Feminism, curating, and writing history : (3) The Methodology of Questioning

In 2018, the exhibition The Arrival of New Women opened at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA), Deoksugung. The first scene I remember from the exhibition is none other than the wall decorated with the exhibition title in large letters and the long line of people waiting to take photo in front of it. It was quite surprising to see so many people lining up in an exhibition hall primarily devoted to modern art and archives. What was it that the people anticipated from an exhibition introducing “New Women" and their arrival? 

In this article, I mention the exhibition, The Arrival of New Women, as one example for rethinking the institutionalization of feminism and curatorial practice based on feminist thought in the contemporary Korean art scene. At the same time, while exploring a number of very subjectively selected exhibitions, I will show that neither the mere preoccupation with the subject nor the participation of female artists guarantees “feminist" curating. Through quite a large number of exhibitions to date, many artists and curators have recognized and expressed the need for a feminist stance and ways of thinking. However, I am not sure whether a corresponding curatorial method or one approximating it has been explored. How might feminist curating, or the preparatory work for it be possible? Can feminist thought be expanded more concretely in the here and now?     

1)    The Deconstruction and Study of History 

The Arrival of New Women
December 21, 2017 - April 1, 2018 (MMCA Deoksugung, Seoul)
Participating Artists: Kim Insook, Rha Sangyoun, Rha Hyeseok, Park Rehyun, Park Eulpok, Bae Jungrye, Lee Hyunok, Jun Myungja, Jung Chanyoung, Chun Kyungja, and others (Total of 68) 

In many cases, considering feminism in the planning of institutional art exhibitions begins with shedding light on the activities of women as a subject. The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) also locates women artists in the genealogy of Korean modernists, holds individual exhibitions, and collects their artworks. By doing so, the MMCA participates in the historicization of feminist art. It is notable that the exhibition The Arrival of New Women, held at MMCA Deoksugung in 2018, did not simply aim to incorporate women artists’ exploration as a subject into existing art history.

The exhibition navigated comprehensive stories surrounding the emergence of Korean New Women based on previous studies in diverse fields such as Korean literature and Korean art history. Various visual and cultural materials at that time, including illustrations from magazines and books, allowed the audience to follow the representation of 1910s and 1920s women or New Women in Korea. The exhibition also included female figures drawn by male artists who submitted their works and won awards at the Joseon misul jeollamhoe (Joseon Fine Arts Exhibition).  In the exhibition, “New Women” were highlighted as women from a particular class who were called by that name, especially artists who had studied abroad and were active in various fields such as art, music, literature, and dance.  In addition to renowned women artists, such as Rha Hyeseok, there were many lesser-known female artists who also studied in Japan at that time. These women attended the craft department for practical reasons, such as to work as educators after returning home. The exhibition showed their embroidered works and illustrated the figurative/abstract images that followed and deviated from the style of Academic painting at the time. The section displaying the craft work of Korean female students at the Japanese Women’s Art School was an important achievement in Korean art history.¹ Also, this implies that the exhibition, interlocking with the description of art history, showed that feminist thought is not limited to the discovery of “Great Women Artists,”² but also provided an opportunity to question and discuss the aesthetic values and styles approved by the existing historical record.

Nevertheless, the exhibition had some noticeable limitations. There were too many narratives that emphasized the romance and marriage of New Women. In fact, the 1920s was a time when the idea of free love spread like a trend along with the emergence of New Women.³ Various media and novels often dealt with the love affairs of New Women. Given that the majority of New Women stories were produced by their contemporary male counterparts, the narratives and descriptions of New Women were mostly objectified and controlled by men. Under the ideology of free love led by married men who had studied abroad, “New Women” were considered their romantic partners. These New Women went through the process of their lives falling apart as they experienced love that was destined for failure.  Rather than critically drawing attention to this background, the exhibition once again romanticized the process of importing the idea of romantic love and free love as the new idea of the time, hanging on the wall letters written by male modernist artists such as Kim Whanki and Lee Jungseob to their wives. Moreover, it only repeatedly confirmed how artists who were called “New Women” walked the path of misfortune, as they became involved with and then split up with men.⁴

