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| Two artists of Korean descent ― Busan-born Dutch creator Sara Sejin Chang, left, and Korean-American artist Young Joon Kwak ― speak during a press preview at the Arko Art Center in Seoul, Wednesday, for "All About Love," their first-ever exhibition in Korea. / Courtesy of Arko Art Center |
Exhibition features Sara Sejin Chang's examination of transnational adoption industry, Young Joon Kwak's exploration of body and gender identities
By Park Han-sol
Contemporary viewers have been bearing witness to the art world's trend in recent years of questioning, critiquing and dismantling hegemonic cultural frameworks ― Western-centric, patriarchal and heteronormative ― in efforts to bring "peripheral" narratives into the spotlight.
Such long-overdue challenging of normative ideas around race, gender, sexuality and nationality is now being highlighted at the Arko Art Center in central Seoul, specifically through the works of Busan-born Dutch creator Sara Sejin Chang and Korean American artist Young Joon Kwak.
"All About Love," the two creators' first-ever exhibition held here, explores their disparate yet similar visual dialogues of decolonization and the deconstruction of identity, ones that draw on their positions as artists of Korean descent.
"For (Korean) adoptees, Korea has always been quite abstract," Chang said at the Wednesday press preview. "Through my work, I do want to connect actively with (my) Korean ancestry or Korean culture, but it has always been more like a one-way effort. I think it's really wonderful to have this exhibition to see it's being more welcomed in Korea as well."
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| Sara Sejin Chang's site-specific installation "Mother Mountain Institute," located on the first floor of the Arko Art Center / Courtesy of Arko Art Center |
On the first floor of the gallery stands Chang's site-specific installation, "Mother Mountain Institute."
As an orrery, or a mechanical model of the solar system, brought to a room-size scale, it likens the revolving sun and moon to a birth mother and child who are in a constant search for one another after they have been separated by the process of the child's transnational and transracial adoption to white families in North America and western Europe.
The room plays parts of the artist's interviews with two mothers ― Korean and Bangladeshi ― as they recount the tragic stories of how they were pressured to believe they were "unworthy" of taking care of their own children and subsequently give them up for a better home.
In between their monologues plays the voice of the speaking mountain, which is endowed with spiritual power in many non-Western countries, including many of the adoptees' homelands, as part of pre-Christian indigenous cultures. But with many such cultures historically seen as poor, underdeveloped and inferior to the United States and Europe, it has led to the justification that the children should be "saved" through adoption by white families in those places.
"I plan to extend this project to other countries where similar processes are happening, but it should be noted that this global adoption industry started from Korea after the Korean War," Chang said.
"I think it's very important to show the work here, because in Korea, this is actually still happening. And Korea is a very wealthy country, so it's very strange that it is not able to give mothers the help (they need) to keep their children."
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| An installation view of the "All About Love" exhibition, on the second floor of the Arko Art Center, shows Young Joon Kwak's sculptures, videos and drawings. / Courtesy of Arko Art Center |
Upon entering the second floor of the gallery, visitors lock eyes with Kwak's sculptures and videos, which are more visually striking and tactile. Kwak's works aim to expand how we view and interpret bodies, as well as explore the multiplicity of identity that cannot be confined strictly to fixed normative social categories of race, gender or sex.
Growing up in a large Korean community in New York and New Jersey had a decisive influence on the artist's concerns with the idea of hybridity.
"I think that being a Korean born in America was really important to me … Oftentimes I felt like I wasn't accepted by Koreans. But then at the same time, I wasn't accepted as an American by Americans. So I think that was really formative in terms of how I think of my work as kind of straddling this in-between space, this divide between cultures," Kwak said.
The artist's concern with "what lies beneath the skin" is notably visualized in a series of sculptures that aim to deconstruct and reimagine intersex, trans and non-binary icons throughout history and visual culture ― including the Greek statue of Hermaphroditus, the two-sexed child of Hermes and Aphrodite, long a symbol of androgyny.
In "Circle Dance and Divine Queer Futures," the artist envisions a gateway or a portal made up of multiple casts of the hands of her friends ― all queer, trans, women and people of color. It's Kwak's way of embracing those who have been alienated amid strictly heteronormative systems and promoting queerness as a "future-oriented, profoundly utopian mode of being and doing in the world."
In both Chang's and Kwak's pieces, a community of empathy, support and solidarity is proposed as a way to overcome collective traumas and build a truly forward-looking narrative.
"All About Love" runs through July 17 at the Arko Art Center.
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| Installation view of the "All About Love" exhibition on the second floor of Arko Art Center / Courtesy of Arko Art Center |
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