■ Yun Suknam
(B. 1936, Manjuria)
Yun Suknam, Portrait of JOO Se-juk, 2021, Color pigment on Hanji, 210×94cm.
As a representative feminist artist in Korea, over the past 30 years, Yun Suknam has expressed the beauty of women who strive to become subjects of their own, and restores the rights of all women who have been oppressed. She has dealt with motherhood and female strength, and the unstable inner world of women living today. From 2020, she has been working on Women of Resistance to draw 100 portraits of female independence activists. In this exhibition, three portraits are presented; CHOI Yong-shin, who worked hard for the rural enlightenment movement along with the independence movement, CHA Mirisa, an educator who led the women's movement and education movement, and JOO Sejuk, a socialist anti-Japanese activist. Although female independence activists acted at their young age, they are often recognized as grandmothers because of the fact that they are our ancestors. At this point, visitors can rethink the meaning of “grandmother” and expand its scope.
Yun Suknam studied at Pratt Institute Graphic Center and Art Student League and started her career as an artist in her forties. Yun was the first female artist who won the Lee Jung Seob Awards. Yun has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in various art institutions such as OCI Museum of Art (2021), Seoul Museum of Art (2015), Arko Art Center (2008), and Ilmin Museum of Art (2003). She was exhibited at the Korean Pavilion in the Venice Biennale (1996) and participated in the Gwangju Biennale (2014).
■ Joyce Wieland
(b. 1931, Ontario - d. 1998)
Joyce Wieland, Solidarity (video still), 1973, Video, 10' 40", Image courtesy of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre.
Incorporating strong personal statements in her work about issues of feminism, nationalism and ecology, Joyce Wieland is regarded as one of Canada’s foremost artists acrossing various media, including drawing, painting, quilting, and fi lm. Willand's film Solidarity is a documentary on the Dare strike of the early 1970s in Ontario, Canada. Rather than paying attention to the characters, the film records the flow and mood of the strike, paying attention to the workers' hundreds of feet and legs walking on the lawn, strike pickets, and marching groups. The soundtrack is an organizer's speech on the labor situation. The female worker’s voice addresses precarious issues through loudspeakers. With the superimposed word “Solidarity” in the middle of the screen, the work presents what society truly dreamed of with this strike and what we should dream of in this day and age. Wieland combines a political awareness, an aesthetic viewpoint, and a unique sense of humor. Joyce Wieland is regarded as one of Canada’s foremost experimental filmmakers and mixed media artists. She found success as a painter in Toronto in the 1950s. In 1962, the artist moved to New York and expanded her career by including new materials and mixed media work. She also rose to prominence as an experimental filmmaker and soon, institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York were showing her films. True Patriot Love (1971) was the first solo exhibition by a living Canadian female artist at the National Gallery of Canada. She was awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Visual Arts Award (1987) and received the honor of an Officer of the Order of Canada (1982).
■ siren eun young jung
(b. 1974, Incheon)
siren eun young jung, Public yet Private Archive, 2015, Pigments print, Dimensions variable.
siren eun young jung is interested in how the seething desires of anonymous individuals encounter events in the world and become resistance, history, and politics. She believes that artistic practice is possible both aesthetically and politically through ceaselessly reexamining feminist-queer methodology. In Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project, she has traced Yeoseong Gukgeuk and its members, and has organized research and analysis on the historical origins and social meanings of it. With this methodology, she has imagined the possibility that this practice accompanies the production of knowledge at the same time. jung reconstructs historical data, often called evidence of historical facts, by resisting the practice of material fetishism and positivist historiography. She tries to rearrange the materials such as images, oral statements, and writings collected during Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project with her works based on the materials. Through this attempt, she creates a way to keep the distance from the authority of chronological or semantic historical archives and tries to build a methodology to read the outside of the archives.
siren eun young jung 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 has grown mainly through major exhibitions in Asia such as Biennale Jogja (2021), the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019), Kyoto Experiments (2019), Shanghai Biennale (2018), Tokyo Performing Arts Market (TPAM)—Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (2018, 2014), Serendipity Art Festival, Goa (2018), Taipei Biennial (2017), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Discordant Harmony (2016, 2015), Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2015-16), “Tradition (Un) Realized” (2014), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2014). She won the 2018 Korea Artist Prize, 2015 Sindoh Art Prize, and 2013 Hermes Foundation Art Award.
■ Jinhyun Cha
(b.1973, Tongyeong)
Jinhyun Cha, Park Boonyi, Born in 1922, Pohang, 2007, Gelatin silver print, Dimensions variable.
Jinhyun Cha is working in documentary photography that explores Korea’s modern and contemporary history from Japanese occupation and Korean War, to post-industrialization. He questions the historical rights and responsibilities that we should all share. Cha’s The Portraits of 108 (2007-2008) series which documents the Korean comfort women who were forced mobilized by the Japanese military during the Japanese occupation. This work questions our tragic past and human dignity, the violated women rights as sexual objects by male gaze. Memory becomes an irreplaceable latent image and an irrecoverable trauma. The women in the black square frame represent the disappearing testimony of unfinished cases and the voices of comfort women who are exposed but still exist as suppressed history. The artist calls out the boundary between memory and obscurity, and allows the audience to face it. The reality and the past shall superimpose.
Jinhyun Cha earned a MFA degree in photography from Kyungsung University, and completed his doctoral course at Hongik University. He has held numerous solo exhibitions such as 1839 Gallery (2012), KT&G Sangsangmadang (2009), Tongyeong Marine Park (2008), and Gallery Lux (2006). He was selected for one of the 4 finalist of Encounter 16, Daegu Photo Biennale (2016) and won Asian Pioneer Photographer’s Grant Award at the 6th Dali International Photography Festival, Yunnan (2015) and the 1st Korean Photographer’s Fellowship Winner, KT&G Sangsangmadang (2008). In addition, he participated in Daegu Photo Biennale (2014), Seoul Photo Festival (2013) and DongGang International Photo Festival (2008).