Our Sculptural Journey: The Path to Today
June 10, 2022 – July 9, 2022 (WESS, Seoul) 
Participating Artists: Kim Chungsook, Bae Hyungkyung, Baek Yeonsu, Yoon YoungJa, Lee Kyunghee, Rim SongJa, Hwang Jisun 
Explored by Noh Haena, Lee Eusung, Hong Khia
Curated by Noh Haena

Our Sculptural Journey: The Path to Today, curated by Noh Haena, touched upon a gap in Korean art history, namely the modern sculpture of female Korean artists. In fact, the specificity of sculpture and the materiality of sculptural materials are closely related to the bodies and thoughts of women sculptors. As a result, works different from the typical modern (men’s) sculptures that dominate extant art history could have been expected in this exhibition. Hanguk Yeoryu Jogakga Hyeopoe (The Korean Sculptress Association) is a currently active organization of women sculptors. It has provided a channel to encourage curators to have a concrete historical approach to reconsider the contemporary sculptures and Korean modern sculpture movement in the context of feminist thought.⁵ 

In the exhibition, sculptures of seven women artists from Hanguk Yeoryu Jogakga Hyeopoe are exhibited in addition to sculptures of two other contemporary artists, Lee Eusung and Hong Khia. In addition, the team consisting of Noh Haena, Lee Eusung, and Hong Khia visited the sculptors or their families to gain further information. They recorded  the artists’ oral statements and their related information, along with the diaries of the team members’ own thoughts and compiled a book entitled The Diary of Our Journey. On one side of the exhibition space, several audiences waited for their turn and spent significant amounts of time reading The Diary of Our Journey. This pile of texts seemed to occupy an important part of the entire curatorial project. The Diary of Our Journey aimed to encourage the reader to weave stories inside and outside of what was given in the exhibition. Above all, questions were generated through “diary” and “journey.” Regardless of the curator’s original question, this could be extended to many different follow-up questions, such as

: What is a sculpture created by a woman?, Who can be called a woman sculptor??, How does a woman’s experience transfer to an artwork?, How does a woman's experience translate into a work of art? But what is meant by "women's experience"? Does it refer to a physical experience that is unique to her?  Did they not question the somewhat diminishing term “yeoryu jogakga (sculptress)”? Should “yeoryu jogakga” in the title of the association be interpreted only as a structural limitation? Do the illustrations and books of the artists in the exhibition reaffirm the physical and economic conditions of “becoming a sculptor”? as well as the experiences of marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth conditioning the “becoming a woman”? What could be the next question if we do not fully navigate the complex idea of what it means to be a “woman” and “sculptor”?
 

Besides the fact that these works were produced by cisgender women artists, at a visible level of exhibition, there was no way to confirm how each could join together making women’s solidarity. Apart from the uniqueness of the motif of each work, the overall works did not deviate significantly from the form of (mainstream) Korean modernist sculptures in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition appeared to present a scene where “woman” and “sculptor” were brought together to coin a single neologism, hastily stitching together various questions that were squeezed into the gap, while simply choosing to leave aside what could not be digested. 

2)    The Paradox of Deconstruction

In the exhibition text, Noh Haena addressed several starting points of Our Sculptural Journey: The Path to Today. One of them was Love (2001), an exhibition organized by Choi Taeman as a Hanguk Yeoryu Jogakga Hyeopoe exhibition. Noh criticized that the main theme of Love emphasized female sensitivity and the curator Choi Taeman described the feeling of love as something specialized in women. As the exhibition represented the sentimental and emotional characteristics as feminine, Noh doubted and challenged Choi’s premise that love is the most important subject for women.

