, weaving moments of performing and sensing the performing as a form of “queering.” At the same time, it seeks to question political aesthetics through its feminist-queer methodology of re-summoning the narrative of those isolated by official history.

The work is co-commissioned by the Korean Pavilion 2019 at 58th La Biennale di Venezia, and KADIST as part of Frequencies of Tradition, a three-year series of seminars, commissions, and exhibitions initiated by KADIST.

Born in 1974 in Incheon, South Korea, siren eun young jung currently lives and works in Seoul. Within her projects she explores how the yearning desires of anonymous individuals merge with events of the world, and how such contacts become sites of resistance, history, and politics. Seeking an artistic practice that would expand feminist artistic language, she began the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project in 2008; the project traces the lives of surviving actors of the genre that emerged in the newly independent nation in the 1950s and waned during the military dictatorship. In her work, the artist employs various media, performance, and video in order to question the concept of gender and critically analyze the construction of tradition and history. She has been particularly active within Asia, participating in Tradition (Un)Realized (Seoul, 2014), Ghosts, Spies, and Grandmothers (SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, 2014), Discordant Harmony (Hiroshima, 2015/2016), Asia Pacific Triennale (2015), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Taipei Biennial (2018), Shanghai Biennale (2018), TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting (Yokohama, 2014/2018), and Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa, 2018). She is the winner of the Hermes Foundation Missulsang Prize (2013), Sindoh Art Prize (2015), and Korea Artist Prize (2018).

Community of Parting traces a different approach to borders, translation, and artistic expression by invoking the ancient Korean shamanic myth of the abandoned princess Bari and employing female Korean shamanism as an ethics and aesthetics of memory and mutual recognition across time and space.
Rooted in oral storytelling and embodied by female shamans, the legend of Bari and her abandonment at birth for being a girl is mainly understood as a story of filial piety. However, Kaisen frames the myth as a founding story of gender transgression that transcends the logic of division, but has the experience of othering and loss at its core. According to the myth, Bari regains the community’s acceptance after reviving the dead and is offered half the kingdom as a reward. Yet, the heroine refuses to abide by human borders and instead chooses to become the goddess who mediates at the threshold of the living and the dead. This is what distinguishes the myth of the abandoned Bari from other Korean myths about women.
Community of Parting draws on Kaisen’s extensive research since 2011 into Korean shamanism and her long-term engagement with communities affected by war and division. The piece features imagery filmed in various locations including Jeju Island, the DMZ, South Korea, North Korea, Kazakhstan, Japan, China, the United States, and Germany. Combining shamanic ritual performance, nature and cityscapes, archival material, aerial imagery, poetry, voiceover, and soundscapes, the work is configured as a multi-scalar, nonlinear, and layered montage loosely framed around Bari’s multiple deaths.

Both intersubjective and deeply personal in her approach, Kaisen treats the myth of the abandoned as a gendered tale of migration, marginalization, and resilience told from a multi-vocal site. In the shamanic ritual, the shaman abandons herself in order to mediate, gathering an assembly of the living, the dead, and multiple spirit witnesses. In a similar vein, a “community of parting” is formed in the piece around the shared sentiments of the abandoned. Ritual performance and chants by shaman Koh Soon Ahn, a survivor of the 1948 Jeju Uprising and Massacre in South Korea, constitutes a recurring rhythm and culminates in a ritual for the dead that involves the artist and her own personal abandonment. The myth is also reflected in the poetry of Swedish poet Mara Lee and in the poetics of Kim Hyesoon from whose book Woman, I Do Poetry the translated title Community of Parting derives. It further resonates in various narratives by South Korean, North Korean, and diasporic women who negotiate how gender bias along with colonialism, modernity, and war have resulted in radical ruptures while unfinished histories continue to linger.

Infused by the living, the dead, and those yet to come, Community of Parting is actualized through a process of dissolution, revival, and becoming. Informed by shamanic practice, properties integral to the filmic medium are employed to contest and diffuse spatiotemporal boundaries and hierarchies of knowledge and being. In doing so, Community of Parting proposes other ways of thinking and being with others, including our relationship to nature and other life-forms.

Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist born in Jeju Island, South Korea, and adopted by Danish parents in 1980. She currently lives in Berlin and Copenhagen. Working across different media—film, video installation, photography, and performance—she engages themes of memory, migration, and gender through poetic modes of storytelling and non-linear montages of image, sound, voice, and embodiment. Recent exhibitions include 2 or 3 Tigers (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 2017), Forum Expanded (68th Berlin International Film Festival, 2018), Decolonizing Appearance (CAMP: Center for Art on Migration Politics, Copenhagen, 2018), Asian Diva: The Muse and The Monster (Buk Seoul Museum of Art, 2017), Art Spectrum 2016 (Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art, Seoul), Interrupted Survey: Fractured Modern Mythologies (Asia Culture Center, Gwangju, 2015). She was awarded the Montana Enterprize at Kunsthallen Brandts in Denmark, and has participated in the Liverpool Biennale, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Jeju Biennale, among others. Kaisen has an MFA from UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

1. Round Table, The Korean Pavilion at the 58th La Biennale di Venezia : the Curatorial, artworks and Exhibition Making for Korean Pavilion

• Date : Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 3 p.m.
• Place : ARKO ART CENTER phillux space, first-floor
• Speaker : Hyunjin Kim(Curator) , Siren eun young Jung (Artist), Hwayeon Nam(Artist), Hyejin Jang(Deputy Curator), Kyungho Kim(Technical supervisior)
• Moderator : Kyeongyun Ho