A Small Memorial, 2016, single-channel video, color, sound, 6min 28sec
2016 was the 20th anniversary of Moon Okju's death, and the Heeum – Museum of Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu moved to a new location and opened a new exhibition to commemorate the occasion, entitled 20th Anniversary Memorial Exhibition, Dear Moon Okju. I became involved in the exhibition and met her in a new way.
In fact, I had been working on a video project about the Japanese military sex slaves for the past few years, and I participated in a comfort women seminar organized by the independent research commune Suyunomo (수유너머). During the seminar, my thoughts about comfort women began to diverge, and I began to see a different side of the movement. I got to hear the “voice” of Moon Okju separately and learned about her participation in the comfort women movement. In particular, her attitude toward life, her freedom, and her artistic talents captivated me.
For A Small Memorial, I went to the “Wednesday Vigil” that is held every Wednesday at 12 o'clock in front of the Japanese Embassy, calling for justice for the victims of sexual slavery, and spoke about Moon Okju and asked people to write letters to her. I took hundreds of handwritten letters, written on hundreds of Korean papers, to her grave. I covered her grave with the letters and circled her grave many times, shaking a small bell. (요령). The sound of the gong traveled far and wide into the sky, calling the dead right there. We met.
“We remember you. We know you, as the dead, are with us. We know how important you are. It was so warm.”
Why Did You Come to My House?, 2016, single-channel video, color, sound, 3min 34sec
The motif of the work is taken from a word game, “Why did you come to my house?”. The song was inspired by the Japanese nursery rhyme “Hanaichimonme” (花いちもんめ). “Hana ichi monme” translates as “a flower is one monme”, where a monme is a low-value coin, and means “a girl who is bought very cheaply.” When the song was brought to Korea, it was translated into Korean as “Why did you come to my house?”. In this song, which has been passed down as a nursery rhyme and a game about selling children from poor families to prostitute quarters during Japan's Sengoku period, the artist sees the class issue of the poor and the rich, and sees it as a parallel to the relationship between the ruling and the ruled during the Japanese occupation. The artist found in the song the hardships and pitiful lives of the subjugated, including the long-term victims of sexual violence by the Japanese military. By intercutting photographs of women dying of Japanese military sexual assault with footage from 1938 of Korean women during the Japanese occupation of Korea voluntarily receiving “golden binyeo” (Korean hairpins) to symbolise an acceptance of a marriage proposal, without knowing or pretending not to know about the horrific and brutal events taking place in Japanese colonial era. She questions what Hannah Arendt called the “ordinariness of evil”. Furthermore, it asks what kind of oblivion our society is currently living in.
Why Did You Come to My House? 2, 2016, single-channel video, color, sound, 15min 13sec
For this artwork, I visited Lee Yong-soo, one of the former comfort women living in Daegu, and expressed her testimony through video work. The works shows her singing songs, talking to visitors, and walking around in her daily life. Through the way she expresses her deep sadness with her whole body, and her appearance as an ordinary grandmother who sings and laughs, I want to reveal a cross-section of the suffering of the victimized women who testify with their own lives in the present moment and be with them now.
She was not anyone's grandmother, but rather a woman who was free because she was old. She could sing very well (she sang “You're My Man”) and was very determined to get something done before she died. She was 16 when she was a victim of sexual slavery, so she was among the youngest of the comfort women, and this made me realize that if I don't focus on this soon, it's really going to get harder.