Asia

Hwayeon Nam

Imjingawa

2017

Imjingawa, 2017 (Still)

Imjingawa is Hwayeon Nam’s first foray into borrowing from the documentary form. The root of the work is a Japanese song with Korean diasporic connotations, which the artist heard inadvertently years ago. While tracking the inception and history of the song, her research explored the song’s potential to live beyond “legal, national, ideological, and geographical barriers.” The song earned its fame when it was introduced to the Japanese band, the Folk Crusaders. The version of Imjingawa sung by the Kyoto-based Folk Crusaders rose to great prominence. However, in 1968, the General Association of Korean residents in Japan submitted a copyright claim to Toshiba Records, claiming that this song was not a Japanese folk song but a North Korean song composed by Jonghwan Koh with lyrics written by a North Korean poet, Seyoung Park. As a result, the sale of this album was suspended and banned from broadcasts, which ended up drawing more attention and fame as a result.

Tracing the time and space where Imjingawa was first sung and disseminated by people who heard it and sung in different ways, Nam discovered the time in which the ‘song’ was commonly shared and inherited. Imjingawa is also linked with the choreographic and performative methodology that the artist has persistently explored through her various works. Dwelling on her comment that “the path of thought is considered a movement,” we are encouraged to study which form the song, that comes from a different time and space, currently takes. Questions are incited by the independent and fragmented objects of the film: What does it mean to know an object? How can we indirectly experience something that ceases to exist? Movement of the artist’s thoughts on the song also carries with it the reality that the song may be sung differently every time.

Hwayeon Nam’s practice employs an artistic language that vigorously investigates the movement and phenomenon of various objects operating in sync with social systems, as well as the structure and nature of time. She unveils a history of human desires as well as collective sensibility, both through the work of tracking discovered archival objects. Her recent work is driven by extensive understanding of choreographic movement, with which her video sequences are finely elaborated. Nam strongly demonstrates her archival epistemology through vigorous exploration of cultural diasporic products such as song and dance; colonial acquisitions and stories of imperialistic treasure collecting; domains of natural science like flora and fauna, astronomy and so on. The subject of her works are mounted with human desires, reproduction of signs, acquisitiveness, and fantasy, fulfilling cultural projections over the long history of human existence. Her works not only pose the fundamental question of how we experience historicized symbols and representation from today’s ubiquitous but uniquely drifting images. Nam has been successful in choreographing and rehearsing time-navigation, through which archives breathe and animate toward the future.

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Hwayeon Nam Imjingawa

Hwayeon Nam

Imjingawa