Abstract
Abstract To date, one of the first video artworks by and about Zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in Japan), Zainichi artist Soni Kum’s three-channel video work Morning Dew (2020) is based on her interviews with sixteen Zainichi Koreans who went to North Korea during the repatriation project (1959–1984) and came back to Japan, and their descendants. I argue that Morning Dew, deliberately fails to give a coherent Zainichi representation, and in doing so, locates Zainichi experience in a context of the global diaspora, especially through the incongruent video montages on three screens, having animals lead the narrative, and filming the void. Queer imagination of failure helps explain the ways in which Kum’s aesthetic choices and her lived experience intersect. Responsive to the bifurcated gender discourse that threatens the legibility of queer lives, queer failure helps to unveil the structural polarization in identity-based knowledge formation and explicate Kum’s art of failing as a means to convey a portrayal more faithful to the diasporic life of Zainichi Koreans.
Published Version
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