Love is a complex subject which can be viewed in multi-layered ways. Many researchers and philosophers have dealt the theme of love with gender differences and sexuality issues, and its social definitions and norms as well as neoliberal values imposed upon them. In this context, the exhibition The Raw differently approached the topic of love beyond the idea of Love. 

The Raw
May 3-29, 2022 (Incheon Art Platform B-dong, Incheon)
Participating Artists: Kang Nayoung, Kim Sylbee, Kim Oksun, Kim Hwahyun, Ryu Hansol, Mooni Perry, Park Sunho, Park Hyein, Lee Soonjong, Lee Eunsil, JangPa, Jeong Doori, Jung Haena, Han Jihyoung, and Dadboyclub
Curatorial Team: Kim Gahyun, Kim Ulter, Son Euihyun, Jeon Hyunji

The Raw was a special exhibition co-curated by four curators, Kim Gahyun, Kim Ulter, Son Euihyun, and Jeon Hyunji, who met at the Incheon Art Platform Curator School. Fifteen artists and teams participated and presented works that approached topics from various angles, such as the norm of marriage, the special situation of Korean women who are married to people of different nationalities/races, limitations or overcoming of female bodily reproduction, pursuing post-body possibilities, lesbianism, and the expression and projection of women’s sexual desires. However, the keyword that brought all of them together was “love.” 

In the exhibition preface, the organizers raised the issue that “love,” which has been standardized by society, requires a definite "identity" from each individual. And they sought to think critically about “normative love” (that is to say, heterosexual love between a biological male and female with genital intercourse and reproduction) that is tailored in a specific direction. With this kind of thematic understanding, the preface made it known that an individual experiences double or triple confusion depending on how one recognizes one’s own sex/gender or depending on the different circumstances of the person based on different economic, class, and socio-cultural customs. It also pointed out that the status of such confusion constitutes a person’s identity in an individual and complex way. Furthermore, it insisted on making intersecting personal issues a part of each individual’s unique identity, and from there, suggested imagining a “new love affair.”⁶

In the development of the above preface, there is a hidden sense of purpose that is not fully explained. Namely, that the concept of identity as a collective characteristic based on homogeneity must be dismantled. To this end, the existing concept of identity is seen as one that often causes failure and frustration to individual subjects, and in contrast the individual’s uniqueness, which is only temporarily confirmed, is emphasized. As is often the case with the myth of deconstruction, in the “deconstruction” that has become the goal, there lurks the futility of infinitely segmented and sliding signifiers. Is there anything that is missed in the promotion of “ambivalence,” “contradiction,” “fragmentation,” “temporality,” and “differentiation”? Of course, as if sensing this danger in advance, the preface hides the purpose of deconstruction by touching on the seemingly unknown topic of the “new identity model.” In fact, the particular concept that the exhibition preface intends to examine appears to be a new concept of the subject (engaged in a love affair) rather than “identity.” In any case, in what form did the subject that materialized after overcoming such deconstruction, or the subject that was confirmed through the paradox of deconstruction, appear in the exhibition?

Actually, it was not easy to find this subject in the exhibition. The exhibition was organized into Part I, “Sadness is Another Name for Love,” and Part 2, “The Joy of Love,” and each part was allotted to each floor of the exhibition hall of Building B of the Incheon Art Platform, which is divided into two floors. The works were arranged in proximity to each other according to their likeness in color, form, genre, and method of representation/description. In addition, the exhibition brought together works that are too broad to materialize the argument in the preface or that approach the subject from different directions. Individual works pointed out and utilized the limitations of representation in existing identity politics (Kim Oksun, Kim Hwahyun, JangPa, Lee Soonjong), highlighted its self-destructive aspects and caricatures (Jeong Doori, Ryu Hansol), established a third zone outside of the identity discourse through the ambiguity of the image layer (Park Hyein, Jung Haena, Han Jihyoung), or attempted skepticism, doubt, and reflection on “love” itself (Kim Sylbee, Kang Nayoung, DadBoyClub). It can be said that the exhibition was more like a collection of contemporary works that exemplified and shared a “consciousness of the feminist subject” (this may be the significance of the exhibition).  

