IV. “Shadow Play Attesting” To
a Magical Friendship
Still harboring disappointment
over The Wall (2010), her unfinished documentary
work on Korean and Japanese history that she conceived while studying in
France, Kwon traveled in 2021 to Taiwan—which shared Korea’s experience of Japanese
colonization—to resume her research into modern East
Asian history. At the time, the COVID-19 pandemic was raging, and her research
in Taiwan proved a difficult process with many stops and starts. Most of her
activities involved meeting with other people. She described the experience as
one of realizing that there are “ultimately only
subjective perspectives in this world,” and that no
matter how objective a view we strive to take, what remains in our memory “is not a line from a history book but a word spoken by someone
beside us.”[9]
During this turbulent period of
ongoing isolation, the artist pored through the scattered records of Japan’s occupation of Taiwan during the early 20th
century. Her attention fell on an episode recording the special friendship that
arose between Ushinosuke Mori (1877–1926), a Japanese
cultural anthropologist who studied the indigenous cultures of the island’s minority ethnic groups, and Chief Aliman of the highland Bunun
clan.
The story amounts to an oral tradition rather than a part of the
historical record, but Kwon used the research materials left by the
Taiwanese-based anthropologist Mori—including
photographs, maps, and notes—to create the open
narrative structure of a documentary and 3D animation work. She devised The
Guardians of Jade Mountain (2024) with a virtual reality
interface to allow viewers to immerse themselves in personal stories from
history and a village where highland peoples in Taiwan lived during the early
20th century.
The video observes a farewell
speech given to colleagues by Mori as he returns to Japan, 18 years after he
arrived in 1895 as an 18-year-old army interpreter in Taiwan, where he would go
on to conduct research on its indigenous population. An adventurous land
surveyor, Mori would develop deep friendships with indigenous people in Taiwan,
mastering the languages of several tribes over the course of his earnest
exchanges and publishing five books on those languages. For these activities,
he has been lauded as a pioneer in research on indigenous Taiwanese residents.
Assembling vast amounts of information in the areas of anthropology, history,
folklore, archeology, botany, and geography, he created a museum collection and
completed a two-volume ‘Chronicle of Taiwan’s Indigenous Peoples’.
In the face of imperial Japan’s repressive policies against those residents, he argued the need to
preserve their unique identity. His extensive local studies earned him a
reputation as a Taiwanese naturalist during the early years of the occupation,
and he became the first person to summit and collect plant sables from Yushan
(Jade Mountain), the highest and broadest wilderness in Northeast Asia and a
site where virgin forest and various plant and animal species had been preserved.
As a result of these activities, samples of over 20 different Taiwanese
highland plant species named after Mori have been entered into the botanical
record.
As viewers don their headsets and
enter the virtual reality, they follow the movements of a virtual camera taking
in an aerial view of an indigenous village on a 3D-animated map of the island
of Taiwan. Upon a tripod that rises like a tower at the island’s center is a large camera of the kind used by
anthropologists in the early 20th century. The viewer travels to different
villages, adopting Mori’s perspective as they take
black-and-white photographs of the activities of indigenous residents. In the
virtual reality narrative, the viewer walks through actual spaces and
encounters records of indigenous Taiwanese residents, at which point they enter
the communities of the people in question.
As Mori’s
camera points toward the village of the highland Bunun people, a history is
provided for the indigenous people’s campaign of
resistance against Japan and its new five-year ruling policy. From there, the
setting shifts to the beautiful, wild landscape of Yushan, lit fantastically by
fireflies. The viewer holds a bamboo lantern as they are guided into Mori’s narrative along a forested mountain trail by pangolins, squirrels,
owls, and butterflies. Mori relates a story from a weeklong survey of Yushan by
his large geographical research team. It tells of how his life was threatened
when he was chased for five days by the Bunun tribe’s
Chief Aliman, who sought an opportunity to take revenge on the Japanese for the
deaths of family members who had been falsely accused by them and killed.
Through the virtual reality
interface in The Guardians of Jade Mountain, viewers
carry along their bamboo lantern until they come to a rock face in the
mountain. As they hold their arms out to shine the light, a shadow play
presents Mori’s tale of
adventure, historical facts, and episodes involving Chief Aliman.
