Informed by gender politics and historical acts of resistance siren eun young jung’s research based artistic practice engages across a wide range of mediums such as films, photography, performance and installation. In 2013 she was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang prize, for her video work Act of Affect produced in that year. This is her first work that I encountered and it made me curious about her inquiry into the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, a traditional theatrical genre created and performed solely by female protagonists.
 
During her recent artist-in-residence at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore I became more familiar with her long-term commitment to this particular theatre form that reached its peak in the fifties, the artist’s advocacy for its central characters, and the repression and exclusion from official histories of the particular circumstances that lead to Yeoseong Gukgeuk emergence within Korea’s post-occupation cultural history following WWII.
 
To understand the significance of jung’s artistic practice it is important to position her work within Korea’s cultural, social, and political history to which her entire oeuvre contributes. Born in the mid-seventies, as Jung Eun Young was a teenager when South Korea saw a period of violence when students and civilians who were opposing to the South Korea autocratic rule at the time, were tortured and killed.
 
Although at that time still young, these incidents left its mark in jung’s childhood memory and having lived through these events impacted her shaping years becoming an adult. Amongst many controversial events that jung witnessed, the years lead-up in preparation for the 1988 Olympic Summer Games hosted by South Korea was a notable one. Being the second Asian country to host a Summer Olympic, the 1988 Seoul Olympics was an opportunity for South Korea to gain international attention and showcase for their economic growth¹.
 
However, the means to prepare the country for the event included the hiring of thugs to forcibly remove the poor residents of Sanggyedong for the redevelopment of land. Violence broke out as the residents resisted but construction took place anyway, demolishing houses still filled with possessions.² Others were locked away in closed institutions, or forces in to unpaid work in factories and construction sites, thousands were mistreated and died. All this was known to the government, but never lead to any prosecution.
 
The well-known 1987 student uprising in the aftermath of the massacre of Gwangju³, the June Democracy Movement eventually caused the overthrow of the Fifth Republic of South Korea. It was indeed the after-effects of these traumatic events that prompted changes in attitudes amongst universities students. Protest groups and feminist assemblies were formed, that challenged the traditional standards of South Korea’s societal norms and hierarchies and the call for change swelled beyond the nineties. The neglect of the government to implement democratic involvement, the lack of transparency in the necessary political process continues to cause frustrations in the population. Until today, South Korea has one of the worst cases of gender inequality when it comes to salaries or rights at the workplace for a high percentage of female workers⁴.
 
In 1994, jung became involved in the sprouting young feminist movement within her university campus. As part of a political and social gesture these students gave themselves new names, breaking with their given predetermined societal roles. In the year 1994, using this important rite of passage, jung decided to assign herself a name that would be particular to her and express what she felt. She refused to be profiled by the existing Korean patriarchal and class structures and she deliberately chose “siren” as for “dangerous woman/creature”.
 
Referencing Greek mythology as an act of resistance and empowerment she would write her new self-given name in lower case: siren eun young jung. The name appealed to her as the “sirens” were known for their powerful, deceptive voices, that jung seeked to apply from her position as an artist in the act of “seducing” through compelling work, to those listening to her. In addition, this name would not reveal her gender, her ethnic nor class background and it was for her a political strategic gesture to position herself in a western male centric society as a queer Asian artist⁵.
 
While in the United Kingdom, jung eventually met feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, who accepted her into the MA programme at University of Leeds, where she graduated in 2004 with a Master in Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art. Pollock cautioned her that feminism is not just theory, but a practice and encouraged jung to translate her thoughts and wishes into creative work.
 
After she returned to Korea, she started to develop works of art that were based on her personal experience and that of the women around her and from 2007 she participated in a community project in Dongducheon, a city where a United States military base was located. There she came across Korean women working as prostitutes whose patrons were American soldiers. Through this first involvement as a researcher and artist with a particular female community she was confronted with the daily lives of sex workers.
 
