TY - JOUR
AU - Jang, Nayun
AB - Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a critical factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation?’1 On 15 August 1995, the building of the former Japanese government general (Joseon chongdokbu) in the heart of Seoul was demolished. The building, which was the headquarters of the Japanese colonial authority from 1910 to 1945, had been used as a presidential residence, a government office, and a national museum for fifty years after the country’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. The decision to demolish it was part of the Kim Young-Sam government’s (1993–1998) policy of eliminating the remnants of Japanese colonialism, despite the controversies over their historical and architectural value.2 It was a symbolic gesture by the South Korean government, boasting that the country had not only achieved a highly developed economy and a stable democracy but had also overcome its colonial past. The demolition of this emblematic building was the main event of the day when the country celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of independence. This spectacular event heralded a new phase of the national commemorative rhetoric promoting instituted memorialisation of the country’s difficult past, as evinced by extensive construction of official memorial halls and the appointment of national memorial days and annual commemorative events. In any cultural context, official memory privileges some memories over others in order to mediate competing constructions of reality. In East Asia, during the seventy-seven years since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, official memories have been formed with the intention of reinforcing each nation’s cultural and political orthodoxies. Each country’s commemorative effort has been made through disparate visual semiotics, a process that renders particular narratives deliberately invisible, thus allowing them to be forgotten. In post-colonial, post-Korean War South Korea, memory culture has been formed largely based on two key attributes: anti-Japanese and anti-communist sentiment. The memory of Japan’s thirty-five-year colonial occupation in the peninsula has been regarded as an immitigable topic of collective resentment, while the opposite narratives, such as that of the existence of pro-Japanese collaborators among the Koreans, have been neglected. The memories of pro-Japanese collaborators were lost over the course of the country’s intensive economic growth programme until they were recalled by a government that often tailored them to suit its ideological orientation under the name of the ‘settling the past’ (Gwageo cheongsan) project; this eventually resulted in the destruction of the former Japanese government building. As such, the memory of Japanese colonialism has been ‘sacralised’ in the form of ‘victimhood nationalism’ that ‘effectively block[s] the sceptical and critical gaze of outsiders upon “our own unique past”’, to borrow historian Lim Jie-Hyun’s words.3 Anti-Japanese sentiment combined with victimhood nationalism is still salient in contemporary South Korea’s memory culture, as noted in the constant resurgence of the memory of comfort women as a point of collision in South Korea–Japan relations.4 The concept of victimhood nationalism is useful in understanding how official narratives of the Korean War and the subsequent conflicts between the two Koreas after partition have been formed in the country as well. South Koreans believe that they were the most victimised group during the conflict since the war was started by the North, then escalated and ended by outside superpowers, not by the decision of the South Koreans themselves. This belief led to the successful installation of an anti-communist, anti-North Korean narrative, which helped construct strong pro-Americanism. Anti-North Korean rhetoric was violently applied by authoritarian governments to suppress democratic movements, the most representative examples of which include the Gwangju Democratisation Movement in 1980. According to Chen Kuan-Hsing’s analysis in his renowned volume on modern trans-East Asian history, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization, a secular faith of anti-communism and pro-Americanism was installed in South Korea in the aftermath of the Korean War, which provided justification for anti-democratic forces that suppressed any anti-governmental movements.5 Due to the ‘ideological fantasy’ generated by anti-communist structures, ‘being anti-government was equivalent to being communist’, and an ‘authoritarian state could therefore legitimately intimidate and arrest dissidents’, which eventually resulted in the disruption of the critical tradition of leftist thought.6 Memories of pro-democracy movements and governmental repression entered a new phase when democratic governments began to embrace them as part of the national commemorative rhetoric in order to differentiate themselves from previous dictatorial powers. These attempts were made in the interests of promoting the instituted memorialisation of pro-democracy grassroots movements, which intensified towards the end of the twentieth century. In comprehending such resurgence of historical memories in the late twentieth century, especially in the form of instituted memorialisation suited to the country’s ideological orientations, Chen’s analysis of delayed decolonisation, deimperialisation, and de-Cold War in East Asia can provide an important clue. The main argument Chen makes is that decolonisation and deimperialisation were postponed in the region until the era of globalisation emerged. He asserts that the momentum required to accomplish the deimperialisation process after the Asia-Pacific War and the Korean War was lost in South Korea; while the Cold War mediated Japanese colonialism and US neo-imperialism, deimperialisation was ‘postponed and channelled into economic development’.7 Critical thinking was accordingly prohibited for former colonial relations, and South Korean society remained under the overwhelming influence of its colonial past as well as the Cold War structure.8 Chen’s study helps us better understand the shifting terrain of South Korea’s memory politics in the late twentieth century, when the country, while going through the irresistible process of globalisation as well as rapid economic growth, began to develop new modes of commemorating its difficult past in order to tackle the suspended tasks of decolonisation and deimperialisation. What is noteworthy here is the context deliberately excluded in this official memorialisation of the past. For instance, the South Korean people witnessed the growing presence of the US military after the war, but this particular context was neglected in composing the official narratives of the wartime past. With a national narrative that regarded North Korea as the biggest threat to the country and the US as its closest ally, the majority of South Koreans have supported the presence and activities of American military forces on Korean soil. Due to strong pro-American rhetoric, even negative memories of the American military’s activities in the country were deliberately neglected in bringing the official memory and social consciousness in conjunction with the interests of the US. The selective formation of official narratives of the wartime past and its aftermath has been critically examined in the field of contemporary art in South Korea. What is noteworthy is that a considerable number of artists attempting to revive memories that had been neglected in the official narratives began to emerge from the late twentieth century onwards. This change was led by groups of young artists who belonged to the second or third post-war generation and who aimed to subvert the seemingly comfortable surface of contemporary society and cast light on hidden memories. To borrow Marianne Hirsch’s words, they were the ‘postmemory’ generation, who did not have first-hand experience of the traumatic events that they depicted but connected to the sources of memory through ‘imaginative creation’, thus adopting an unconstrained attitude towards the traumatic past.9 Postmemory is a term coined by Hirsch to explain the second or third post-Holocaust generations’ unique ways of connecting to the distant memory of the traumatic incident. According to Hirsch, postmemory ‘characterises the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth’, despite the fact that the original event ‘can be neither fully understood nor re-created’.10 Hirsch points out that post-Holocaust generations struggled to establish their own representational strategies to reactivate memories of the past without just appropriating it, although they were often met with suspicion that was deeply rooted in morality, thus being posed questions such as ‘can they enable a responsible and ethical discourse in its aftermath?’