In 2015, artist Youngjoo Cho created DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, an ajumma dance-film project with DMZ tour guides. Here, the artist and two participants in the project return to discuss symbolic acts of healing and the intergenerational layerings of internal conflicts and external relationships in Korean women’s lives.

Two videos from the project will be screened at this event: Floral Patterned Romance starring thirteen women working at the Rainbow Industrial Complex in Dadaepo Port in Busan and DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses starring seven Cheorwon-DMZ tour guides who spend almost every day in the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea as part of their work. Participants from DMG: Demilitarized Goddesses, Yang Suk Seo and Seonja Jeon will join artist Youngjoo Cho in a discussion moderated by SMB12 Program Advisor Ong Jo-Lene. The event closes with a song performed by Yang Suk Seo.

Ong Jo-Lene is an independent curator in Amsterdam-Ipoh. Her long term research on the legacies of colonial histories of exploitation and new possibilities for sustainable and equitable futures was recently advanced through a residency at Delfina Foundation, London and the Ishibashi Foundation/Japan Foundation Research Fellowship on Japanese Art. Jo-Lene teaches theory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie where she is also part of Urgent Ecologies: Towards A More Sustainable Curriculum working group. Past projects include SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now at National Art Center, Tokyo and Mori Art Museum, Other Futures Festival, and Hartwig Art Foundation Collection | Production Grant 2020-21.

Youngjoo Cho unravels the practical concerns held by artists — specifically women artists — within sociocultural frames to share her experiences with colleagues and viewers. By interacting with people from diverse cultural spheres, she explores her internal conflicts, her external relationships, and her identity as a foreigner and an Asian woman in Western society and culture. Since her return to Korea, Youngjoo has produced a series of works dealing with the issue of feminism in Korean society. Centering on her own experience of childcare and the nature of care work, she seeks to broadly relate to viewers. She is also simultaneously studying the art-historical image of the female body, how images of the body are recklessly consumed in the contemporary era, and the relationship between video, performance, and viewers.