Abstract

<Still Hear the Wound: Towards an Asia, Politics, Art To Come> is a project on Asia, politics, and art curated by Zainichi feminist and philosopher Jeonghwa Lee in 2007. The project offers new methodologies, including an artistic and aesthetic response to issues surrounding Japan's responsibility for colonial crime. In other words, this project begins by reflecting the colonial history of Okinawa that overlapped with Korea (or Jeju), and contains questions about how the two regions will pursue new modes of political community. Among them, this paper focues on Soni Kum's <Still Hear the Wound>(2009), which deals with mass suicide during Battle of Okinawa, <Vegetation>(2009) which describes art performance on Jeju Masscare and Tari Ito's <I Will Not Forget You>, which overlaps the issue of mass suicide in Okinawa and the comfort women issue. Furthermore, Soni Kum made the documentary, <Leyte Dream>(2010) on forced Laborers and comfort women in Leyte Island, Philippines and Noriko Sekakuchi made <Women of the Battlefield>(1989), which covered the testimonies about Korean comfort women in New Guinea. I will also analyze these works. These works deal with issues of dialogue and communication between local historical events overlapping across national borders between Korea and Japan as important topics. Therefore, I would like to analyze these film arts using the concept of ‘transnational local', a concept focused on the space of local. A Zainichi scholar, Jinseok Choi , points out that the historical conditions of the transnational local between Korea (or Jeju) and Japan (or Okinawa) are ‘scarring of Japanese imperialism’ and ‘legacy of colonialism’ along with the Cold War. Taking this point into consideration, I would like to see how the above works emphasize dialogue and communication between the locals, which are the basis of solidarity and memory against state violence or imperialist violence, rather than being reduced to other nationalism and globalization. Also, the above works shows ‘traversing, translating and violating of body and place’ through performability of film or performance art which indicates ‘subjective expression technique.’ ‘interaction between real material and the performance of producer or performer,’ ‘the coexistence of actors and spectators.’ This is also well connected with the transnational local of transversality and translatability.

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