.11 The power and uniqueness of postmemorial aesthetics lie in this creative way of connecting to an object or source of memory that is ‘mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation’, which enables a more direct connection to the past.12 In this essay, I aim to analyse the ways in which South Korean postmemory-generation artists, especially those who mainly use lens-based media in their practices, engage with memories of the country’s wartime past by drawing attention to the US military’s presence and activities. The attraction of these artists to the lens has to do with the traditional belief in the evidential forces that the medium possesses. Playing with its apparent veracity and evidentiality as a complement to the imaginative work, these artists use lens-based media as a connotative agency to the memory of controversial past events. To offer a better understanding of the role of lens-based media as a mnemonic archive and its close association with power and authority, the essay will first analyse the tradition of shaping and mediating official memories though photography in South Korea during and after the Korean War. The essay will then examine how postmemory-generation artists challenge this very power of photography in shaping and controlling memory and attempt to create counter-hegemonic memories. Kang Yong Suk (b. 1958, Incheon) will be discussed as an example of notable postmemory-generation lens-based artistry, since his practices can be taken to represent the ways in which the memory of the Korean War was examined in the field of documentary photography in the late 1980s and 1990s. Two of his series of photographs will be examined with regards to the disparate legacies of the war upon which each project sheds light. Photographing the Korean War and Its Aftermath In South Korea, memories of the Korean War have been shaped by extremely limited sources of visual material. Most of the photographs produced by the US Army, which make up the majority of the photographs from the Korean War, were taken by photographers from the US Army Signal Corps. According to Jung Keun Sik and Kang Sung Hyun’s study on the US Signal Corps Photo Unit, US Army and Navy photographers began carrying out their remit in the Korean peninsula as early as 1945, when the Asia-Pacific War (1941–1945) ended and the two Koreas began their nation-building processes.13 Intensive photographic activities, however, started when the Korean War broke out in 1950. General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the occupation of Japan as well as the defence of South Korea during the Korean War in his capacity as commander of the United Nations forces, was well aware of the importance of the use of photography in the war. An extensive amount of photographic material was produced during the war by photographers belonging to signal service battalions attached to the Photo Division, General Headquarters, Far East Command.14 These photographic records are stored at the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), none of which were studied until the 2000s.15 Based on their study of photographic records of the Korean War stored at NARA, Jung and Kang claim that photography was used to construct and reproduce the anti-communist, humanitarian rhetoric of the United Nations and the US, especially by backing up the activities of the civilian support unit, namely the United Nations Civil Assistance Command, Korea (UNCACK).16 They pointed out that UNCACK’s war aid activities, such as supplying food, controlling sanitation, and building shelters, were meticulously recorded by US military photographers and were then widely used for propaganda purposes.17 In one of the photographs depicting UNCACK’s activities, for example, a little girl is surrounded by Korean and US troops and assistants who are spraying DDT on her body (Fig. 1).18 Seeing that the people in the photograph are awkwardly posing for the camera and the girl is looking directly into the camera lens, it seems clear that they were all aware of being photographed. In a number of other photographs depicting civilians being sprayed with DDT, most of the photographed subjects are captured as posing for the camera in static compositions. These images confirm that taking photographs was an official part of hygiene-control activities and the results were intended to propagandise their humanitarian efforts. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Daegu, 13 December 1951. Courtesy National Archives, Photo No. 111-SC-386994. Since the Korean War was the first international conflict that broke out after the Geneva Convention clarified the standards of international law for humanitarian treatment in war, highlighting their efforts to support civilians was an important task for the US military. Simultaneously, photographs revealing collateral damage caused by Allied air raids and executions of civilians and political prisoners were deliberately censored and removed from official documents. For instance, the caption accompanying a photograph that was classified as confidential indicates that the image shows three civilian women injured by firebombs dropped near Suwon station (Fig. 2).19 The photographer documented the three seriously injured victims with a completely detached, objective viewpoint without any hint of compassion or sympathy towards them, creating a clear contrast to the humanitarian perspective that was commonly found in photographs depicting UNCACK’s civilian relief activities. Furthermore, photographs depicting executions of civilians and political prisoners were regarded as highly sensitive material, thus they were never disclosed to the public – at least until 2000, when some of these images were released by the South Korean media for the first time in history, widely shocking the domestic public.20 On the civilian side, Bert Hardy and writer James Cameron for Britain’s Picture Post recorded the inhumane treatment of South Korean political prisoners who were suspected opponents of South Korea’s leader Rhee Syngman, which never made it to the magazine’s pages.21 Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Daejeon, 4 February 1951. Courtesy National Archives, Photo No. 111-SC-357516. The inhumane treatment of civilians was naturally regarded as especially important news by the photojournalists accredited by the communists. Alan Winnington, a correspondent for London’s Daily Worker, accompanied the North Korean army and thoroughly documented the cruel oppression of civilians and political prisoners by the Allied Forces. His photographic records of a massacre that took place in the Rangwul Valley in Daejeon is a representative example. These photographs were released in the Daily Worker on 9 August 1950 and later published as a separate pamphlet entitled I Saw the Truth in Korea: Facts and Photograph that Will Shock Britain! (1950).22 On 29 November 1950, the Daily Worker published a photographic report by I. R. Lorwin, a photographer from New York’s Pix Inc., of another grand-scale massacre of civilians and North Korean sympathisers by the Allied Forces.23 This feature article was published with the rather provocative heading ‘THIS WAS DONE IN YOUR NAME!’, causing some controversy in the Western world.24 As such, Western media outlets actively produced photographic records to give the public a sense of the war from contrasting standpoints. In the meantime, the South Koreans were largely cut off from the circulation of these photographs both during and after the conflict. Since the newspaper company offices in Seoul were destroyed during the early stages of the war, it was impossible for Korean photographers to produce or transmit photographs.25 Only a small number of Korean photographers, such as the notable Limb Eung Sik (1912–2001, Busan), took photographic records of the war with their personal cameras while working for US military units.26 A well-known photograph by Limb that contributed to the formation of the domestic public’s collective memory of the Korean War might be War Orphan, Taepyeongno, Seoul (1950) (Fig. 3). This image portrays a dust-covered child with ragged clothes and bare feet squatting amidst debris and ruins. The title indicates that the photo was taken in Taepyeongno, a boulevard located in central Seoul. But the image, which tightly frames the child, does not provide viewers with any context of the surroundings. Jung Joon Lee interestingly argues that its lack of detailed information allows the image to attain more symbolic value, making it representative of ‘the general tragedy of war’.27 A starving child on the street without a protector, who can be considered the most vulnerable person in a time of war, appealed to the South Koreans’ belief that they were the most victimised group during the conflict.28 As Lee underlines, this emblematic image has been ‘propagated as a powerful symbol of the Korean War by curators and critics of photography’.29 By being widely and constantly exposed to the public through solo and group exhibitions and publications, the photograph became an iconic image representing the South Korean experience of the war. The process by which Limb’s photograph of an orphan has become a symbol of the wartime experience is deeply related to the notion of victimhood nationalism. Lim Jie-Hyun argues that the core of the construction of collective memory has been gradually moving ‘from heroic martyrdom to innocent victimhood’; this has led to strong ‘victimhood communities’ being formed in certain countries.30 Comparing the cases of Korea, Israel, and Poland, Lim underlines that ‘victimhood nationalism’ is complete when victimhood becomes hereditary in the national historical imagination’.31 Limb Eung Sik’s photograph has been constantly invoked as an image representing the suffering of the Korean War, especially by the post-war generations who did not experience it first-hand. The process of building hereditary victimhood around the image demonstrates how the post-war nationalism in South Korea was formed based on a notion of collective innocence. Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Limb Eung Sik, A War Orphan, Taepyeongno, Seoul, 1950, gelatin silver print, 43 × 27 cm. © Limb Eung Sik. Courtesy of the Photoarchives of Limb Eung Sik. The positive reception of Joo Myung Duck’s (b. 1940, Hwanghae-do) photographic series The Mixed Names (1963–1965) by the domestic public in the late 1960s, despite its focus on the taboo subject of mixed-race war orphans, also evinces that the phenomenon of victimhood nationalism continued to influence the country (Fig. 4).32 His series indirectly depicted the impact of the US military’s presence on the civilians by documenting the lives of war orphans of American GIs and Korean women – memories of which were repressed to an extreme degree in South Korean society. Although the domestic public was hostile to the presence of sex workers serving American GIs and the resulting mixed-race children who were mostly abandoned in orphanages, Joo’s photographs depicting pitiful orphans were a perfect reminder of the suffering that Koreans had endured during the war. The Mixed Names naturally became a site of memory where viewers could project their own memories of victimhood onto the photographed children. Fig. 4. Open in new tabDownload slide JOO Myung Duck, Harry Holt Memorial Orphanage, 1965, gelatin silver print, 27.9 × 35.5 cm. © JOO Myung Duck. Courtesy of the Museum of Photography, Seoul. As such, both Limb and Joo’s work largely contributed to sustaining the notion of victimhood community in post-war South Korean society. At the same time, their work served as important sources of memory of the wartime past, thus filling the absence in photographic records of the war until the Korean public had finally been exposed to the photographs produced by the US Army. In the following decades under the military regimes, a strict censorship of photographic records of the war continued in the country, resulting in an even smaller amount of surviving photographic documentation. As Jung Joon Lee pointed out, photographic materials documenting the war were used as ‘photographic texts’ under the regime of Park Chung-Hee and employed as strong anti-communist propaganda.33 It is important to understand contemporary lens-based artists’ ground-breaking attempts to rethink a disputed past within the context of the photographic tradition discussed above, since these young artists’ practices grew out of the soil of the traditions of photography during and after the Korean War and became attuned to the particular cultural climate of contemporary South Korea conditioned by hereditary victimhood. These artists, who began to embody an unprecedentedly personal and creative approach to the troubled past, did not have first-hand experiences of the events they depicted. Nevertheless, they captured the legacies of the war and subsequent events by reflecting on contemporary society since they believed that the societal conditions they were living with were still under the strong influence of the lingering memories of war. It is worthwhile to discuss the ways in which these young artists contested and challenged nationalistic official memory in their own way, such as casting light on vernacular realms of memories and representing a nuanced reflection on historically difficult subjects. This shared attitude enabled them to differentiate their photographs not only from the official means of memorialisation that arouse viewers’ empathy based on patriotism but also from conventional methods of documentary photography, which are tied to the specificity of time and space. As such, they probed how they connect with the past and how the past acts upon current society, attempting to renew the present’s connection to history by means of memory. The Emergence of Postmemory in Contemporary Lens-based Art in Korea Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. … It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such a uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code. Han Kang, Human Acts (2014)34 Human Acts is a novel written by Han Kang in 2014 that tells the stories of people who survived and live with the memories of the massacre in Gwangju. The Gwangju Democratisation Movement was a massive protest that took place in 1980, demanding the country’s democratic reform. It is considered one of the most traumatic incidents in Korea’s modern history, as it resulted in indiscriminate killings of unarmed citizens by violent government troops. The story of Human Acts revolves around memories that were not properly integrated into the symbolic tradition of the country, just like the unburied dead bodies in the streets of Gwangju during the massacre. In the introduction to the English version of the novel, translator Deborah Smith interestingly points out that ‘one of the main Korean words for “to remember” mean[s] literally “to rise to the surface”’, and that repressed memories of the atrocities in Gwangju resurfaced in Han’s novel in a form of ‘hazy recollection’.35 Just as dormant memories of the massacre rose to the surface in the novel, there has been a tendency towards the resuscitation of memories of the war and subsequent ideological conflicts in the field of contemporary Korean lens-based art since the 1990s. This photographic revival of dormant memories was led by young artists who were generally in their 30s during the 1990s. Most of them did not have first-hand experiences of the incidents they depict, but they took a critical stance against state-led anti-communist education and photographic records of the war that merely reflected biased viewpoints. It is also worth noting that they were heavily influenced by the yearning for democracy that dominated universities and intellectual societies in the 1980s. The artists belonged to a generation of student activists or radicals who tended to bring to the forefront their opposition to the official accounts of the past. Critics such as Lee Kwang-Soo have pointed out that this generation of artists attempted to elevate memory as a primary concern in the discourses of history.36 In the early stages of this shift, discussions were centred on memories of the Korean War, since it was regarded as a paramount example of a traumatic event depicted from a restricted point of view. Furthermore, they believed that these conditions – the experience of the war and the country’s decades-long confrontation with North Korea – resulted in violent events such as the atrocities in Gwangju. By sharing a critical attitude towards official accounts of the past on a national scale, the new generation of artists attempted to arouse suspicion and vigilance in onlookers against the official hegemonic memory. In his analysis of victimhood nationalism, Lim discusses the phenomenon of the inherited memory of the past, which is strictly divided into that of victimisers and victims. Lim argues that once this dichotomy of victimisers and victims is fixed, ‘victimhood becomes hereditary, in order to consolidate the national collective that binds generations together’.37 He continues that this hereditary victimhood ‘has fed a specific form of nationalism that rests on the memory of collective suffering’, and that ‘the epistemological binary of collective guilt and innocence has facilitated the turn towards victimhood in collective memories’.38 Arguing that victimhood nationalism ‘has sacralisation of memories as its epistemological mainstay’, Lim warns that there is a danger when these ‘sacralised memories’ successfully block the outsider’s gaze and strengthen the insider’s bonds by ‘keep[ing] a monopoly on understanding the past’ and ‘enjoy[ing] a morally comfortable position’.39 According to Lim, it is because by finding such a ‘mental enclave’, the fact that these ‘heirs of historical victimhood have become today’s perpetrators’ is often disregarded.40 Furthermore, Lim warns that memory of a past atrocity that one did not experience in person tends to develop into a categorical notion of collective victimhood that ‘cannot help us to come to terms with the brutal and tragic past in the present history’.41 He further underscores that a community of memory bonded by a sense of collective innocence ‘would only encourage people to perceive reality in national terms and thus justify their own victimhood nationalisms’.42 Lim’s assertion can be understood in the same vein as Hannah Arendt’s criticism of Germany’s post-war collective guilt, which imposed a categorical tendency that made people ‘guilty of, or feel guilty about, things done in their name but not by them’.43 Interestingly, young Korean artists with hereditary memory have attempted to overcome the categorical attitude of collective guilt and victimhood in their art practices to reveal repressed memories and correct wrong or biased memories. One significant approach followed to tackle this binary in the works of contemporary Korean lens-based artists is the attempt to challenge authority, or the agent that produces official narratives of history and memory, in their artworks. One way that this group of lens-based artists challenges authority is by placing an emphasis on unusual subjects that have been neglected in the dominant narratives. By highlighting memory at the level of individual or small-scale social units, the artists attempt to subvert the official memories that have been strengthened by authority. Furthermore, they focus on memories of marginal beings that have been forcibly repressed and left out of the collective conscious so that they can transgress