Previously, artist Dorothy M. Yoon has crossed the boundary between the East/West, reality/fantasy, and has presented us, in an audacious but detailed way, a perspective on the gap between the social perceptions of Asian women and their self-identities, or the ‘taken for granted’ power-relation behind it.
In this exhibition, she captures Saeteomin (North Korean refugee) girls and boys who once moved to the U.S. for study as kids and have returned to South Korea. The girls and boys have seen their lives split between North Korea/South Korea and the U.S./South Korea. Exploring how they, at the Korean territorial and cultural border, have played the role of unrooted person, and have embodied the social perception of them, Yoon is exposing the fictitiousness of that perception.
Korea has only a thin collective memory of these girls and boys. They are, in a sense, characters or icons in fantasy – they are far away, beyond certain visible borders, and they can be consumed by ‘us’, who are inside the solid border now named ‘Korea.’ In fact, they are also products ‘selling well’ in Korean mass media now.
Two people in each photo, looking like twins or doppelgangers, were in fact played by one person. Audiences might read the girl in the photo in clothes which might look like a school uniform of North Korea as ‘the natural self,’ while reading the other girl in full make-up as the ‘the wannabe self’. From the gaze of Korean majority, Saeteomin appear to have only two options: assimilation or alienation. However, Yoon decided to lead audiences to feel a complete isolation, betraying our trusted ‘gaze.’
At first, audiences will be relieved, recognizing the teenagers’ affection, friendship, and trust in the photo. Even the sexuality among the same-sex teenagers, a kind of social taboo, will not stop the audiences from feeling safe, because the sexuality is resting on fantasy, not reality. Moreover, the teenagers in each photo gaze in vagueness, as if not knowing where to look, being cut off from the outside world. For example, in the photo, Okjoo is admiring someone who looks just like herself. As an unrooted person, Okjoo is admiring a K-pop star, who belongs to ‘fantasy’ – whether seen from inside or outside the border. Matthew also admires a Hollywood movie character, which has the same face and body of Matthew himself. Both Okjoo and Matthew seem fully satisfied with their ‘other half’; but the very ‘satisfaction’ indicates that they are freed from the given path of ‘assimilation or alienation’, to which our gaze is heading. Their freedom directly embarrasses our consumer-gaze – we do not want them to escape from our fantasy. They, who once were a safe object of our gaze in fantasy, now turn to live in the real world in the same space and time of us, making us ‘uncomfortable.’
Yoon’s strength, thus, lies in her ability to show the power to subvert the structure of power relation in gaze. Yoon’s works, in that sense, are paradoxically works of reportage; calmly rearranging the direction of the gaze which is caught at the border between fantasy and reality. The prejudices on the unrooted people have been consumed in a form of story like an old fantasy, for example, the stories of the Rococo period. The characters in the story exist only when they are read, becoming the objects of the ‘gaze’. However, in Trunk Gallery, the once-safe story becomes a new reality. It is now our gazes, prejudices, and biases which are deported to far beyond DMZ or Pacific Ocean into a fantasy world, being stuffed, and waiting for somebody to gaze upon or consume us.
Pil Joo Jung (sociology of art)