3)    Resuming Questioning

The Taming of the Shrew ⁷  
March 4, 2022 - April 13, 2022 (Museumhead, Seoul)
Participating Artists: Kim Sollee, Ryu Ahyeon, Lee Naha, Lee Eun Sol, Jang Do En, Han Sol, Hwang Yezoi
Curated by Hur Hojeong
Consulting and Organizing by Kwon Hyukgue

In March 2022, I curated an exhibition at Museumhead with seven artists. The topic I wanted to question most when I began the project was the current form of feminisms in Korea. Domestic feminist discourse was facing both politics and backlash that incited the language of hate, as well as internal discord on both sides. As for the internal discord, there are cases where a group that only recognizes “biological women” presented a confrontational stance against other plural feminisms/feminists (also known as “sseukka”⁸), or the visible appearance and trend of the exclusionary feminist group TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist).⁹ The situation was even worse in that this exclusivism was not confined to a small number of specific interest groups but could be felt at the general social level. At one women’s university in Seoul, an admitted student refused to enroll due to the school’s movement to refuse admission to transgender women,¹⁰ and in the military, Sergeant Byun Hee-soo was forcibly discharged for gender reassignment surgery.¹¹ Meanwhile, within the art world, while not exclusively discriminatory, there has been a steady trend of the formation of artist organizations composed entirely of women, centered around artists/designers in their 20s and 30s, and the tendency to hold exhibitions as a means of women’s solidarity.

Accordingly, the participating artists and curators of The Taming of the Shrew agreed first to bring the following questions to the fore.
Is “woman” the prerequisite of feminism? Does feminist thought originate from and belong to “women.” What exactly is the “woman” we are talking about here? Does it refer to a person born as a woman? Who shares the “feminine experience” or “femininity”? What defines the “feminine experience” and “femininity”? 

In addition, the participating artists also shared their views on how much they considered “feminism” when explaining their art practice and whether they had ever been called feminists within the art world. 

Each of them was keenly aware of the everyday opportunities to recognize themselves as a female/woman and the impossibility of feminist thinking linked to those opportunities. They had doubts about whether their work could be interpreted as “feminine” because they were born as a “woman,” and actively tried to reflect on how to position the context of the exhibition within the trajectory of their work.

In the exhibition, Hwang Yezoi, who has been taking portrait photos of her mother, older sister, and female friends, exhibited photos taken in collaboration with MTF transgender people as darkroom prints. Han Sol, while producing a music video that talks about life and love as a lesbian, highlighted the representation of “butch.” Lee Eun Sol, who explores the fictional possibilities of Web 3.0, played a video in which the fictional character “Kimberly” plans a revolution of destruction. The character “Kimberly,” whose body is constituted only of the head, allows us to imagine a personality that escapes the shackles of the representational body, with reference to The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (directed by Joseph Green, 1928-1999). Rhu Ahyeon, displayed women in the twisted form of advertisements, as objects of daily display and as capitalist humanoids who embody such “visibility,” and Lee Naya converted photos of female K-Pop starts IU and Irene into low-resolution digital format and transferred them to the canvas, appropriating the excessive visibility imposed upon them. Kim Sollee, while contemplating a way to visualize the affect of “hate,” presented a “standing image sculpture” that is neither upright nor prone, in place of the traditional phallic aspect of sculpture. And finally, Jang Do Eun, while adhering to traditional methods of handing wood, attempted to overcome the limitations of her body in a different way by disassembling and reattaching her sculptures, which mostly take the form of human figures.

