Korea’s experience of Japanese colonialism and the ensuing Cold War left many fraught legacies, including an intense ideological confrontation between the North and South that manifested in the Korean War. The Cheju 4.3 Incident of 1948 is one of the most horrifying examples of state violence committed against civilians in the name of anti- communism, and the South Korean state involvement in the systematic sexual exploitation of women who served American GIs at American military camptowns in postwar South Korea is yet another. In post-1987 South Korea, memories of such catastrophic historical violence became keen sites of contestation in the calls for redress that attended the country’s transition to procedural democracy. Acts of proper remembering called for collective reckoning with the past, often attended by official action against past immunity, amnesia, and silencing—celebrated in the form of what Hannah Arendt has called “organized remembrance.” But what happens to the memories that do not fold neatly into pre-existing narratives of collective trauma and discourse of sacrifice? Through examination of such media as theater, film, and art exhibition, we seek to address how artistic expressions can generate productive spaces to engage with the memories of Korea’s violent past and recover the silenced voices.

We are witnessing a burgeoning body of scholarship with respect to the treatment of historical violence in the context of construction of the past in present-day Korea, particularly as it pertains to the events surrounding the Korean War (often referred to as America’s “Forgotten War”). Moving the discussion beyond the dominant discursive axes of American diplomacy and nationalistic collective narrative, this session takes to task the critical relationship between memory, truth, and representation of historical violence by engaging with alternative forms of storytelling generated through artistic expressions. The three papers in this session examine various forms of artistic representation in their attempt to seek ethical ways of archiving and remembering the voices that have been disavowed in official historical narratives of truth, justice, and/or reconciliation.

Areum Jeong focuses on the Cheju 4.3 Incident--often considered as the definitive precursor to the Korean War--by examining theater productions based on the survivors’ testimonies and historical accounts. These performances, Jeong argues, challenge the state’s distortion and coverup of truths while generating affective rendering of human suffering. Vicki Kwon engages in a comparative analysis of two art projects that document the lives of female sex workers, interracial children, and residents in a military camptown called Dongducheon. Kwon explores how the projects subvert the victimization of the female sex workers by unsettling the perception of the women as extension of “comfort women” (forced sexual labor under the Japanese imperial regime during the Pacific War) and reorienting the narrative gaze on camptown as a lived locality. Hyun Jung Kong analyzes The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019), an experimental film featuring an elderly former sex worker that engages with the relationship between women’s act of narrating memories and their performative agency. Kong argues that The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin, by blurring the boundary between fiction and non-fiction, past and the present, and fantasy and reality, presents new possibilities of envisioning the very nature of memory as a transitory, liminal experience. The three presentations will be followed by a discussion on the politics of memory in modern Korea by the respondent, Nan Kim. After a brief introduction by the presiders, each presenter will be given about 12 minutes for their presentations, which will provide 12 minutes for the respondent’s comments, to be followed by 20 minutes of Q&A with the audience.