This marked the beginning of her of interests to study women’s predicament serving in the particular role of entertaining men. Through a senior colleague in cultural studies she eventually came across the genre of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk an all-female theatre genre that had its peace in the fifties right after WWII. The personal encounters with key protagonists developed into a long-term inquiry in the lives of these performers and the particular historical circumstances that led to the invention of this new form. Initially to serve soldiers during Japanese occupation, a vast number of Korean women were trained in Korean kisaeng schools ruled by the Japanese Government called Gwonbeon⁶.
 
The women were trained to entertain the Japanese army through musical play and dance, a clear reference to the role that Geishas have in Japan⁷. There existed a much larger scheme of forcing women to serve the Japanese Army as “Comfort Women” in Japan Military Brothels in Korea or as it referenced more directly, as sex slaves. It was jung who showed me last year a bronze sculpture depicting a young woman sitting on a chair, that was installed on the sidewalk near the Japanese Embassy in Seoul as a visible reminder of the “Comfort Women”, whose existence is still not officially acknowledged by the Japanese Government.

After the end of the Japanese occupation, the entertainers trained in the Gwonbeon became jobless. They joined organized the Korean Women Traditional Musician Association and became part of a new Korean music industry.⁸ Still stigmatized and discriminated, they developed their own theatrical form called Yeoseong Gukgeuk. Since more than a decade, jung has focused in her work on this dying art form, the trajectories of individual performers, and the socio-political role of these once highly popular form of entertainment. 
 
Yeoseong Gukgeuk became the core of her artistic inquiry and agency as a longterm research and she pursued a Doctoral Degree in Fine Art at Ewha Womans University in Seoul with a dissertation titled “The Politics of Gender and the Aesthetics of Dissensus: With a Focus on the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project”. Through this body of work, she points to the unique history of its significant legacy as well as to the prominence of its most adored performers, that she considers invisible in the official cultural narrative of her country.
 
She collected and presented documents, interviewed key protagonists of the genre, whom she featured in performances scripted by herself with collaboration of the performers. In its most current iteration Deferral Theatre (2018) she expanded this even further into an active agency transforming these historical cultural practices together with a new generation of performers into a potential future existence.
 
As the initial Yeoseong Gukgeuk performers are coming to age, jung engages with this new generation which consists of only a few female performers who continue to be trained in this art form⁹. If prior jung was studying the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, arguing for its place in South Korea’s National culture history she now is part of calling for its future existence. jung herself became part of the genre and its continued history.
 
The Yeoseong Gukgeuk is a reference to South Korea’s traditional theatre form Pansori.¹⁰ Until today, preserved as a national asset, Pansori is a Korean pre-modern tradition of musical storytelling and involves a singer and an accompanying percussionist. It took place in private homes to entertain the Korean elite although it is rooted in everyday Korean culture. The Yeoseong Gukgeuk was set to be performed in existing theatres shifting the intimate way of performing Pansori in private to a public accessible format, in a Hellenistic architectural structure with a clear separation of stage, performer and audience.  
 
It also attracted a different audience, mainly female, ranging from housewives to sex workers, who saw this theatre as a liberating space to breathe and interact. It is no surprise that Yeoseong Geukguk also gained popularity amongst schoolgirls and it challenged heteronormative relationships within a patriarchal society. This particular aspect gained the attention of jung whose interest was in the history of feminism in Korea.
 
Ironically, Yeoseong Gukgeuk points to another Asian tradition in Japan itself, the Takarazuka Revue¹¹ that also features female performers. Seen in a wider historical context, both genres counteract the tradition of male performers playing female roles in traditional theatres across Asia.
 
jung also was interested in the wide reception of these performers that gained celebrity status in the hay-day of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk, their coverage by women magazines in their off-stage life as well, and their huge group of followers.
 
From 2008 until 2011, jung’s work focused on a particular star, Cho Geum-aeng. Going through her private photo album during an interview, she came across a photo that caught her attention. It was a staged wedding photograph of Cho and a fan which featured them as bride and groom along with Cho’s theatre members and friends to pose as guests. Especially the fact that both Cho and her fan were married to men caught jung’s interest.
 
Although Cho was married three times and mothered three children of three different surnames, this peculiar photo was the only wedding photograph she kept in her personal archive, wiping the traces of her three husbands. Upon learning about Cho’s marriage history and the fictional aspect of this image, the photograph ruptured jung’s understanding of archived photographs as evidence of truth. It led her to investigate further with an understanding of how visible and invisible histories needed to be explored and connected. The trajectory of the performer’s life became the topic for her next inquiry to shed light on the hidden lives of lesbian and transgender community in South Korea.
 
