Asia

siren eun young jung

I am not going to sing

2015

I am not going to sing, 2015 (still)

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Deferral Archive is one of the archival extensions of siren eun young jung’s Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-), a decade-long ethnographic research project into the diminishing genre of Korean traditional theater known as Yeoseong Gukgeuk. The genre, which was popular in the 1950s-60s, has since been forgotten, without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theater. The most distinctive formal trait of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is that the theater performers are exclusively women. Each actor’s drag technique in playing a male character varies according to their own analysis and understanding of masculinity, critically deconstructing the heteronormative conventions around gender, tradition, and historical consciousness in Korean culture.

Deferral Archive features two video monitors, framed by graphic posters consisting of existing photo archives of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. The first set examines the gender expression of Lee So-ja, a first-generation actor who used to play the Gadaki (male villain), including the actor’s conflicts and contradictions regarding gender roles. This is a non-chronic archive of the queer body that includes processes of superposition, division, glamorization, and modification. The other set examines the memory of Cho Young-sook, another first-generation actor who mainly played the role of Sammai (comic supporting role/sidekick). The video is a documentation of the artist’s first theater performance entitled (Off)Stage/Masterclass (2013), which was derived from the artist’s earlier Yeoseong Gukgeuk research. It contains an oral history of Cho Young-sook in relation to modern Korean history, revealing a particular mode of transfer not only exclusive to traditional performance techniques between generations, but also to gender representation within and beyond social norms therein.

jung’s work addresses the desire found in Yeoseong Gukgeuk, as both invented and interpellated in the social space at the birth of the modern nation-state. Surpassing the firm dichotomy in gender performance, this form of theater destabilizes the ideology that governs the formation and exclusion of tradition. The artist deliberately puts on hold the existing history; rewriting methodologies of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, she situates herself inside the discourses and memories of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. She fills the inactivated time with an awareness unto the viewer of the massive space and the bodily movement of performance. Her emphasis is not given to the restoration of the intrinsic legitimacy of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. Rather, modification to the senses deployed by jung’s practice underscores the political power of more anomalous and queer artistic practices.

With a practice deeply engaged with feminism and LGBT rights issues, siren eun young jung reveals the subversive power of traditional culture, one unknown in the Korean modernization period, and provides unique perspectives and documentation of important communities. Through their long-term research projects bridging different generations of women, jung keenly addresses questions of gender as a norm of “becoming.” Their early works have examined the struggles of a younger generation of women against androcentrism and violent patriarchy and subsequent projects have addressed issues surrounding environmental change, human rights, activism, and homosexual rights. jung’s pivotal work Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–2016) engages the existing queer community in South Korea by focusing on Yeoseong Gukgeuk, an all-female traditional theater genre existing since the 1950s, after the Korean War. The ongoing project tells an empowering story of gender-becoming in the mid-20th century. Unveiling traditional yet subversive narratives that existed during the transitional period of a country moving towards a modern society and challenging the myth of Korean “andro-modernization” achieved by a rapid masculinism of national development.

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siren eun young jung I am not going to sing

siren eun young jung

I am not going to sing