Minyo, There and Here

Joo Hwang

Joo Hwang, Minyo, There and Here, 2018. 4 channel video, color, sound. 7 min 33 sec. Photography: Joo Hwang, Video editing: Jeong Jun Hwa, Featuring: Jeongsook An, Saengok Kim, Myeonghwa Song, Gyeongwook Kim. Supported by the 2018 Busan Biennale. Courtesy of the artist

This artwork uses close cropping to create portraits of four overseas Koreans living in Jilin Province, China and in Tokyo and Osaka, Japan while they sing Minyo Korean folk songs. The women depicted on screen sing the familiar melodies of Minyo with slight variations, their awkward pronunciation and lyrics reflecting the lived realities of their respective regions. This work focuses on Minyo as the sounds of the people that originate from and become transmitted among the ethnic community, traversing territories along with human displacements. Moreover, it reveals the contemporary cultural identity that corresponds to the official history of the “Korean diaspora” and the voluntary or involuntary migrations that have taken place throughout Korea’s modern and contemporary history. The facial and vocal expressions of the people singing Minyo, as well as their clothing and hairstyles, offer perspectives into their individual characteristics and allow us to gauge the physical distance and cultural differences between these dispersed communities in their current lives.

Joo Hwang (b. 1964, Seoul)

Joo Hwang’s portrait and landscape photographs adopt a sophisticated aesthetic while exploring identity issues including gender and diaspora. Her major projects include East Village (1995-1996), which examines the alienated identity of a female Asian immigrant in New York, Temporary Warehouse (2011), which records the displacement of the city's artificial nature and buildings, and Her Portrait (2016), which studies on the female figure using image manipulation and photography techniques commonly used in cosmetics advertisements. Joo’s works capture unfamiliar images of familiar beings as metaphorical reflections that expand discussions about the social, cultural, and political backgrounds and conditions to which they belong and reveal the complex backgrounds that constitute contemporary identity. She participated in SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul 2016 NERIRI KIRURU HARARA.

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