In that way, the practice of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk is therefore important to trace South Korea’s queer history in the 1950 – 60s. Even though Yeoseong Geukguk is tied to post-occupation history, it was rather deliberately left behind when Korea began building its new national identity. Focused on promoting economic development, fighting poverty and strengthening national power, Yeoseong Gukgeuk, which connected mainly to its female audience was not favored by the new Cultural Properties Administration, an office established in 1961 under President Park Chung Hee¹².
 
The office was responsible for all processes related to heritage management, and determined definition, selection, conservation and the promotion, defining new national culture and identity. It prioritized the monumental, the grand, and the old tradition of patriarchy and heteronormative moral. By 1990s only a few Yeoseong Gukgeuk troops remained. In one of jung’s videos it is stated by a performer this may have been different if they would have developed an internal system of trainees and performers learning directly from the older performers.
 
However, as the initial generation of performers chose this occupation due to the specific and often painful circumstances within their own lives, how to communicate this to a next generation shaped by a different and modernized Korean society? The complexity of societal hegemonies as well as gender inequalities and how these are inscribed in everyone’s personal history is reflected in jung’s complex research based artistic practice that engages different archival collections of photographs, news clips, interviews with performers by the artist that over the years shaped her deep understanding and identification with the challenging history of this particular women, as well as societal condition for women per se.
 
Persistent in her inquires unfolding layer by layer, her perspective and method of deconstruction and reconfiguration of documents and all kind of materials applies feminist and queer theory as a tool. Her different art installations and body of works revolve around the stories and histories of these performers while featuring their qualities as creative practitioners which makes them peers. In addition to utilizing diverse archival material including footage of interviews, she also took photographs of performers in gender traversing roles. However, many performers were uncomfortable in front of the camera and preferred performing in real time, on stage. This resulted in two works (Off)Stage and Masterclass that she premiered in 2012 at Culture Station Seoul 284.
 
The single channel video (Off)Stage: Cho, geumaeng (2012), is in search of this first generation nimai¹³, who passed away. Through the video and exhibiting reference material jung marks the absence, the disappeared voice, that will not anymore be able to speak about this moment in time, her experience as a performer, the specificities of her community that shaped this unique theatre form and the particularities that determined their lives. Through her work jung asks, how such deliberately hidden and ousted history can be re-animated, how the testimonies and faded photographs be re-inscribed in archival memory to fill the void that each dying protagonist creates? How can these painful and at the same time creative individual histories of women shaped by the Japanese occupation and the Post-WWII period finally become visible and officiated as part of South Korea’s national history?

Through her art works in a diversity of contexts ranging from exhibitions to research presentations to recorded and live performances in theatres, jung is able to draw an intimate history of the creativity and playful inventiveness of these female performers, who often lived a transgender life not only on stage. At the same time, she highlighted the success and wide visibility of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk in its hay-days that spoke to the repressed desires of their female audiences.
 
Initially unintended siren eun young jung became an archivist of this movement, but over the years the artist not only in her work developed solidarity with the challenging situation of the few performers addressing the isolation of queer people in South Korea. Her deliberate non-linear way of archiving the history of Yeoseong Gukguek’s is her attempt to project the fact that recounts of what had taken place and should be part of national history appeared just in fragments of information, and had to be carefully re-constructed and inevitably overlapped as each performer lived through variant experiences.
 
Thus, mapping these historical events normatively is nearly impossible and could be challenged as inaccurate. The lack of sub theme and linear logic is also tied in with the fact that jung is interested in taking the “given” apart, dissecting and reconstructing it through attempts of acquiring and enquiring the truth through different and creative means. For jung, her recent invention of Deferral Theatre (2018) as a performative tool situating the historic narrative directly in a theatre setting, not only stands as a place where the performers have spent most of their professional lives, but it provides also liberating space to engage with the traumatic history of women in the company of others.
 