Depicted in
jointed cut-out shapes, the shadowed figures reenact tense scenes of Japanese
soldiers storming into the indigenous people’s regions
with the Rising Sun flag to the sounds of gunfire; indigenous residents
fighting back with bows and arrows, only to be shot down; and Mori exploring
Yushan’s plant life as he conceals himself in the
forest against an endless stream of arrows fired by Chief Aliman. Kwon’s work visits the boundaries between reality and fiction, where the
viewer cannot tell if they are witnessing a true story, an invention, or a
fantasy. Mediated by shadow theater—an ancient
storytelling technique boasting a long tradition in Southeast Asia—it accesses the spiritual world of indigenous culture and nature.
The shadow theater that Kwon
applies to virtual reality has historically been used mainly by storytellers as
a means of dramatically representing historical tales that are partly true and
partly fictional, as well as a tool in sacred village performances to relate
epic poems, stories from Hindu mythology, and other legends. In The
Guardians of Jade Mountain, the shadow play magically transforms the
Yushan rocks that observed these tales into a stage attesting to the people’s stories as the viewer shines them with the
light of their lantern.
On the unfamiliar trails of the VR-rendered Yushan, the
lantern-holding viewer is guided by creatures such as pangolins, squirrels,
owls, butterflies, and fireflies, along with various plants that bear Mori’s name. These presences guide the narrative, as though conspiring to
share things that are not recorded in the writings of the human world. In his
farewell address, Mori explains that even as his life was threatened, he never
took up arms, devoting all his energies to walking around night and day to
complete his explorations—and that his courage was
recognized by Chief Aliman, who became a true friend. The shadow play documents
the magical friendship as the figures who once held guns, swords, and bows lay
down their weapons to clasp hands and embrace one another in a circle.
In this work, Hayoun Kwon
explores the idea of the “enemy” by means of the history of colonization in East Asia during Japan’s imperial era. Just as her previous work focused on the relativity
of episodes that reconfigured the truth as they treated the concepts of
boundaries (including national borders like the DMZ) as fictional and
imaginary, the idea of the “enemy” in historical narratives is something that can be newly defined at
a personal level rather than a national one. In contrast with other species,
human beings have thrived through sociability, a collaborative form of
communication.
Another aspect of this sociability is that when a group we care
for appears to be threatened by another group, there is a universal tendency to
dehumanize the other (group). This aspect also explains why we tend to
disregard the basic human rights of people who do not belong to our own group.
The extreme forms of dehumanization committed by white supremacists elicit a
reaction at a different extreme. This dynamic of one extreme triggering another
is not a phenomenon exclusive to any one political movement, cultural sphere,
or era. From the Chinese Cultural Revolution to post-WWII Stalinism, anarchist
terror attacks, the French Revolution, and Japanese imperialism, those in power
have wielded dehumanization and the accompanying violence in various
governmental forms.
Yet numerous examples from human
history have shown that the human nature of dehumanizing other groups can be
cured through collective action. While the Holocaust was taking place around
the outbreak of World War II, thousands of people in Europe risked their lives
to rescue Jews from persecution and death. Those who were discovered faced
torture, expulsion, and even their own death and the massacre of their family
members. Even so, they were willing to conceal these endangered Jewish people
in their barns, attics, and other locations. What led these people to help Jews
at the risk of their own lives, when so many others were either siding with the
Nazis or looking the other way? Based on his analysis of eyewitness accounts
from Europeans who rescued Jews during this era, sociologists Samuel P. Oliner
and Pearl M. Oliner found one common characteristic among them: they had all
been close with a Jewish neighbor, friend, or coworker before the war.
They had
no other common characteristics in terms of gender, education, political
affiliation, wealth, or profession—what enabled them to take those risks was the fact that they had
been or were still close friends with a Jewish person.10 In her
explorations of the “enemy”
concept dating back to her time studying abroad, Hayoun Kwon discovered it to
be a fluid and uncertain “product of imagination,” with borders that could be broken down less by matters of nation,
ideology, tradition, and religious beliefs than by experiences of friendship
and contact at a personal level.
V. Conclusion
It is common knowledge that human
history has evolved in ways that have transformed human consciousness and
perceptions based on different codes created by the representative media of
each era. The early technology of the written word and printing was a key
medium underpinning the modern self, establishing an exemplar of modernity as a
matter of creating order through repression. In the era that has become known
as the “Anthropocene,” we have experienced the rewriting of history at the
planetary scope.
