The Korean War and Postmemory Generation

Contemporary Korean Arts and Films

Dong-Yeon Koh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000407556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Korean History
• Index: History

This pioneering volume navigates cultural memory of the Korean War through the lens of contemporary arts and film in South Korea for the last two decades.

Cultural memory of the Korean War has been a subject of persistent controversy in the forging of South Korean postwar national and ideological identity. Applying the theoretical notion of "postmemory, " this book examines the increasingly diversified attitudes toward memories of the Korean War and Cold War from the late 1990s and onward, particularly in the demise of military dictatorships. Chapters consider efforts from younger generation artists and filmmakers to develop new ways of representing traumatic memories by refusing to confine themselves to the tragic experiences of survivors and victims. Extensively illustrated, this is one of the first volumes in English to provide an in-depth analysis of work oriented around such themes from 12 renowned and provocative South Korean artists and filmmakers. This includes documentary photographs, participatory public arts, independent women's documentary films, and media installations.

The Korean War and Postmemory Generation will appeal to students and scholars of film studies, contemporary art, and Korean history.

1 “Late photography” and Cold War memories

Heungsoon Im, Onejoon Che, and Suyeon Yun

Documentary “photography,” postmemory generation, and historical tragedies

The documentary photographer and filmmaker Heungsoon Im premiered his Jeju Prayer (Binyum) at Jeonju International Film Festival in 2012. Im later received the Silver Lion for his documentary film Factory Complex (Euiro Gongdan, 2014) at the Venice Biennial in 2015. For his first full-length film Jeju Symptom and Sing (Sungsi) and his documentary book of photographs Jeju Notes (2011), Im dealt with the tragic incident of the Jeju April 3rd Uprising and massacre, the massive operation for hunting down the communist party members and sympathizers in the Jeju Island by the provisional government under the supervision of the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK). As noted, with the cooperation and consent of the U.S. military, the South Korean interim government decided to uproot South Korean communists who had allegedly penetrated into Jeju Island, which is located at the southern tip of the Korean peninsula. The operation took place over six years from April 1948 to September 1954, leaving the Jeju April 3rd Massacre as one of the first and most devastating tragedies caused by ideological conflicts in modern Korean history.

Nonetheless, an official investigation about victims did not take place until the mid-2000s. Victims’ families also remained in silence for more than five decades; they had been afraid that they might be associated with communist parties and groups, especially under the extremely anti-communist governments in South Korea from the 1950s until the late 1980s. According to the investigation during the Moohyun Roh administration in the mid 2000s, the number of casualties, based upon the report of the victim’s families alone, reaches 15,000. However, that number does not include entire families sacrificed or leaving Jeju Island for good. The suppressive political and historical atmosphere in South Korea under the military dictatorship made it harder for the next generation of the Jeju people to remember and commemorate this tragic event and its victims. The grandfather of Minkyung Kim, the producer who collaborated with Im for Jeju Prayer, also came from a victim’s family, and the burial site of his grandfather is still unknown.

For the film Jeju Prayer and documentary photography book Jeju Notes, Im paid particular attention to the surfaces of stones and the traces on the ground nearby historical locations where victims might have striven so desperately to escape. Saryeoni Forest, one of the most popular hiking trails in Jeju Island, had been used as a hideout for the people hunted by operating armies seven decades ago during the Massacre. Having no clear historical records and information about the victims, Im juxtaposed archival photographs that he found from the National Archives of American Military History with his pictures of specific historical sites in his book Jeju Notes. He then added his comments to the irregular surfaces of stones and the weird shape of broken trees—as if these marks and natural debris are somehow truly related to the historical tragedy.

