EN

A Nameless Woman, She

“Even though it seems pitiful and boring on one day, on another day this may no longer be the case. I need to fix and rewrite numerous sentences and add to them in order to persuade myself. To burst out laughing is too shameful, I don’t like it.”

“I wasn’t scared of walking at night. What’s frightening was to forget myself. I was forgotten. I spoke many times, but maybe what I said was too trivial. I was easily forgotten and gossiped about, though I spoke many times.” 


 -She series, excerpt of a conversation-


The theme of woman in the contemporary art world was broached in the 1970s by feminists in the United States in ways that they recognized the structural contradictions of patriarchal systems and challenged the male-dominated culture. The female body, which had been alienated due to sexual repression, surfaced as a major subject matter in exploring awareness towards gender/sexuality as perceived by women. Their critical attitude helped incorporate the female body into the realms of art, decorative art, crafts, and even sewing, which was once denigrated as a female domestic labor. These early feminist arts, such as performance, installation, and body art, were mostly based on radical discourses and relatively straightforward speech. Since the mid-1980s, the feminist arts have developed into a way that appropriated or subverted the female images that were publicly represented in the mass media, such as film. For example, Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, and Barbara Kruger’s use of image and text that drew upon mass media. Even now such attempts are done by many artists in an effort to rehabilitate women’s self-perceptions. However, it is difficult to conclusively state that all those works can be considered as part of the feminist art movement, as for decades it has not worked on simple logic and forms. 

Jin Hee Kim, who has just turned thirty, has unflaggingly taken pictures of Korean women in their twenties. In this exhibition, Kim shows us honest perspectives about her subject’s memories, wounds, and trauma. By going one step beyond her previous subject matter, such as the first sexual experiences and desires of women in their twenties, Kim now densely embedded titles with the nine portraits. The texts signify implicit messages, as if they were taken out of magazine covers or advertisements; however, these meanings are barely intelligible. Just a slight hint is given through the letters or short talks that are shared between Kim and the other women, from whom these ambiguous texts come from. The reason why Kim’s photos are particularly whimsical lies in the way that they reveal a certain kind of subtle sensitivity and psychology, which belong only to women, in the combining of body gestures with text. The text in this context serves as another type of visual language that facilitates female perception. In combining image and text to challenge and subvert the fixed notions of woman, Kim’s work may be related to that of Kruger’s. We Won’t Play Nature to Your Culture (1983), one of Kruger’s most representative works, instantiates the confrontation between the natural and the cultural as deeply rooted as a conflict between man and woman, as she wrote the eponymous title on a photograph of a young woman sunbathing with her both eyes hidden with leaves. Kruger’s skeptical and straightforward texts are used as a way to break down the prevalent sexual discrimination and prejudice deeply rooted in American society. This exemplifies a gender dynamic that “men act while women are acted upon, and men are speakers and producers of meaning, while women are no more than holders of meaning as objects of speaking, and until then, young women had been objects of seeing, far from being subjects.” [1]

What does Kim intend to present through her way in juxtaposing image and text, which are in conflict with one another? Kim’s phrases resemble literary texts, such as poems that refuse to be transparently univocal, while Kruger’s work is suggestive of mainstream advertisements. The young women appearing in this series act as both objects of visual desire and subjects having a voice. However, Kim simplifies the sincere talk into just a few phrases, and translates them into different languages, in order to hide the original messages. As in Kim’s first series Whispering (2009-2013), the conversation among women seems like mumbling that is yet to be articulated. In addition, the title of Kim’s work, She (also a third person pronoun), is phonetically similar to an exclamation, “sh,” as in telling someone to be quiet. It evokes certain emotive feelings that are embarrassing yet secretive, and are also clear yet not fully explicable. The intense gazes projected by the women might be embarrassing to viewers, and even to themselves, as if saying, “We do not want to explain, but please just understand us.” Such a symbolic and shorthand way of speaking by women quite possibly leads men to conclude, “women are totally unpredictable.” This is the point where the women in the She series appear as the “Other with no name,” instead of remaining as objects who comply with (men’s) trivial pleasures. Therefore, attention should be drawn to the fact that the women in the She belong both to speakers and holders of meaning without being characterized as one or the other. 

As previously mentioned, Kim’s incomplete text and geometric patterns on the images evoke emotional and psychological empathy as they contradict one another. In addition, such incoherency and vagueness is often repetitively found in the process of sewing with threads. The hours-long sewing is allegedly quite different from Kim’s previous experience in working with the camera to obtain a few photographs. The repetitive behavior, in sewing the surface of photographs requires long tedious laborious efforts and somehow became Kim’s responsibility to determine which memories are to be hidden and which ones are to be exposed. Paradoxically speaking, their memories changed anew as Kim’s act of sewing and “healing” brings about unexpected effects in “damaging” the original prints. The backside of the photograph reveals entangled traces of the threads, which are a deep contrast to the exquisitely embroidered patterns on its front side. However, it is only the front side that the viewer is able to view. 

Kim states that she began sewing to cure the wounds of past unpleasant memories and shameful emotions belonging to her subjects. Unlike the initial attempts to guarantee their anonymity by covering parts of the women's naked bodies, while sewing with echoes of their narratives, Kim is doubtful whether their wounds are curable. Also included in this exhibition is another series titles April, which is based on the Jindo incident on April 16, 2014. In general, April is a herald of spring, signifying a new beginning and inspiring hope. However, this past April has become emblematic of deep sorrow and pain in Korea. Since the South Korean Sewol ferry disaster, April has turned into a time of the year when Koreans are bound to be reminded of that tragic accident. Even without the phrase, “We won’t forget!” that is inscribed on Kim’s photo, the yellow dots shattered all over the surface leave one with feelings of a peaceful but plaintive sadness. The pale hues convey some wish of healing the wounds in the still heartrending memories. Is it possible to relive someone’s memory and heal the wounds? As for memory, trauma, and melancholia, Freud argued that an experience of tragedy or loss (such as a death of a loved one or a national disaster) makes a person unconsciously deny memories from the past; trauma is of such a critical nature as to threaten one’s own existence, therefore it is often repressed from coming into the consciousness, in order to protect oneself.[3] Referring to Freud’s repression of the pain and anxiety in the mind, Kim tries to ameliorate the wounds of others by sewing as a way to deal with the loss, fear, and uneasiness, instead of just reporting the reality. Kim weaves patterns that are drawn from memories, rather than merely making unkempt promises, or witnessing the tragedy of the reality. In a sense, healing might be none other than a bleaching of memory. 

Kim’s second series, She, uses the image, text, and sewing, and thereby reflects her perspective on the world in moderate and symbolic ways. As a visual reportage from a woman’s sensitive and subtle view towards wounded memories, Kim hopes that her work is a way in which she can keep establishing a kind of contact with women, rather than conceptualizing the gender issue or power roles as a feminist. The act of sewing threads and tying knots may be to weave new meanings in the memories that have lost their names. 


Contemporary Art Photography Magazine IANN
Jeong Eun Kim, Chief Editor