Korean Artist Talk—“Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project: Wrong Index, Queer Mnemonics” with siren eun young jung
siren eun young jung
Join Duke Arts, the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity, the programs in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist studies and Asian American and Diaspora Studies, and the departments of Art, Art History and Visual Studies and Theater Studies for a special artist talk by visiting Korean artist siren eun young jung.
About the talk:
This talk will focus on jung's representative work and long-term research project, "Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-)". Yeoseong Gukgeuk was a new genre of performance that emerged in Korea's liberation era following its independence from Japanese colonization in 1945. This genre, characterized by gender-bending performances where only women performed on stage, combined elements of pansori—a traditional Korean performance art—with modernized and Westernized proscenium opera. It reached the peak of its popularity in the 1950s but lost prominence during the military dictatorship in the late 1960s when Korea sought to transform into a powerful modern nation-state.
The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project serves as a practice of rewriting history. It uses this unique genre of performance- which began with Korea's modernization but was simultaneously erased by the nation's pursuit of modernity—as an anthropological ethnography. The project analyzes Korea's patriarchal modern history, reinterprets the biased power of historical archives, and imagines same-sex intimacy and queer genealogies.
Instead of aiming for historical restoration that attempts to resurrect lost histories in the present, the project seeks to reveal hegemonic histories that have deliberately erased certain narratives. It aims to create unique ways of remembering the lives of others. Furthermore, the project practices understanding and creating methodological and formal originality in contemporary art. It also serves as an assertion of the artist's own historical grounding in queer and feminist communities.
About the speaker:
siren eun young jung is a Seoul-based visual artist whose work explores the aesthetic and political possibilities of queer performativity, primarily through video and performance.
Born in 1974 in Incheon, South Korea, siren eun young jeung currently lives and works in Seoul. She studied the visual arts and feminist theory at Ewha Womans University (BFA, MFA, and DFA) in South Korea and the University of Leeds (MA). She is interested in how the seething desires of anonymous individuals encounter events in the world and become resistance, history, and politics. She believes that, by ceaselessly reexamining feminist-queer methodology, artistic praxis that is simultaneously aesthetic and political is possible.
Her representative works include the “Dongducheon Project” (2007-2009) and the “Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project” (2008-present), and she works across genres including art, film, and performance. She has grown mainly through major exhibitions in Asia such as “Tradition (Un)Realized” (2014), “Ghosts, Spies, Grandmothers: SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul” (2014), “Discordant Harmony” (2015, 2016), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2015-16), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Taipei Biennial (2017), Shanghai Biennale (2018), Tokyo Performing Arts Market (TPAM)—Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (2014, 2018), Serendipity Art Festival (2018), Kyoto Experiments(2019), Biennale Jogja(2021). She has received the 2013 Hermes Foundation Art Award, 2015 Sindoh Art Prize, and 2018 Korea Artist Prize and participated in the exhibition in the Korean Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.