The episodic aspects of the narrative structures in the
aforementioned 3D-animated works by Hayoun Kwon—Lack of Evidence
(2011), Model Village (2014), 489 Years
(2016), and The Guardians of Jade Mountain (2024)—illustrate
how history achieves new stylization within a contemporary concept in
opposition to modernity, and how historical, ethnic, and cultural identity is
written in an era of deepening encounters among different cultures, religions,
and languages. These methods of rewriting “do not create any hegemony; they
reevaluate regions and areas, re-manifesting concealed maps and forgotten
histories.”
Using episodic narratives as a
potentia for the constructing of history, Hayoun Kwon creates spaces shared
between the speaker and listener, using virtual technology in ways that allow
the viewer to fully experience and respond to another’s body amid the images.
The relativity of the episodes in works such as Lack of Evidence
or The Guardians of Jade Mountain shows that the standards
used to select the events we deem “important” must come from very intimate,
personal, and unique subjective perspectives—leaving behind the attitudes of
others and the perspectives of “administrative questionnaires and police reports.”
This may be presented as a new method of historical narration in the
contemporary era, creating the possibility for us to break away from the modern
method of writing historical writing and its linear perception of time—where
only the stories of the winners and the images of the powerful survive—and to
allow all of us to rewrite the history to date as living subjects.
Ultimately, Kwon’s 3D-animated
works mediate the unclear, murky memories that arise in the process of sharing
experiences in encounters with others. Memories are something unique to a
specific person; in Kwon’s perspective, they are akin to the bluebird of the
fairytale, which appears and disappears without our knowing why. We all dream
of capturing the bluebird, but few of us can achieve it. Memory is something
that flits onto the back of our hand at unexpected moments, only to fly off
again to parts unknown.
Another person’s life experiences and other incidents
from the past can easily be forgotten in the collective memory. But like the
bird that comes when beckoned by its trainer, past moments from life can appear
before us in raw, unvarnished form through our attempts to breathe in the air
exhaled by another. The narratives of imagination and contradiction shared by
Hayoun Kwon aspire to the possibilities of transforming the unclear memories of
life that we summon through our gestures in our relationships with
others—allowing in the process for an ongoing “rewriting” of history.
1. Milan Kundera, Korean trans.
Kim Byeonguk, Immortality (Seoul: Minumsa, 2010), p. 487.
In 2019, I curated the exhibition Immortality in the Cloud (Feb. 22–May 12,
2019, Ilmin Museum Art), which included the work of Hayoun Kwon and five other
artists. This text is based on elements from an interview with the artists
during the planning of that exhibition, which included questions about what new
perspectives contemporary art might offer when addressing matters of history.
The analysis focused on The Guardians of Jade Mountain
(2014), a new work that is being presented at the Korea Artist Prize 2024
exhibition, along with three of Kwon’s most prominent works: Lack of
Evidence (2011), Model Village (2014), and 489
Years (2016).
2. Aristotle, Poetics, Korean
trans. Sangseop Lee (Seoul: Moonji, 2005), p. 39.
3. Kim Jihoon, “The Walking
Experience and the Digital: Conceptualism, Remixing, and 3D Animation,”
Embracing the Parallel Lands: Thousands of Tiny Futures (Seoul: Seoul Museum of
Art, Hyunsilbook A, 2018), pp. 101–102.
4. Donna Haraway,
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManⒸ_Meets_OncoMouseTM,
Korean trans. Kyungsook Min (Seoul: Galmuri, 2007), p. 76.
5. For more on how Haraway
re-embodies the “modest witness,” see Kim Aeryung, “The Cyborg and Her Sisters:
Rhetorical Strategy of Donna Haraway,” Korean Feminist Philosophy, vol. 21
(2014), pp. 74–76.
6. Kim Namsee, “Twitter and the
Possibility of New Communication with Focus on the ‘Story’ of Walter Benjamin,”
Semiotic Inquiry, vol. 30 (2011), p. 12.
7. Kim Namsee, p. 13.
8. Kim Jihoon, p. 105.
9. Hayoun Kwon, Artist interview
for Immortality in the Cloud (April 2019).
10. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods,
Survival of the Friendliest, Korean trans. Mina Lee (Paju: D Plot, 2021), p.
258.
11. Gisu Kim, “The Issue of
‘Contemporariness’ in Contemporary Art since 1989,” Journal of Contemporary Art
Studies, vol. 21 (2017), pp. 73–78.