the existing official historiography. Portraits retaining the ordinary texture of mundane private life and oral testimonies that have the power to make listeners pay attention to personal narratives are key materials that often appear in their practices. Another important attribute shared by contemporary Korean lens-based artists is a detached attitude towards the subjects that they are depicting. This detachment arises partly from the limited memories of the subjects that they are dealing with. Their belated memories of traumatic events, such as the Korean War and the massacre in Gwangju, were necessarily mediated by existing sources, and were thus connected to their objects or sources through ‘imaginative creation’.44 Through nuanced reflection on historically difficult subjects, these young artists revealed the intrinsic precariousness of their memories, at the same time demonstrating the fact that the memories of tragic events cannot be recaptured in all of their temporal and cultural specificities. Although their detached photographic language was often met with suspicion regarding the representability of historically difficult subjects, the open character of their art drew out the participatory and interpretative potential of viewers. Through these efforts to overcome collective victimhood and re-engage with past memories, these artists ultimately urge viewers to think outside of the official framework of the historical account and reconsider the problems of contemporary South Korea in relation to the impact of the haunting memories of the past. Their art suggests to viewers that continuing the discourse on past experiences can help to examine the issues of contemporary society, since they believe that memory is a place where these problems can be newly discussed and contemplated. Despite their limited access to memories of past incidents that they themselves did not experience, what makes these artists’ practices unique is their belief in the productive potential of memory. As representative examples of postmemory work, Kang Yong Suk’s two photographic series will be analysed based on the common concerns and strategies of contemporary lens-based artists outlined above. Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits, produced in the 1980s, will first be discussed as a rare early example that looks at personal, smaller-scale memories of individual beings and constitutes a fresh approach to official accounts of history. This will be followed by the exploration of another poignant series of photographs created in the late 1990s: From Maehyang-ri, focusing on its adoption of an allusive, detached photographic language. Remembering the Unremembered: Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits One of Kang Young Suk’s Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits from 1984 features two people who are presumed to be a couple (Fig. 5). Sitting in an old bar, a dressed-up black man is seen holding an Asian woman, who is wearing a top with vivid colours, revealing one shoulder – which was an uncommon style of clothing for the average young woman in South Korea at the time when the photograph was taken. Her bold makeup, which exaggerates her eyes, eyebrows, and lips, along with her big curly hair, makes her look like a woman of another race – presumably a black woman – or at least it shows her attempt to look like a non-Asian woman. The flash reflected on the woman’s face and arms draws the viewers’ first glance to her skin, thus putting her as the central subject of the photograph. Kang produced this series by photographing inhabitants of Dongducheon in the clubs and bars that normally forbade entry to Korean nationals. Fig. 5. Open in new tabDownload slide Kang Young Suk, Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits, 1984, digital colour print, 103 × 80 cm. © Kang Yong Suk. Courtesy the Artist. Dongducheon is a city located to the north of Seoul, at the northernmost point of Gyeonggi province. Since the city is in proximity to the heavily militarised border between South and North Korea, which is ironically called the Korean Demilitarized Zone, it operates as a strategically important place for the defence of the South Korean capital. The city has hosted six main camps of the US military, and the South Korean government built a camp town – Gijichon in the Korean language – in this formerly agricultural village to support American GIs’ activities. An important part of this enthusiastic support of the government for the US military’s presence and activities was the implicit approval and backing of the sex industry. Although largely disdained by the public, women in Gijichon, often called by the derogatory term Yanggongju, had a salient presence in post-war South Korean society.45 This was because the currency they earned through prostitution significantly contributed to the country’s economy when South Korea still had not overcome its post-war poverty.46 The ways in which these women were perceived by the general public were explored as the subject matter of many post-war books and movies. Obaltan, meaning ‘a stray bullet’, is a short novel written by Yi Beom-Seon in 1959. In this novel depicting the harsh realities of the life of the protagonist Cheolho after the Korean War, Cheolho’s sister Myeongsuk appears as a former nurse who decides to be a Yanggongju for a living.47Obaltan was made into a film in 1960 by director Yu Hyun-Mok and was released in 1961. The poster for the film centres on a full-length portrait of Myeongsuk in a short dress, depicting her life as a prostitute as one of the representative types of post-wartime suffering (Fig. 6). In this film, there is a sequence where two men in a bus are chatting while looking out at an American soldier and a Yanggongju in a military jeep. They sneer at the woman, saying that ‘It is a pretty good business, she doesn’t have to invest any money for it’ and continuing that ‘I bet she’ll get married someday, like a regular, clean girl’. Cheolho, who is standing next to the two men, moves to the other side of the bus looking disturbed by their conversation. This short sequence reveals that Yangongju were largely regarded as objects of contempt by the Korean public. It is also worth noting that the mockery was directed towards the women, not towards the American GIs. Regarding the complicated position that the sex workers serving American soldiers held in post-war Korean society, Moon Young Min claimed that Dongducheon was negated as a ‘non-territory’, as its residents, namely the sex workers, were disdained and scorned by the Korean public.48 The city has remained in the realm of invisibility and collective negation, and the memory of the city has been left out of the country’s official narrative. It was not until 2005 that this repressed memory resurfaced in Korean society, when a number of US military camps in South Korea began to be relocated or closed down.49 Fig. 6. Open in new tabDownload slide Poster of Obaltan, 1960. Courtesy of Korean Federation of Film Archives. Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits provides a rare early example of documenting the lives of Korean sex workers and American servicemen in Dongducheon. It is an early series of work for Kang’s photographic career as well, considering that it was produced in the year when Kang graduated from Chung-ang University with a photography major. The series demonstrates Kang’s interest in tracing the impact of the war in Korean society, which continued in his later projects such as From Maehyang-ri (1999) and The Korean War Monuments (2006–2009). In the making of the series, Kang obtained permission to enter the bars and clubs, which were exclusively open for Americans, as a freelance photographer who took souvenir photographs.50 The people captured in Kang’s photographs voluntarily posed in front of the camera without much intervention from the photographer.51 Considering that people posing for the camera tend to construct something other than their actuality, the photographs capture the realities that they want to show, as they dressed up and posed in ways that they wanted to be remembered. Kang explains that their relationships seemed to be ‘normal’ and ‘satisfactory’ for them, not necessarily unequal or unhappy as most viewers might assume.52 Some pictures from the series, however, portray women looking embarrassed and discontented, such as in a photograph that captures a couple kissing in front of the camera (Fig. 7). The woman, whose awkward hand gesture seems to reflect her feeling of unease, is sitting on the lap of a black man who is posing to kiss her. Compared to other photographs from the series, the visible unhappiness of the woman conveys stronger emotions and arouses viewers’ sympathy towards her. Moon rightly pointed out that while these relationships might offer the GIs ‘immediate sensual gratification’, to the women they ‘provide[] monetary compensation and perhaps even the prospect of a bright future in the US’.53 Seen in this light, the ‘normal’ relationship between them becomes a pathetic sight – with their gaudy makeup and flashy outfits revealing their pitiful efforts to cater to the American GIs’ tastes. Fig. 7. Open in new tabDownload slide Kang Young Suk, Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits, 1984, digital colour print, 103 × 80 cm. © Kang Yong Suk. Courtesy the Artist. It is worth noting that the American GIs in Kang’s photographs are mostly black servicemen, since he only had permission