Im’s effort to uncover the “trace” of the Jeju April 3rd Massacre corresponds to what Marianne Hirsch, author of The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (2012), has noted as the definition of “trauma,” for the horrible events of the past have remained obscure and distanced to most younger generations in South Korea, and Im’s Jeju Prayer and book Jeju Notes mostly revolved around “traces” and “marks” allegedly left by victims more than seven decades ago. Hirsch has cited Tony Morrison’s Beloved (1987), the novel that addresses the degradation of slavery imposed upon bodies in the form of marks. In Beloved, Sethe’s mother, who was once a slave, bluntly opened her naked chest to her daughter. “‘This is your ma’am,’ said she, ‘I am the only one got this mark now. The rest is dead. If something happens to me and you can’t tell me by my face, you can know me by this mark.’”¹ While unbearable memories of being a slave have been deliberately repressed for her life, such memory remained undeniably and clearly as the mark on the surface of the victim’s body. The physical mark is the outward expression of the untold psychological wounds on the surface of Sethe’s mother.

Trauma is, by definition, “a wound inflicted on the flesh,” and the mechanism of photography as being comprised of the “indexical trace” of lights is, in this sense, comparable to trauma, for photography is the imprint of physical realities from the past as much as trauma is the imprint of psychological and inner wounds. More importantly, photography serves as a significant means through which a postmemory generation can glimpse the victims’ experiences. In explicating a postmemory generation’s tedious process of working with these “traces” and “marks” from the past, Hirsch mentioned the case of a protagonist inspired by a photograph in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitzs (2001). The main character begins his search for his lost mother, who had perished at Theresienstadt concentration camp, near Prague, during World War II. While visiting Prague, he was strongly intrigued by an image of the anonymous woman, who, in his belief, resembled his mother. With the small photographic clue that he had gotten from a 1944 Nazi propaganda film, he began searching for his mother by reviewing all the archival films that he could find in Berlin and asks the local residents to see if anyone could remember his mother, Vera.

The protagonist’s search for his mother in Austerlitzs may run parallel with Im’s documentary photographs on imaginary traces left by victims of the Jeju April 3rd Massacre—in both cases, the medium of photography plays a pivotal role in retrieving their post-traumatic experiences. According to Hirsch, documentary photographs primarily reveal the traces of tragic events, yet “they also signal its insurmountable distance” as transformed into flat two-dimensionality and printed in the photographic paper.² Likewise, the postmemory generation has both an intimate and distanced relationship with historical tragedies—as discussed in the Introduction. Despite the postmemory generation’s efforts and desire to come to terms with past tragedies, they were equally characterized by their paucity of firsthand experience of the war.

In the following, I chose three South Korean documentary photographers—Heungsoon Im, Onejoon Che, and Suyeon Yun—in the genres of landscape, architecture, and portraiture, respectively. Above all, the postmemory generation artists who have never experienced the Korean Wars and Cold War ideological feuds in person, their photographs engaged with the remnants of historical tragedies shifted the definition of documentary photographs. As I argue, these new types of documentary photography have changed how we learn and share historical tragedies without literally observing and recording them as faithfully as possible. For fictional elements in documentary film can invite contemporary audiences’ more creative engagement and participation, as Hirsch has postulated in her theory of the postmemory generation.

Late photography and postwar South Korean society

The traditional definition of documentary photography is supposed to capture the most dramatic and horrific moments of battlefields and slaughters. The most suggestive case in the history of documentary photography is the title of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1952 famous book The Decisive Moment, made of his works taken during and after World War II. Cartier-Bresson gives special priority to the photographer’s actual encounter with human tragedies on site out of his experience during World War II. In contrast, “late photography” undermines the importance of direct and immediate record of violence. In “Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of ‘Late Photography’” (2003), the photography critic David Campany claims that photography has become less of a means of instantly taking the dramatic momentum of events than a way of presenting aftereffects of these tragic incidents. Photographers often prefer to wait until “the noise has died down and the events are over … as the video cameras are packed away.”³

