Muddying the History: Eunji Cho’s “Suspended Matters”

In her 2015 video work, Song for the Shooting Star, Eunji Cho throws mud at the walls of an abandoned building in a red-light district in Seoul called Miari Texas Village. Although sex work was officially outlawed by President Park Chung-hee in 1961, President Park never ceased operation at Miari as it attracted the U.S. servicemen and helped circulate stable foreign currency. Simultaneously prohibited and supported by the state, Miari continued to thrive until the early 2000s. In the 2000s, Seoul was in a stage of transition, from a developmental city to a neo-developmental city, in which environmental and cultural issues shaped the priority agenda for urban restructuring policy. As a part of this transition, the Seoul Metropolitan Government redeveloped Miari, officially demolishing an area that existed unofficially for decades. In her practice, Cho investigates the history of these heterotopic spaces that simultaneously evades and alludes to the process of modern urbanization. This paper examines Cho’s video and installation works that utilize earthly materials such as mud and stone, which the artist refers to as “suspended matters,” and argues that the materiality of earth as a medium brings forth the contradictory modes and histories of nation building in South Korea. Contextualizing Cho’s use of “suspended matters” within the politics of urbanization and environmental studies, I suggest that Cho’s work fashions the possibility for an alternative history of modernization in South Korea, one that is attuned to the contiguity, or even contingency, of the contradictions in the official history.