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Abstract
The split film installation ‘Hanging Garden’ by South-Korean multi-media artist Jung Yeondoo (b. 1969) presents a creative, meta-institutional reflection on how (art) history is, and should be told, in Korea today. It consists of two HD color film sequences, which Jung realized in 2009 for the exhibition Platform in KIMUSA in the section ‘Void of Memory.’ Crucial for the two films is a sequential spatial display that allows viewers to see only one film after the other, since the second sequence reveals the making of the first and is intended to work as a kind of punch line in response. The article explores the ironic ‘framings’ that Jung uses to expose the multi-layered ways heritage is constituted in South Korea given the colonial and authoritarian roots of the art museum. The analysis here follows and contextualizes the esthetic revealing of the art museum’s most contemporary instantiation built on the former site of the Defense Security Command (DSC) in Sogyeok-dong Seoul as a ‘hanging garden’ that is ambivalently suspended between official efforts to establish national ‘heritage’ and citizens’ memories about conflicted pasts, in which the site saw the torture of civilians.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the artist Jung Yeondoo for providing helpful information on his work through his assistant Julian Ott in 2014 and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their valuable feedback. Given the remote nature of this case study, I was not able to expand it into a more situated, art historical contextualization for which field research in Korea and on-site access to libraries and archives are indispensable. The Asia Art Archive’s work in providing online access to information on the rare catalog and a photologue of the exhibition ‘Void of Memory’ (2009) has been all the more vital.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
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Franziska Koch
Franziska Koch is Assistant Professor of Global Art History at Heidelberg University. Her habilitation project about Nam June Paik and transcultural collaboration in Fluxus is supported by a grant from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation. She co-edited Negotiating Difference: Contemporary Chinese Art in the Global Context (2012) and is the author of Die ‘chinesische Avantgarde’ und das Dispositiv der Ausstellung (2016). She recently edited How We Work Together: Ethics, Histories, and Epistemologies of Artistic Collaboration, a themed issue of the Journal of Transcultural Studies (2020/1). For the Trans-Atlantic Research Project ‘Worlding Public Cultures: the Arts and Social Innovation’ (2019–2022; BMBF), she co-leads the Heidelberg team.