ABSTRACT

Jane Jin Kaisen’s 2017 video work, Strange Meetings, documents the inside and surroundings of a former STD (sexually transmittable disease) treatment center for prohibiting the spread of STD among the U.S. GIs as part of the “Clean-Up Campaign” during the 1970s, located near Soyo Mountain in Dongducheon-si, South Korea. This essay questions how the figure of diaspora expressed through art helps trace the contemporary vestiges of colonial violence, and raises a fundamental question to the notion of national community. I argue that Strange Meetings critically revisits South Korea’s nationalist historiography by foregrounding a metaphor of diaspora that, according to Stuart Hall, while signaling its “permanent instability” as a historical marker, exceeds binary structures of representation: such as, literal/figurative, past/present, and them/us. In Strange Meetings, diasporic identities are kaksŏri, a cross-dressed wandering performer, a “vocal” survivor of the camp town prostitution, and the art work itself that is multidimensional, alterable, and globetrotting installation – all of which, I conceptualize borrowing Ann L. Stoler’s terms, constitute “ambiguous colonial vestiges.” The attempts to find fault of the nationalist and misogynous hegemony from within, especially through subaltern voices, have been greatly constrained in South Korea since the Korean War (1950–3). Strange Meetings, however, shows that when they are set in motion, they lend one of the most powerful impetuses for the feminist critique against the intimate tie between the U.S.’s neocolonial occupation of South Korea and Korean patriarchal nationalism.

摘要

Jane Jin Kaisen 2017 年的视频作品《奇怪的会议》记录了一个前 STD（性传播疾病）治疗中心的内部和周围环境，作为 1970 年代“清理运动”的一部分，该中心禁止性传播疾病在美国 GI 中传播，位于韩国东豆川市Soyo山附近。本文质疑通过艺术表达的侨民形象如何有助于追溯殖民暴力的当代遗迹，并对民族社区的概念提出一个基本问题。我认为奇怪的会议斯图尔特·霍尔 (Stuart Hall) 表示，通过将侨民的隐喻放在首位，批判性地重新审视韩国的民族主义史学，尽管将其作为历史标记的“永久不稳定性”标记为超越了二元表征结构：例如字面/比喻、过去/现在，以及它们/我们。在奇怪的会议中，侨民身份是kaksŏri，一个化装的流浪表演者，一个营地镇卖淫的“声音”幸存者，以及艺术作品本身是多维的、可变的、环游世界的装置——所有这些，我借用安·L·斯托勒的术语，构成了“模棱两可的”殖民遗迹。” 自朝鲜战争（1950-3 年）以来，韩国试图从内部，特别是通过底层声音来寻找民族主义和厌女霸权的错误，受到了极大的限制。然而，奇怪的会议表明，当它们启动时，它们为女权主义批判提供了最强大的动力之一，以反对美国对韩国的新殖民主义占领与韩国父权制民族主义之间的密切联系。