Order Description
For your portfolio, you are asked to address a question or theme of your choice that combines aspects of the work of two or more of the artists listed in the attachments.
Reviews
Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 4, July, 2005, 427–443
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2005 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820500123778
0124STCO029oahTr.0iyi1Tgr05lad0ioE -0nn 8Sr0T10ga 0i0a&1JPlen/ 0nu2x0aAd 0dlF3rt9oyr k r65(nFt aip202 rcnBr0a.8lisce0nrn8gia5cst2mn)i 0/Gse05 wLr00ot0 0duA01p-P2 0LT307t 0d17008 2(o1n7l2i3n,e )Sinlim 8-dongGwanak-guSeoul 151-018South Koreasoyang_72@hotmail.com ‘Xen: Migration,
Labor, and Identity’
Yong Soon Min with Allan
deSouza
Soyang Park
I saw Allan deSouza dressed in a white shirt and
trousers, and serving drinks at the opening of ‘Xen:
Migration, Labor, and Identity’, an exhibition by the
LA-based artist, Yong Soon Min. I greeted him and
asked, ‘Where is Yong Soon?’ But as soon as I took a
drink, he turned his back, and moved on to other
guests as if he had not seen me.
I realised later that I was a participant in a
performance, titled X and with multiple references:
it is used in mathematics, and more generally, to
denote an unknown or unknowable factor: it refers
to a branding mark as used in slavery; it also marks
the place where one writes one’s signature. ‘X’, then,
is both a marker to inscribe individual distinctiveness
and, paradoxically, a marker of the unknown.
The way deSouza avoided eye contact with the
guests reminded me of the habitual mode of encounter
between Koreans and foreign workers. Even
though Koreans have lived with foreigners before,
not least the 27,000 American soldiers stationed in
Korea since the end of the Korean War, the Korean
relationship with Americans, although it is taboo to
admit, is ambivalent. Americans are viewed both as
benefactors and as mercenaries of expansionism,
reminding Koreans of the fact that they have been
and continue to be colonised. Unlike Americans,
Asian migrant workers – from South Asia, Nepal,
Mongolia, and China – who have been channelled
into 3-D jobs (dirty, difficult, and dangerous) have
been regarded as invisible, although their presence
in the social landscape has become an increasingly
significant part of this supposedly homogenous
nation.
The influx of workers since the 1990s has led to
more discussion of working conditions and abuse
and the government’s Industrial Trainee System,
which is renowned for giving employers and recruitment
brokers generous leeway to exploit foreign
labour.
‘Xen’, the title of the exhibition, is derived from
the Greek root word, ‘xenos’, meaning foreign or
strange, and is also a homonym of Zen, the Buddhist
method of enlightenment. The show raises an urgent
question for Korean viewers, as to how they deal
with these foreign workers who fulfil the nation’s
growing need for labour but who face systemic
racism.
DeSouza emphasised this ambivalence towards
foreigners in the second part of the performance by
shaving his face and head, and serving the used
water to the viewers. In contrast to the drinks served
earlier, this water contained his corporeal debris, the
body parts of the servant, requiring us to accept his
body too, not just his labour. Min, on the other
hand, constructed different physical and intellectual
spaces on three different floors of the gallery building.
The combination of heterogeneous and multilinear
elements complements and provokes questions
of alterity. Through the different spaces, her project
evolves from ethnography towards a contemplation
that implicates viewers.
In 2003, Min conducted interviews with migrant
workers from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Burma,
Pakistan, and the Philippines. The interviews are
viewed directly on the LCD screens of eight video
cameras located as different sculptural ‘viewing
stations’ around the main gallery. This arrangement
nullifies the illusion of transparency. It mediates the
gap between the sites of the immigrants’ labour,
suffering, and struggle, and viewers in the gallery.
Second, in the gallery, viewers needed to sit down
on a mat on the floor or on a small chair to listen to
the interviews through small headphones and to
lean into the small LCD screens to see the images.
This is not as comfortable as viewing a large projection
and creates circumstances similar to how the
interviews were conducted. It also suggests that
what we are seeing is raw material, untouched by
secondary manipulation. Indeed, the interviews are
only nominally edited.