As the exhibition curator, I thought about ways to concretize not only the resulting exhibition, but also the process and context before and after it. Accordingly, for the exhibition photos, I chose to show prominently individual works and sections, rather than a wide-angle panoramic view of the exhibition that captures everything at a glance. For this purpose, Kim Haeyoung filmed the scene with a hand-held camera moving her body. The designer Kim Juhui displayed an exhibition poster using untamable, cute, creative monsters as characters, using the Risograph printing method and manual work. In the catalogue published after the exhibition, instead of critical commentary, we sought to incorporate the process leading up to the making of the exhibition. It weaves together conversations about the process of creating the exhibition as well as reflections and questions after the exhibition, while showing text and image sources that the artists mainly referred to during the production of their works, and the skein of ideas that has yet to be resolved.¹²
 

***
 

Elke Krasny, a researcher and curator in Vienna, Austria, discussed feminist thought in curating in her 2015 article.¹³ In the beginning of her article, she listed the following questions: 
 

What if there is a feminist turn in curating? And if so, what is it and what does it do? Does it turn practices of curating and scholarship on the histories of curating into a feminist enterprise? Or does it turn feminism into the subject of curatorial knowledge production? Or, does it turn to feminism in order to understand from a feminist standpoint what curating is and what it is that curating does? These questions raised here are central to my study of The International Dinner Party in Feminist Curatorial Thought.¹⁴

Krasny uses the development of these questions as her curating method. For her, “feminist thought” means constantly evolving the definition of herself while questioning all existing dichotomous logic and regulatory orders:
 

This is one of the constitutive paradoxes, or contradictions, actively challenging feminist thought. This also offered in the past, and continues to do so, a fertile ground for a large number of different strands of feminist thought, such as liberal, Marxist, socialist, or anarchist feminism, or Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, or Buddhist feminism. Other strands of feminist thought include “psychoanalytic, care-focused, existentialist, postmodern, women of color, global, ecofeminist,” poststructural, deconstructivist, intersectional, Black, Mestiza, postcolonial, decolonial, cross border, transnational, indigenous, urban immigrant feminism, queer, or transgender feminism. Considerable disputes, debates, conflicts, shared interests, and alliances within different strands of feminist thought point to another constitutive paradox. Schools, canons, labels, or strands of feminist thought cannot be neatly separated or definitively categorized. “To be sure this list of labels is incomplete and highly contestable.”¹⁵

Nonetheless, I will attempt to sketch out different strands that are to be discerned within contemporary curating. I will do so firstly according to perspectives taken up by curators, secondly according to historic periodisation and fields of artistic production, and thirdly according to sites where curators work. With regard to the perspectives employed, these strands are activist, critical, conceptual, discursive, educational, feminist, global, involved, postcolonial, Black America, Chicana, global, or transnational curating/curatorial thought. With regard to historic periodisation and fields of artistic productions, these strands can be named as follows: modern art, contemporary art, video art, installation art, performance art, conceptual art, postconceptual art, or digital and new media art curator. With regard to sites of work, these strands can be named as follows: museum, biennale, festival, gallery, education, public space, community-based, urban, village, or theory curator. Admittedly, such a list is unfinished and risks the danger of oversimplification. On one hand, curating/curatorial thought is prone to introducing such self-labelling in order to work out specificities, differences, and positions. On the other hand, curating/curatorial thought is very likely to resist such labelling as restrictive and reductive.¹⁶ 

By listing these different branches of feminism, Krasny did not simply attempt to expand options between “feminism” and “curating” or reconfirm these types of labeling. Rather, she tried to confirm the “undefinability” that rejected these types of labeling. Therefore, Krasny’s “Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method” addresses the methodology of questioning. For Krasny, “curating from feminist thought” is nothing other than questioning all existing dichotomous logic and regulatory orders and constantly updating one’s own definition. “Feminist Thought and Curating: On Method” is a methodology of questioning. How might it apply to the here and now? We still desperately need the will and strength to hold onto the question mark as we move ahead.