To continue the practice to choose one’s own imagined role and desired gender could be seen as the creative and collective act of artists to gain a different self-understanding. In spite of presenting the curious specificities of Yeoseong Gukgeuk that makes this format so unique, jung also sheds light onto the repressed histories of systemic violence women endure in patriarchal societies, including in her own country. The artist’s practice is to be understood as advocacy not only for this particular genre, its performers and their history. Through this long-term commitment to the subject of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk and the women drawn into this by the specific historic circumstances in her country, she indeed highlights its potential and reshaped future for a queer and LGBT community today, and the continued demand and struggle to have a political voice and rights in any society.
 
Entitled Deferral Theatre, jung’s project for the “Korea Artist Prize 2018”, is therefore a continuation of her decade long effort to revitalize the interest in the disappearing artform of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. This new work is a different take onto the Yeoseong Gukgeuk, it is an act to “defer its death sentence” as jung herself describes it. This iteration of her ongoing dedication to Yeoseong Gukgeuk marks a different approach then, yet it shares once more the artist’s insistence to problematize “gender normativity” and to highlight the difficult socio-political of “marginalized” groups within a society and the artist joining the call for equality opportunity and rights, as well as freedom of expression for everyone. In a time where a government establishes blacklists of artists as it happened recently in South Korea under President Park Geun-hye and her Minister of Culture, the urgency of such work in all its many layers becomes even more imperative¹⁴.
 
In her recent work Deferral Theatre, three theatre practitioners are interviewed voicing their thoughts about their theatrical genre. The internalization of performing male roles and improving their male acting, the boundaries between acting as men on stage and their offstage life as females began to blur. Surrounded by female colleagues and a female audience they inevitably developed romantic feelings for each other.
 
In a tireless effort jung restages, screens and records into an invisible past and projects into a potential future for queer theatrical forms—and therefore queer life. jung not only confronts us with the fact that history includes unpleasant truth that lingers like a shadow near its visible part. jung also addresses the lasting dominance of a patriarchal system in South Korea that degrades women into supporting roles in public and private life. Like the sirens, as a queer “enchantress”, jung uses her artistic language as the seductive voice, to lure us into the dangerous and unpleasant waters of historical truth.


 
1. Horton, P. & Saunders, J., “The ‘East Asian’ Olympic Games: What of sustainable legacies?”
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 29(6), 2012. Retrieved 20 February 2015.
2. George Katsiaficas, Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century, PM Press, 2012, p. 277.
3. George Katsiaficas (20 March 2012). Asia’s Unknown Uprisings, Volume 1: South Korean Social Movements in the 20th Century. PM Press. pp. 277~. ISBN 978-1- 60486-457-1. Retrieved 11 February 2013.
4. US News on Gender Equality
5. Based on an email conversation with the artist
6. siren eun young jung, Hyoshil Yang, Young Ok Kim, Tari Youngjung Na, Haejin Pahng & Sohyun Ahn, Trans-Theatre: Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project 2009 – 2016, Forum A, 2016, p. 318.
7. History on Comfort Women
8. In 1948, the Korean Women Traditional Musician Association was founded to support and provide these female performers with liberal work and creative opportunities.
9. A musical play based on pansori, a Korean traditional style of music
National Theater of Korea - Changgeuk
10. Pansori is a Korean genre of musical storytelling performed by a singer and a drummer. Originally a form of folk entertainment for the lower classes, pansori was embraced by the Korean elite during the 19th century.
11. The Takarazuka Revue is a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Women play all roles in lavish, Broadway-style productions of Western-style musicals, and sometimes stories adapted from shōjo manga and Japanese folktales. Wikipedia - Takarazuka Revue
12. Andrew David Jackson (ed). Key Papers on Korea: Essays Celebrating 25 Years of the Centre of Korean Studies, SOAS, University of London, 2013, pp. 253~274.
13. One of the major characters of yeoseong gukgeuk; the hero who embodies both gallantry and romantic masculinity.
14. Based on an email conversation with the artist: even under the new govern of President Moon Jae-in, the court announced that there will be no disciplinary consequences for those involved in creating this blacklist in South Korea’s Ministry of Culture.

References

• 올해의 작가상 (Korea Artist Prize)