to enter the area occupied by black GIs.54 The clubs in Dongducheon were informally separated into those for white and black GIs, and photographers working in the black soldiers’ area were usually those who lost a competition with other photographers in the white GIs’ area or those who were elderly.55 Kang recalls that he began to work in the black GI area since it was easier to persuade the older photographers working there to let him join them.56 This segregation of white and black servicemen in Dongducheon implies the oppression that the black GIs faced in the armed services as well as back home. The integration of whites and blacks within the armed forces was unthinkable, given the hostility towards black people in the fabric of American society of the time.57 Accordingly, the white and black GIs were ‘segregated into battalions [and] regiments’, and ‘divisions reserved exclusively for them’.58 Even President Truman’s attempt to desegregate the army failed. He appointed an interracial committee and issued Executive Order 9981 in 1948, which stipulated ‘equal treatment and opportunity for all within the armed services without regard to race’.59 Nevertheless, implementation was delayed and the order was refused by General MacArthur, who kept the soldiers segregated.60 Kang’s photographs represent these layers of inequality and oppression, which are hidden behind the depictions of ‘normal’ relationships between black GIs and Korean sex workers, thus engendering an even stronger sense of uneasiness and agitation in the viewers’ minds. It is this sense of discomfort that Kang’s photography evokes: the feeling of awkwardness and ludicrousness to witness the ‘discrepancies’ between different races and customs that were ‘forcibly juxtaposed by geopolitical circumstances’.61 It is uncomfortable because the photographs make viewers face the memories that they had previously rejected. The background of a typical club interior of the 1980s and other objects also serve as strong reminders, for the people who experienced it, of 1970s and 1980s South Korea. Vividly resuscitating this deliberately forgotten memory, Kang ironically calls them ‘commemorative portraits’, although arguably no one in the country would like to commemorate the photographed subjects. In creating these images that evoke uncomfortable memories, Kang tends to illustrate the protagonists in a straightforward manner, unlike his other projects, in which he adopts a detached, allusive photographic language. The couples who feature in the photos do not appear as peripheral subjects, but rather as central figures. Gerry Badger once noted that ‘a portrait photograph’, which ‘immediately grabs the viewer’s attention and triggers profoundly personal responses – emotional, paradoxical and not always rational’, is perhaps the most ‘charismatic of all the genres of photography’.62 Kang’s photographs take the form of portrait photography that triggers ‘personal responses’, thus confronting and actively summoning the repressed memories of the forgotten subjects. By staging specific individuals who arouse strong personal responses, with a background that serves as a reminder of a specific time and space, Kang’s photographs illuminate the realm of the vernacular, ‘the quotidian lives of specific individuals’ that were hidden behind the grand narrative of the Korean–American relationship.63 Vernacular memory, according to John Bodnar, is formulated and sustained by small-scale social units, rather than ‘“imagined communities” of a large nation’, sharing the same experiences and restating views of reality acquired from first-hand experiences.64 It is distinct from official memory, which is formed in order to maintain the ‘continuity of the institutions’, as well to ‘promote nationalistic, patriotic culture’.65 It is ‘public memory’ that emerges from the point where vernacular and official memory intersect, privileging some memories over others in order to mediate competing constructions of reality.66 Since ‘public commemorations usually celebrate official concerns more than vernacular ones’, Bodnar argued that it is usually vernacular memory that is overlooked during the formation of nationalistic public memory.67 Despite the disadvantageous status of vernacular memory in the strongly selective formation of public memory, the very existence of vernacular memory is essential in a society in order to be vigilant against the operation of hegemonic memory represented on a national scale. The photography Kang produced in Dongducheon, for example, is a synecdoche of the lives of specific individuals and the relationships between them. It creates an alternative narrative to the official contexts of the legacy of the war and the US military’s presence in South Korea that neglect personal narratives. As Kang’s photography series reveals, vernacular memory can pose a threat to the ‘sacred and timeless nature of official expression’, thus functioning as a counter-hegemonic memory.68 Being contested and challenged by vernacular memory, public memory can leave a space of contingency, in which alternative memories can be created and history can be reimagined. Due to this potential of vernacular memory to provide a counter-narrative to the official accounts of history, many postmemory-generation artists in Korea have focused on highlighting the lives of specific people who have been overlooked in the formation of the official memory. From Maehyang-ri: Silent Photography From Maehyang-ri is a series of landscape photographs taken in a small Korean farming village located 80 km southwest of Seoul. The village is called Maehyang-ri, meaning ‘village of the scent of apricot blossoms’, which was used as the US military’s test site for new weapons and a bombing and firing range for over fifty years. Until the Korean government recovered ownership of the village’s territory and officially closed the range in 2005, the village’s ecosystem was seriously damaged; many residents had been wounded or even killed by mistaken bombings or unexploded bombs and suffered from hearing problems as well as serious psychiatric disorders.69 What happened to this village and its residents, however, had not been known in other parts of the country until the 2010s. The series illustrates the scenery of the village’s seacoast with low-contrast black-and-white images, where shell casings, wrecked vehicles, and distorted metal fragments are abandoned along the shoreline. One of the photographs from the series, for example, depicts the seashore, which occupies more than half of the overall surface of the photograph, covered by large shell casings (Fig. 8). Although they take up the wider surface of the image, the bomb casings do not clearly function as the central subjects of the photograph. They look to be sinking into the ground, blurring the boundary between them and their background; furthermore, they are naturally composed to point towards the sea and the sky, thus de-centring the image by directing viewers’ eyes towards distant points. Fig. 8. Open in new tabDownload slide Kang Yong Suk, From Maehyang-ri, 1999, 70 × 80 cm, gelatin silver print. © Kang Yong Suk. Courtesy the Artist. In these depictions of the remnants of bombings, one thing that is consistently missing is the existence of any inhabitants. It is almost impossible to spot a person in this series of photographs, except for a few examples that contain a tiny human figure indistinguishable from the scraps of metal scattered around them (Fig. 9). The person is apparently not the protagonist in these works as he or she appears as a relatively powerless figure, dwarfed by the landscape and its ruination. These deserted landscapes, thus, do not encourage onlookers’ immersion into the photography at all; rather, they prevent viewers from becoming absorbed in the photographs by portraying the landscape as flat images. In several interviews relating to the series, the artist noted that he had intentionally used grey tones in these images after experimenting with different development techniques that helped expand the mid-tones in order to reduce the sense of emotion and allow an impersonal approach.70 Kang explained that, in this way, he attempted to differentiate his works from prevalent war photography largely based on sentimentalism, which aims to appeal to viewers’ emotions.71 In these flat photographs, in which the boundary between foreground and background is blurred and central subjects that draw the viewers’ attention are missing, the gaze of the viewer is dispersed all over the photographs’ surface. These images, which do not allow the viewers to project their emotions onto them, are clearly different from other over-circulated images of documentary photography or cinema that arouse viewers’ empathy based on nationalism and patriotism. Park Chan-Kyong, an artist and art critic, argued that Kang’s Maehyang-ri photographs still held a special position in the 2000s due to the prevalent use of ‘documentary photography that depicts war or similar strife in a mode of dramatic exaggeration’ in the country.72 Fig. 9. Open in new tabDownload slide Kang Yong Suk, From Maehyang-ri, 1999, 70 × 80 cm, gelatin silver print. © Kang Yong Suk. Courtesy the Artist. In relation to his use of grey tones in these black-and-white images, it might be worth noting here that, in 1992, Kang translated Arnold Gassan’s book Exploring Black & White Photography (1989), which presents an introduction to the techniques of, as well as critical discussions