Campany’s theory is useful for a postmemory generation of artists. Both “late photographs” in Campany’s term and a postmemory generation’s artistic production work with traces not only as an inevitable condition of photography but also as the essential ways of representing historical tragedies. Documentary photographers taking the approach of “late photography” usually captured peaceful and silent images as the alternative to the recording of vociferous and loud historic violence. As best illustrated in the television program “Reflections on Ground Zero,” aired on BBC, the renowned American documentary photographer Joel Meyerowitz took pictures of vacant buildings, empty streets, and debris of collapsed structures at the Ground Zero site of the Lower Manhattan in 2010. Campany argues that the “Aftermath” series (2010) was “not so much the trace of an event” but “as the trace of the trace of an event.”⁴

Campany then points out the problem with “late” documentary photography for its lack of ideological contents and messages. The pictures of human tragedies after the actual events occur provide documentary photographers with a wider range of artistic freedom; it may, however, fail to fulfill what can be conceived as the original and classical function of documentary photography. “There is a sense in which the late photograph, in all its silence, can easily flatter the ideological paralysis of those who gaze at it without the social and political will to make sense of its circumstance,” Campany writes.⁵ On the contrary to Campany’s criticism, as I argue, the late photography can insinuate political messages embedded behind the façade of the supposedly ambiguous and mute images.

Campany regards late photography as an important genre through which the existing boundary between art and documentary photography can collapse. Nonetheless, he is reluctant to discard the notion of art photography for relatively pure aesthetic appreciation, as it is ontologically different from documentary photography for a more critically engaged and committed experience. I argue that, through this, Campany does not fully take the complicated process of photographic “framing” into consideration. The basic frame through which whether a particular scene of violence should be included or not is never solely dependent on the photographer’s aesthetic decisions alone. Instead, the “representability” of violent images is more likely determined by complicated historical, ideological, and aesthetic contexts that the photographer is involved. South Korean documentary photographers of a postmemory generation naturally take the “late photography” approach not just because they cannot help working with historic events that had happened a long time ago but also because they became less interested in showing violence per se than in rethinking about historical representation of tragedies: how can we represent such tragedies? What is the proper way of representing “historical truth”?

For instance, Che’s photographs from 2007 onward deal with the images of defunct military structures that might have been used during the Korean War, provoking our curiosity toward these military structures seemingly used during the Korean War and afterward. Indeed, his photographs of military structures on the outskirts of Seoul made him receive a grant from the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris in 2012. Compared to Im and Che, who take pictures of natural landscapes and architectural structures, Yun captures the images of North Korean defectors, who have strived to adjust themselves to new ways of life in South Korea. Yun had already worked with their life after returning from the battlefield and “settling” in a new environment in “Home-Coming” (2006–2008) on veterans and families of American soldiers returning from the Gulf War. While both Che’s and Yun’s documentary photographs have not revealed the scene of violence, their contexts from which these photographs have been taken indicate the forgotten, yet tragic history of the war. The absence of explicitly horrific images of the war in these photographs rather points to artists’ intent to touch upon the historical oblivion of postwar South Korean society.

The old military bunkers located nearby the vast apartment complexes in Che’s photograph show the contradictory social circumstances in South Korea. Although politicians continue to use ideological tensions as part of their political rhetoric, most of ordinary life tends to undermine military threats. The fact that the image of older bunkers and the children of North Korea defectors is integrated into everyday life proves how ideological and military conflicts have been either exaggerated or downplayed, depending on the fluctuating circumstances of postwar South Korean society. Since the agreement of truce had been made in 1953, the government and people have had to juggle between military confrontations and economic pragmatism, or between historical consciousness and oblivion for the last seven decades. The anti-communist ethos has been continually adopted by conservative politicians to alert its people as nuclear threats from North Korea have never been resolved for the last two decades. Nonetheless, the South Korean government and people should also cope with the continued diplomatic uncertainties in their everyday lives.

There also exist generational and political disparity with the respective of different attitudes toward the Korean War and harsh ideological conflicts in the Korean peninsula. Accord...