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The interviewees included Samar Thapa from
Nepal, a member of the Equality Trade Union (ETU);
Aishya, a Korean convert to Islam and an active
member of a mosque for South Asian workers; Pakistani
and Bangladesh workers at a moulding factory
in Gunpo; Mishah Don and Saroni from Bangladesh;
Korean volunteers for a Korean language class in
Incheon; a Korean and Pakistani married couple at
their home; Netanyahu, a Brazilian soccer player
who is pursuing an engineering career in Korea; and
Lee Minho, a producer of the TV programme, ‘Asia
Asia’ at MBC. Min asks about coming to Korea,
their experiences of everyday life, their hopes, their
experience of racism and struggle for their rights, and
about encounters with Koreans.
Among the voices of hope, difficulties, and
desperation, I found some of the interviews intriguing
because of the mode of communication established
between Min and the interviewees. For
instance, Min could communicate best with some in
Korean, though she has hardly spoken it since her
family moved to the US when she was seven years
old. In one interview conducted in English with a
Burmese man, communication was difficult because
of his limited English. He proposed that they switch
to Korean. Min accepted, but had to dig hard in her
memory for the Korean she needed. This flawed
Korean was soon mixed with English, but the interview
proceeded better than before. An imaginary
community was formed in this encounter between
different cultures. Globalisation accelerates the
movement of people, the fusion of their identities,
and the flow of ideas in which previously unrelated
Others become interlinked. The language of the ebb
and flow of diaspora, between a Korean American
and a Burmese in Korea, in this instance is a mix of
English and Korean, secondary languages to each of
them and through which their mutually marginal
and marginalised identities can be mediated.
When Min asked if he liked living in Korea, he
said he would go back if his country were
‘democratised’. His reply reminds Koreans of their
own history. Emigration of Koreans to the US and
elsewhere is circumscribed by Korean political instability,
in turn initiated by invasion and occupation
by outside forces. The Korean War and the military
dictatorships installed since the 1960s displaced
massive numbers of people. But now, other Asians
see Korea as a democratic country and as a place of
asylum. While discrimination against these workers
continues, a question is raised for Koreans: is it not
time to rethink the current ideas of ‘democracy’ and
citizenship that are limited to one ‘race’ and ‘blood’?
In a similar context, the fact that immigrant workers
are fighting for their rights in the name of Jeon
Tae-il (the iconic figure of Korean workers’ struggles),
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430
as is clear from migrant community newspapers Min
installed at one of the viewing stations, is astonishing.
Jeon committed suicide in 1970 to protest against
worker exploitation. He demanded that employers
observe the Labour Standard Act, and that the nation
enforce it.
1
One newspaper declared, ‘never forget Jeon Taeil’,
which, in the gallery, incites Korean viewers to
link themselves to migrant worker rights. As Min
notes, ideas flow as people flow. Migrants not only
import economic opportunities, but absorb and
export the legacy of Korean democracy. One must
also therefore anticipate a reciprocation (as in the
shaving water, for instance), with which they demand
what they have lost using the very tool which is given
them, and from which they have been excluded.
2
In the same room as
Field/Work
is a video piece
Strangers to Ourselves
, titled after the book by the
French cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva. The video,
projecting a circular image, shows various postcolonial
and feminist books – such as
The Location of
Culture
;
Writing Diaspora
;
Women, Native, Other
;
and,
Strangers to Ourselves
– floating on the
rippling water. This floating bibliography of postcolonialism
is a means for Min to expand the scope of
the exhibition beyond its regional outlook. In the
book, Kristeva links the notion of the foreigner or
stranger as deriving from within, rather than from
outside, and connects them to Freud’s idea of alienation
caused by the self-imposed repression of
desire, through which one creates the strangers to
oneself. Min intervenes in this binary opposition of
native and foreigner in the Korean mind (which
continues despite experience of living in the shifting
world that causes excessive production of diasporas).
3
Koreans may be strangers to themselves if they
do not see themselves reflected in the Other within
their own border. These Others have adopted their
own ‘Korean’ faces as they traverse the border in
this age of globalisation.
In a separate space is a revolving projection of
video footage Min shot in the summer of 2003. Entitled
Moving Target
, the video is reconstructed
through the juxtaposition of two edited sequences.