around, black-and-white photography into Korean.73 In the translator’s postscript to this book, Kang claimed that ‘black-and-white photography is a sort of an abstraction representing reality’, and that ‘its methods and areas of expression have developed into something that is rigorously professional and personal’.74 Arguing that creating black-and-white photography requires the photographer’s capability and strong will to intervene and control the whole procedure of getting the proper exposure, developing, printing, and conserving photographs, Kang emphasised that black-and-white photography opens up room where each photographer can demonstrate their artistry and unique individuality.75 Kang’s statement shows that he was very much favourable to black-and-white photography and the artistic autonomy that he believed it guarantees to photographers. Seen in this light, his turn towards the use of black-and-white photography in From Maehyang-ri and his meticulous experimentation to develop the perfect grey tone can be understood as his endeavour to achieve advanced artistic quality as well as autonomy in his photographs. Park Chan-Kyong interestingly called the Maehyang-ri photographs ‘silent’ images.76 The silence – emphasised by the lifelessness and stillness of the photographs – casts a stark contrast with the reality of the place, in which the residents were exposed to explosive noise on a daily basis for over fifty years. These silent photographs, however, are often met with suspicion regarding their representability of historically difficult subjects. British photography critic David Campany expressed his doubts regarding this ‘cool’ attitude of contemporary photographers in terms of dealing with legacies of traumatic events. In a 2003 article, Campany argues that photographers had stopped actively engaging with the event itself and rather tended to record the ‘trace of the trace of an event’, calling this belated depiction ‘late photography’.77 He pointed out that these photographs ‘often contain no people, but a lot of remnants of activity’, and that the viewers ‘are left to imagine [what has happened] or to be informed [about the event] by other means’, similar to viewers’ experiences when they see Kang’s photographs of Maehyang-ri.78 Campany was critical that this tendency of ‘late photography’ has become merely a ‘“convincing style” in contemporary culture’, claiming that this ‘retreat from the event is no guarantee of an enlightened position or a critical stance’.79 Sarah James also called attention to the trend of aftermath photography capturing sites of war and terrorism, noting that they engender ‘a strong sense of detachment from the scenes under their lens’.80 Citing Edmund Burke’s argument that terror becomes sublime only ‘when it does not press too close’, she argues that these photographs stay at ‘a safe cultural, moral, and political distance’ and do not ‘“press too close” to the real human face of the war’.81 Questioning the representability of the terror of death in these photographs embedded with ‘sublimity of abstraction’, James warns that these photographs that suggest ‘an empty landscape that pervades [the] military sublime’ are ‘in danger of displacing violence from the political … to the natural’.82 She further claims that ‘in this context, photography cannot but objectify and universalise the sublime experience, forcing the beholder of the sublime moment into a position of moral and subjective superiority’.83 Despite the deep doubts that Campany and James have raised regarding late photography or the military sublime, however, it is debatable whether it can be disregarded as only a ‘convincing style’, as Campany described it. Representing the aftermath of traumatic events from a distanced viewpoint, which can be categorised as ‘late photography’ in Campany’s words, has become commonplace in contemporary photography. Discussing such recurrent belatedness in recent photography, John Roberts observed that it is undeniable that there was ‘a significant change in orientation in how recent photography thinks about its connectedness to the temporality of the event …’.84 Regarding this ‘photography of the event in which the event is displaced from its conditions of immediacy from the outset’, Roberts claimed that ‘here is [a] clear sense that photography has arrived after the event to record what remains of the event, of what can be reconstructed from evidence that an event of significance or import has taken place’.85 To put it differently, it is not just photography that did not arrive on time, but, essentially, ‘a photography of the event-as-aftermath’.86 Roberts argued that, as such, this belated depiction emphasises the ‘ineluctability of the recent past through emphasising the melancholic allure of photographic stillness’.87 Furthermore, he asserted that the tendency of atemporal photography represents its efforts to redefine its relationship to the event, thus establishing ‘a new reportorial role for itself by making a case for the necessary lateness of the photograph’.88 This ‘necessary lateness’, of course, has to do with shifting media culture; digital media took on the reportorial role based on its instantaneity while documentary photographs were mostly removed from immediate use. Analysing the tendency of atemporal photography in South Korea, however, requires more in-depth understanding of the political and cultural specificities that allowed such attitudes to be developed. There has been a growing number of South Korean artists who share an attitude of representing historically, socially sensitive subjects in a somewhat dispassionate tone, and this change has not only been received as a tendency to ‘foster[] an indifference and political withdrawal that masquerades as concern’, as Campany warned.89 For example, in an article on the recent booming of late photography in the Korean art scene, art critic Koh Dong-Yeon pointed out that late photography’s ‘suggestive ways of alluding to the history’ could draw out more participatory and interpretative potential from viewers.90 Citing cultural critic Debbie Lisle’s opinion on late photography, Koh argued that its ‘radically open’ character refuses a ‘reductive account of what actually happens’, but generates ‘the multiple mode of attention’ and provides space ‘for those dispositions to develop’.91 Seen in this light, the holes in the ground and rusty shell casings portrayed in From Maehyang-ri, for example, could enable viewers to reconsider the violent history of the village and the lives of the residents who had to confront that reality. The stillness of the images can be read as an expression of Korean society, which remained in a heavy silence, thus in turn encouraging viewers to rethink the contradictory societal situation that they are living in. Koh pointed out that ‘the ongoing militaristic and ideological battles are something that most of the South Korean people tend to undermine or even repress in their everyday lives’, and the serenity represented in late photography can serve as an ‘important reminder of the paradoxical state of peace’ in the country.92 In a similar vein, Roberts noted the political potential of late photography. Citing an interview with Simon Norfolk, Roberts accounted that the artist’s ‘turn to large-format, panoramic photographs of war zones, “post-conflict” (Bosnia, Afghanistan, Palestine)’, which was distinguished from his former commitment to traditional photojournalism, ‘was an attempt to reawaken a certain attentiveness … in … the lost or diminished spectator of photography’.93 Just as Norfolk ‘re-establish[ed] the repoliticisation of the image’ through his ‘post-conflict’ photography, Kang’s photographs of the aftermath can open up the possibility of new political imagination and intervention. By staging the remnants of a troubled past in an uncomfortably calm and peaceful manner, Kang’s photography takes the notion of the documentary beyond conventional modes of testimony and evidence. The series is a document that is dialectical – on the one hand, it is a testimony of the present and, simultaneously, it refers to the past. Jean-François Chevrier explained this tension by showing that ‘the document provides facts and is a fact in itself’, articulating the status of documentary photography as a medium existing between fact and fiction.94 Kang’s photographic series, which documents the present as a critique of the past, creates vigilance against traditional documentary photography produced during and after the war to be stored in national and military archives, where it functions as evidence of official narratives of memory. Favouring ‘distance and comparative coldness’ over ‘immediacy and warmth (or emotionalism)’, Kang’s photography tends to distance itself critically from what has happened.95 What Kang creates is thus a counter-hegemonic memory, which represents the artist’s resistance against the universal and dominant narrative of official accounts of memory. By revealing the space that has been negated as non-existent, the series urges viewers to think about the consequences of international relations on the lives of the village’s residents that were hidden behind the grand narrative of the Korean–American relationship. Conclusion: Memory as an Ever-present Past In the quiet corners of your conscious mind, memories are waiting. … YOU REMEMBER And you’ve succeeded, haven’t you? Succeeded in putting it all behind you, in pushing away anyone who, with their insistence on raking up the past, threatened to cause you even the slightest pain. Han Kang, Human Acts96 This essay has offered an analysis of the lens-based art practices in post-war South Korea, with a focus on the exploration of the official memory of the Korean War and its aftermath. It explored Kang’s photographic series that actively responded to the legacies of the war by adopting unconstrained representational strategies. Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits spotlights the realm of the vernacular with colourful, straightforward portrait photography, thus summoning memories of specific individuals whose existence had been rejected in the official narratives. From Maehyang-ri represents photography that deliberately ‘arrived after the event to record what remains of the event’, thus portraying the ‘event-as-aftermath’.97 By doing so, what Kang tried to make sense of was the unwavering amnesia of contemporary South Korean society, where numerous lives have vanished namelessly and been forgotten behind the curtain of official memory. The peculiarity of his photographs lies in the representation of the marginalised people and spaces as the embodiment of the collective unconscious.98 They are painful reminders of never-ending war and the lasting legacies of Cold War ideology, as they retain the memories that the country seeks to forget. Kang and other postmemory-generation lens-based artists in South Korea have striven to keep the memory of the Korean War alive and have traced the legacy of the past in their own era. They have also resisted the influence of official narratives of history, which offer limited or distorted viewpoints towards past incidents. The agents of memory control have evolved from US military forces during wartime to anti-democratic dictatorial governments and subsequent governmental authorities that have supported US military activities for the sake of national security. The domestic public have also formed part of this decades-long process of gradual oblivion, ignoring various ongoing tragedies because they believed that they needed to endure them in order to retain US military power in the country. Thanks to their cooperation, what happened in Gwangju, Dongducheon, and Maehyang-ri has successfully been forgotten or even romanticised as a memory of sacrifices for the country’s prosperity. In Human Acts, the author tells a woman, one of the protagonists who went through the massacre in Gwangju, that she has forgotten all her traumatic memories of the incident. Although the author narrates that she ‘succeeded in putting it all behind’ her, the story reveals that she vividly remembers what happened during the uprising, but has trouble sharing these painful memories with others.99 Throughout the novel, those who were involved in the incident are depicted as having trouble making sense of and continuing their lives. They are haunted by the aftermath of the incident while being seriously affected by an oppressive anti-democratic dictatorship. The voice of the author, asking if she has succeeded in forgetting everything that made her uncomfortable, can therefore be read as a question to the people in contemporary South Korean society who have cooperated in the collective forgetting. Although decades have passed, the society is still influenced by the far-reaching effects of the war and subsequent ideological conflicts, memories of which remain in the photographs of mixed-race war orphans, sex workers serving American GIs in camp towns, missile casings abandoned along the shoreline, and a small person picking through metal scraps to sustain a meagre living. These photographs allow viewers to grasp the substance of post-war memory that throws a shadow over contemporary South Korean society. Since the momentum required to accomplish deimperialisation after the Korean War was lost, the Korean public was never given the chance to collectively come to terms with memories of the war and subsequent ideological conflicts; people were instead left to find a way to overcome the legacies of the past on their own. This is not very different from the complexities that young people in Japan or China had to face in the decades after the Second World War and the Cultural Revolution, respectively. As Andreas Huyssen has noted about nations ‘in the wake of histories of mass exterminations, apartheids, military dictatorship, and totalitarianism’, people are ‘faced … with the unprecedented task of securing the legitimacy and future of their emergent polity by finding ways to commemorate and adjudicate past wrongs’.100 As a consequence, contemporary lens-based artists play an important role in this process of reconnection and reconciliation with the past; their art practices reconfirm the productive potential of memory, which provides a new, powerful link between past atrocities and a better future. Rather than following the pre-coded approach of naming the past, which neutralises it from the living present, their art incorporates fragments of the past to reorient the present and thereby the future. Cultural critic Laura Marks emphasised the importance of these ‘fragments’ when she wrote that: television, movies and other ‘public’ images compose a sort of official history, while the unpreserved present-that-passes is more like unofficial history or private memory. To confront one with the other is to dig between discursive strata—in the process, perhaps finding trace images of unofficial or private memories.101 Such fragments retain what have been excluded from histories, revealing the inaccuracy and inadequacy of historiography. Through the collection of these fragments, the art demonstrates the artists’ struggle to create an alternative history in a form of counter-hegemonic memory, thus verifying the hypothesis about the productive role of memory: that is, memory can be a ‘powerful agent of change’ that can transform our relationships with the past and forge new courses of action.102 Funding This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (2017S1A6A3A01079727). Footnotes 1. Ernest Renan, ‘What Is a Nation? (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?)’, Text of a conference delivered at the Sorbonne on 11 March 1882, in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny (eds), Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), trans. Martin Thom, p. 45. 2. Korean names are given in the East Asian order, namely surnames first. 3. Jie-Hyun Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism in Contested Memories: National Mourning and Global Accountability’, in Aleida Assmann et al. (eds), Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 140. 4. Comfort women are women from Korea, China, and other occupied countries who were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army before and during the Second World War. 5. Kuan-Hsing Chen, Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 7. 6. Chen, Asia as Method, p. 8. 7. Chen, Asia as Method, p. 8. 8. Chen, Asia as Method, p. 8. 9. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 4, Winter 1996, p. 662. 10. Hirsch, ‘Past Lives’, p. 662. 11. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2001, p. 8. 12. Hirsch, ‘Past Lives’, p. 662. 13. Keun Sik Jung and Sung Hyun Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin ui yeoksa sahoehak: Migun sajin budae ui hwaldong ul jungsing uro [Historical Sociology of Korean War Photography: Focusing on the Activities of the US Army Signal Corps Photo Unit] (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2016), p. 20. Translation mine. 14. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, p. 20. 15. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, p. viii. 16. Although UNCACK is often misunderstood as an organisation of the United Nations, it was a military unit that belonged to the Eighth United States Army (EUSA), which is a US field army located in South Korea. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, p. 181. 17. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, p. 181. 18. DDT is a chemical compound originally developed as an insecticide. DDT was widely used to kill human body lice and to control diseases, such as malaria, typhus, and yellow fever, during the Korean War. Henry Fuller and Joseph Smadel, ‘Rickettsial Disease and the Korean Conflict’, Medical Science Publication, vol. 4, no. 2, April 1954 <http://history.amedd.army.mil/booksdocs/korea/recad2/ch6-5.html> [accessed 10 April 2018]. 19. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, pp. 212–13. 20. Dr Lee Doyoung first found eighteen confidential photographs portraying executions of political prisoners at NARA and reported them to the regional newspaper Jeju ilbo; these images were published on 24 December 1999. The photographs were published again in another national newspaper, Hankook Ilbo, on 5 January 2000. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, p. 214. 21. ‘The Life and Times of Albert Hardy (1913–1995)’, Photo Histories <http://www.photohistories.com/Photo-Histories/50/the-life-and-times-of-albert-hardy-1913–1995> [accessed 26 October 2018]. 22. Alan Winnington, Breakfast with Mao: Memoirs of a Foreign Correspondent (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 115. 23. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, pp. 227–9. 24. Jung and Kang, Hanguk jeonjaeng sajin, pp. 227–9. 25. Jung Joon Lee, ‘No End to the Image War: Photography and the Contentious Memories of the Korean War’, Journal of Korean Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, Fall 2013, p. 347. 