Estherka Projekt
April 18, 2009
NOH-CHIM (missing), social intervention video, seoul, Korea
An American artist returns to Seoul, Korea where she was born and given up for adoption almost 30 years ago. Interlaced with various art performances and interventions, text from her adoption documents, and national television search for her birth family, the video investigates the process by which the artist was adopted, which was pointedly motivated by Christian ideals. Through a self-reflexive video “documentary” and in vulnerable performances, she struggles with issues of belonging and transnational identity.
Dear kate,
Thanks for posting your work to the site. I know that Jillian will be responding as well, but in the meanwhile, I’m wondering if you would say a bit more about the inclusion of the self-conscious performances in your video, the ones in which you’re engaging in “anti-social” or unconventional behavior (I’m thinking about the eating as well as the laughing in the crowd scenes). Are these metaphors for vulnerability and the struggle to belong? Or something else?
Cheers,
Susan R
Hi Kate,
I’m thinking about the commonalities and divergences in how you approach the issue of transnational identity and adoption and how they are dealt with in films such as Daughter from Danang (http://www.daughterfromdanang.com/) and First Person Plural (http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2000/firstpersonplural/). There is something of an emotional excess or spectacle that is foregrounded in these works, primarily in the form of the weeping female body. In your work, however, emotional and corporeal excess seems to be displayed via eating and laughing. The manner in which you approach it seems aimed at provoking the feeling of displacement to the viewer/spectator.
Also, is translation, via language and emotion, something you are exploring and troubling? I am thinking about moments in the film in which spoken English has English subtitles, and moments in which the viewer realizes that more than one “voice” is addressing them.
Thank you for sharing your work,
Jillian
i was very pleased and excited with your responses to my work.
i think directly or indirectly my work for the last several years, has
taken up language as a medium and intended to interrogate my position as
a speaking subject. Bound up with language is of course translation,
whose translation, who is being translated, and whose voice is
translating. it’s probably more evident in my last work called das
deutschsprachliche projekt in which i refused to speak english for 3
months and only communicated in geman while living in berlin and
zürich. i consider NOH-CHIM to be intimately connected to much of what i
continue to engage. it’s a piece which is highly personal and funtions
quite differently i believe as “high art” because of my critical
investment (at least at that time) in being korean so the distance
needed to appreciate the work on my part took awhile.
i am familiar with those other filmic works about transracial adoption and while i agree that they deal with the excess of spectacle, i think
those spectacles exist in exploiting a traditional narrative. i think these pieces are interesting as documentaries but my intention as artist is different and perhaps even subversive. i am more interested in a critique of my subject position, as a mirrored Other.