One is of an immigrant street demonstration against
the passage of the EPS (Employment Permit System)
in Myeng-dong, Seoul, which was organised by the
ETU–MB (Migrant Workers’ Union–Migrant
Branch). The other sequence is of Korean pedestrians
walking along a busy street, seemingly disinterested
in anything other than their own business. Each
sequence is cut in parallel horizontal strips, and then
interwoven with the other. Min’s manipulation highlights
the struggles of immigrants within the indifference
of the general public. The constant rotation of
the image haunts the viewer as if it were a memory,
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431
constantly reinscribed/projected onto the body as
one stands in the space.
A collage of letters cut from popular magazines
is glued onto the wall of the room, creating a
contrasting layer of Min’s thought-fragments, with
notes on borders, globalisation, migrants, diaspora,
labour, and identity. This layer begins with ‘the
border is an intellectual laboratory, a conceptual
territory to explore the complex relationships
between cultures’, and continues, ‘Free trade: the
product is protected but not the worker’, and ends
with a quote that Min encountered at the Freud
Museum in Austria: ‘Everywhere I go, I find that the
poet has been there before me.’ I can only guess that
this might be related to Freud’s notion of the
uncanny, a re-encounter with a long-forgotten
memory activated by an unexpected object met in a
foreign place. One may find the trace of the long
forgotten memory of oneself in the face of the
migrants, as they constantly remind us of who we
are and of our Other identity. The irregularity of the
letters creates a quasi-montage, cutting and reassembling
fragments of meanings, images, quotations,
and borrowings into new juxtapositions in a
Benjaminean dialectic of seeing that reveals hidden
meaning between fragments. Min brings to the
surface the discourse of the forgotten through these
fragments from mass culture. She appeals to us to
see beyond the printed surface of the letters, to see
the images of the forgotten, overcoming the distance
lying between our conception of the present and the
presence of the workers.
The final installation is on the floor below in a
dark, almost empty space. A single light falls on a
handwritten note on the far opposite wall. The note
is illegible at this distance, but a video camera
located in the front of the room reveals what is written
there through its LCD screen: ‘Samar Thapa [the
worker from Nepal who Min interviewed, and who
became an activist against the EPS immigration law
that since 2001 perpetuated the enslavement of
foreign workers] was captured on February 15,
2004 and deported.’
This highly mediated environment, which Min
titled
3D Exit: Desperate, Disposable, Deported
,
reminds us of the impasse presently imposed on the
migrant workers. She also reminds us of the existence
of the media, literally mediating the distance between
migrants and Koreans, and whose objectivity can
never be assumed.
Only by experiencing being an Other is one able
to contemplate the relative nature of foreignness and
its latency in our transitional existence. With one in
every 35 people in the world a migrant, we should
understand the importance of this recognition.
Foreign workers were in Korea long before I recognised
them; I learnt of them later, recognising them
only after I had lived in London for many years as a
foreigner myself. Art often fails to deal with current
realities, and the art gallery is a space where forgetting
and appropriation can easily be justified in the
name of sublimation, poetics, and visual pleasure.
Foreigners – their labour and identity – unless treated
as objects of fetishisation, are rarely subjects for
artistic investigation. Projects such as this function
always at the margins of art and politics.
Notes
All images are from Yong Soon Min with Allan deSouza, ‘Xen:
Labor, and Identity’, 13 August to 18 September, 2004,
SsamzieSpace, Seoul.
1. Jeon was a young worker in a fabric factory in Seoul in the
1960s who became a labour activist in order to improve the
inhuman working conditions he and other under-aged workers
endured. He organised a small seminar group with his
colleagues to study ‘The Labour Standard Act’, and challenged
the factory owner, and campaigned for the workers’ rights by
writing to the government and the media. But when he realised
no one was listening to them, he conducted a suicide
demonstration by burning himself, on 13 November 1970,
stating ‘Observe the Labour Standard Act and do not waste my
death’.
2. This reminds me of CLR James’s
Black Jacobin
, which is a
study of a Haitian revolution against white French slave owners
that ended in 1803, which used the legacy of the French
Revolution against the French themselves.
3. Koreans constitute the fourth largest diaspora in the world, but
have little experience of dealing with others within their
homeland, let alone within their art.
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