26. Sanghyun Ji, ‘Limb Eung Sik, Hanguk Sajin ui Gilul Yeolda’ [Limb Eung Sik, Opening a Road for Korean Photography], in Limb Eung Sik (Seoul: Yeolhwadang Sajin Mungo, 2013), p. 5. Translation mine. 27. Lee, ‘No End to the Image War’, p. 350. 28. Lee, ‘No End to the Image War’, p. 351. 29. Lee, ‘No End to the Image War’, p. 350. 30. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 139. 31. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 139. 32. For a discussion of Joo Myung Duck’s The Mixed Names series, see Nayun Jang, ‘The Mixed Names: The Birth of the Photo-Essay in South Korea in the 1960s’, Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, vol. 42, Dec 2021, pp. 130–44. 33. Lee, ‘No End to the Image War’, p. 346. 34. Kang Han, Human Acts (London: Portobello Books, 2014), trans. Deborah Smith, pp. 140–1. 35. Deborah Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Han, Human Acts, pp. 4–5. 36. Kwang-Soo Lee, ‘Noh suntag ui manggak gigye: Giuk ai daehan damron ul tonghan “5·18” ui sajin jaehyun’ [Photographic Representation of 5.18 Focusing on the Discourse of Memory: The Forgetting Machines of Noh Suntag], Yeoksa wa munhwa, vol. 28, Nov 2014, p. 124. Translation mine. 37. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 138. 38. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 139. 39. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 140. 40. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 140. 41. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 159. 42. Lim, ‘Victimhood Nationalism’, p. 159. 43. Hannah Ahrendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), p. 278. 44. Hirsch, ‘Past Lives’, p. 662. 45. Yanggongju means ‘Yankee princess’ or ‘Western princess’. 46. Byung-sup Kim, Hanguk ui geundae gonggan un eotteoke hyungsung doeeo watneunga. [How the Modern Space in Korea has been Formed] (Seoul: Jisaem, 2012), p. 43. Translation mine. 47. Beomseon Yi, ‘Obaltan’ [A Stray Bullet], Hyundai munhak (October 1959), page unknown. 48. Young Min Moon, ‘Report from the Underside: Dongducheon’, Trans Asia Photography Review (TAP), vol. 3, no. 1, Fall 2012 <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.110> [accessed 20 April 2018]. 49. Moon, ‘Report from the Underside’. 50. Pyung-Jong Park, ‘Bundan hyunsil ui dagakjuk jomang: dongducheon ginyum sajin aiseo hanguk jeonjaeng ginyumbi ggaji [Multilateral Observation of the Reality of the Divided Nation: From Dongducheon Commemorative Portraits to the Korean War Monuments]’, Official Website of Parkgeonhi Foundation, publication year unknown <http://geonhi.com/korean/강용석동두천기념사진-1984/> [accessed 19 April 2018]. 51. Bunyan hyunsil, Park (2010). 52. Bunyan hyunsil, Park (2010). 53. Moon, ‘Report from the Underside’. 54. Mihyang Park, ‘Chabunhan heukbaekton ae bichin bundan ui heunjukdul’ [Remnants of Division Reflected upon Calm Black-and-white Images], Hangyeore, 4 August 2010 <http://www.hani.co.kr/arti/specialsection/esc_section/433526.html> [accessed 23 October 2018]. Translation mine. 55. Park, ‘Chabunhan heukbaekton’. 56. Park, ‘Chabunhan heukbaekton’. 57. William Bowers et al., Black Soldier White Army: The 24th Infantry Regiment in Korea (Washington, DC: Centre of Military History, United States Army, 1996), p. 263. 58. Bowers et al., Black Soldier, pp. 263–4. 59. Bowers et al., Black Soldier, p. 37. 60. Tom O’Lincoln, ‘A Munity Against Racism’, Socialist Worker, 15 February 2012 <https://socialistworker.org/2012/02/15/mutiny-against-racism> [accessed 4 December 2018]. 61. Lucy Lippard, ‘Countering Cultures: Part II’, in Min Joong Art (exh. cat.) (New York: Artists Space, 1988), p. 3. Cited in Moon, ‘Report from the Underside’. 62. Gerry Badger, The Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed Our Lives (London: Quadrille, 2007), p. 169. 63. Moon, ‘Report from the Underside’. 64. John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 13–14. 65. Bodnar, Remaking America, pp. 13–14. 66. Bodnar, Remaking America, p. 15. 67. Bodnar, Remaking America, p. 16. 68. Bodnar, Remaking America, p. 14. 69. Chan-kyong Park, ‘Leviathan: Kang Yong Suk’s Maehyang-ri Photographs’, The Aftereffects of War in Asia: Histories, Pictures and Anxieties, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, trans. Young Min Moon <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.7977573.0003.106> [accessed 27 April 2016]. 70. Sang Yeop Lee, ‘Dongducheon, maehyung-ri, tongil-chon, gurigo sungjeontap ggaji’ [Dongducheon, Maehyang-ri, Tongil-chon, and the Monuments of Victory], Wolgan Sajin, June 2009 <https://www.monthlyphoto.com/webzine/past_view.asp?m_seq=11&s_seq=93&page=1> [accessed 28 April 2016]. Translation mine. 71. Yong Suk Kang, ‘Artist’s Statement (July 1999)’, in Yong Suk Kang (ed.), Maehyangri Pungyeong [The Landscape of Maehyang-ri] (Seoul: Nunbit, 1999), p. 98. 72. Park, ‘Leviathan’. 73. The original book was published by Wm C Company Publishers (Dubuque, IA) in 1989. The translated book, titled Heukbaek Sajin Mandeulgi (Making Black-and-White Photography), was published in Korean by Nunbit in 1992. 74. Yong Suk Kang, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, in Arnold Gassan, Heukbaek Sajin Mandeulgi [Making Black-and-White Photography] (Seoul: Nunbit, 1992), trans. Yong Suk Kang, p. 303. Translation mine. 75. Kang, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, p. 303. 76. Kang, ‘Translator’s Postscript’, p. 303. 77. David Campany, ‘Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on the Problems of “Late Photography”’, in David Green (ed.), Where Is the Photograph? (Brighton: Photoforum; Maidstone: Photoworks, 2003) <http://davidcampany.com/safety-in-numbness> [accessed 15 June 2016]. 78. Campany, ‘Safety in Numbness’. 79. Campany, ‘Safety in Numbness’. 80. Sarah James, ‘Making an Ugly World Beautiful? Morality and Aesthetics in the Aftermath’, in Julian Stallabrass (ed.), Memory of Fire: Images of War and The War of Images (London: Photoworks, 2013), p. 126. 81. James, ‘Making an Ugly World Beautiful?’, p. 127. 82. James, ‘Making an Ugly World Beautiful?’, p. 125. 83. James, ‘Making an Ugly World Beautiful?’, p. 125. 84. John Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph: Event, Archive, and the Non-Symbolic’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 2009, p. 290. 85. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 289. 86. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 289. 87. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 289. 88. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 289. 89. Campany, ‘Safety in Numbness’. 90. Dong-Yeon Koh, ‘“Late Photography” in South Korea: Heungsoon Im, Onejoon Che, Suyeon Yun’, Photography & Culture, vol. 8, no. 1, 2015, p. 85. 91. Debbie Lisle, ‘The Surprising Detritus of Leisure: Encountering the Late Photography of War’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 29, no. 5, 2011, pp. 874–88. Cited in Koh, ‘“Late Photography”’, pp. 85–104. 92. Koh, ‘“Late Photography”’, pp. 83–4. 93. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 291. 94. Jean-François Chevrier, ‘Documentary, Document, Testimony…’, in Frits Gierstberg (ed.), Documentary Now! Contemporary Strategies in Photography, Film and the Visual Arts (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2005), p. 48. 95. Chevrier, ‘Documentary, Document, Testimony’, pp. 54–5. 96. Han, Human Acts, p. 169. 97. Roberts, ‘Photography after the Photograph’, p. 289. 98. Kang’s photographic series addressing the question of how to represent marginalised beings through photography leads to a broader discussion of representation and political agency in photography. It is worth underlining that, as Tanushree Ghosh rightly pointed out, the scholarly considerations of race, gender, and representation in photography have often contributed to the affirmation of the ‘cultural imaginary of the isolated subject–victim and the sympathetic, yet privileged, spectator’. Scholars such as Ariella Azoulay have suggested alternatives to such fixed, one-directional models of onlookers and images, but East Asia’s different histories and constructions of the social and public spheres should be carefully considered in understanding such theories. Further investigation would thus be beneficial to generate the possibility of other ways of representing the marginalised that allow more activism and ‘anti-colonial ways of seeing’ in East Asia. Tanushree Ghosh, ‘Witnessing Famine: The Testimonial Work of Famine Photographs and Anti-Colonial Spectatorship’, Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 18, no. 3, December 2019, pp. 327, 351. 99. Han, Human Acts, p. 169. 100. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, p. 26. 101. Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), p. 41. 102. Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt, Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 4. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/pages/standard-publication-reuse-rights) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Memory as an Ever-present Past: Photographic Representations of US Military Presence in South Korea
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcac020
DA - 2022-12-09
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/memory-as-an-ever-present-past-photographic-representations-of-us-OX4uZ4jKRh
SP - 405
EP - 426
VL - 45
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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