siren eun young jung studied visual arts and feminist theory at Ewha Womans University in South Korea and the University of Leeds in the UK. Her interests lie in the seething desires of anonymous individuals as they encounter events throughout the world and how they grow into resistance, history, and politics. She believes that, by ceaselessly reexamining feminist-queer methodology, artistic praxis that is simultaneously aesthetic and political is possible. Working across various fields such as visual art, film, and theatre, her most representative works include the Dongducheon Project (2007-2009) and the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008-present). She has grown mainly through major exhibitions in Asia such as Tradition (Un) Realized at Arko Art Center, Seoul (2014), Ghosts, Spies, Grandmothers: SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul at Seoul City Museum of Art, Seoul (2014), Discordant Harmony at Kuandu Museum of Fine Art, Taipei and Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (2015, 2016), 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2015-16), 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), 13th Taipei Biennial (2016‑2017), 11th Shanghai Biennale (2018), at Tokyo Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama (2014, 2018), and Serendipity Art Festival in Panaji (2018). She is the recipient of the 2013 Hermes Foundation Art Award, the 2015 Sindoh Art Prize, and the 2018 Korea Artist Prize and participated in the Korean Pavilion’s exhibition at the 2019 Venice Biennale. siren eun young jung was born in 1974 in South Korea, and currently lives and works in Seoul.

www.sirenjung.com

Ji-Yoon Han develops exhibition and research projects that aspire to uncover how images drive and guide us in shifting social, cultural, and psychic contexts. Her PhD dissertation (2021) investigated how images competed between 1929 and 1936, articulating photography, Surrealism, and the nascent cultures of the illustrated press and advertising. She is currently a research fellow for the Photography and Commission project (2022–2023) at the Cabinet de la photographie, with the support of Les amis du Centre Pompidou.

Yeoseong Gukgeuk is a Korean form of opera and musical theatre. It is similar to traditional Korean opera, or changgeuk, which is performed by a mixed group of actors in the vocal style of pansori. Pansori is a type of Korean musical storytelling traditionally performed by a solo singer and a drummer who plays a buk (an instrument in the form of a shallow, cylindrical drum). Yeoseong Gukgeuk and changgeuk both rely on the interaction between the visual performance and the soundscape of pansori by combining singing, dancing, and music. Popular stories and myths from the pansori repertoire are typical themes.

Yeoseong Gukgeuk differs from other forms of theatre in that it is performed entirely by women. Practiced during the mid-twentieth century, women played both male and female roles. The lead male roles in Yeoseong Gukgeuk are called nimai (the hero who embodies both gallantry and romantic masculinity), sanmai (the second male role that acts as the buffoon), and kadaki (the villain).

Yeoseong Gukgeuk debuted in Seoul in 1948, three years after Korea’s independence from Japanese rule. This period was marked by a strong increase in the number of female artists who had been trained to sing, dance, and play music as gisaeng. Gisaeng—often called kisaeng—date back to ancient Korea and were highly skilled female artists whose purpose was to entertain men with music, conversation, and poetry. Since gisaeng entertained upper class men during celebrations or gatherings where alcohol was consumed, the profession was considered inappropriate for most women.

The history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk is inextricably linked to Korea’s colonial past and often associated with wartime. The closure of gwonbeon (colonial institutions in charge of training and managing gisaeng) resulted in increased numbers of women transitioning over to gugak (Korean national music, including folk and court music). This shift was marked by gender-based discrimination by other performers and administrators, who were mostly male.

Toward the end of the 1960s, the popularity of Yeoseong Gukgeuk quickly declined. At that time, the Korean military government began to support the implementation of infrastructure and training for changgeuk and the production of performances that would help consolidate the national and cultural identity of modern Korea, both at home and abroad. Some historians attribute the decline of Yeoseong Gukgeuk and theatre in general to the burgeoning of Korean television and film, which progressively replaced the popularity of the dramatic arts among the emerging middle class.

Yeoseong Gukgeuk grew out of a desire to resist patriarchal society. The body occupies a fundamental place in this type of theatre. It is presented as being both feminine and masculine—even as being neither one or the other. This opens up many possibilities for a kind of androgyny that completely transcends the gender binary.

The fact that a woman embodies a male role makes the performance of a character more complex because it involves combining a male character with feminine qualities. In that respect, Yeoseong Gukgeuk is about gender performativity. Transgender performance doesn’t simply go beyond gender presentation on stage, it also allows performers to experiment with different ways of being in their body.

Complex heterogenous relationships between the sexual bodies of female artists and their interpretations of the masculine gender on stage extend to the world outside the theatre and at the social level. According to Judith Butler (and her theories, which the artist refers to in her work) gender performativity is a series of performative with stagings that are progressively assimilated into the fabric of social reality. The sociopolitical impact of this art project resides precisely in its potential to generate androgynous representations.

EXPLORE
– how the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project questions the standardization of a binary masculine/feminine system and its normative effects on the body.
– jung places tremendous importance on the sensorial aspects of her work. During your visit, observe how the exhibition affects your own body through your senses.

In her artistic and intellectual activities, jung identifies as a queer Asian artist. She locates her interdisciplinary practice at the intersection of theatre, performance art, and ethnography. jung has developed this project by repositioning the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk performance and by
reproducing it through contemporary forms of resistance and queer self-identification.

The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project simultaneously combines archival documentation and ethnographic research on the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk performance and its intergenerational community of performers. In this way, jung attempts to disrupt patriarchal and heteronormative forms of representation by establishing alliances between Yeoseong Gukgeuk people of different non-binary and androgynous origins and contemporary queer communities in South Korea and elsewhere.

It’s important to note that, while the decline of Yeoseong Gukgeuk and its live performances has been attributed to the advent of television and cinema, jung uses the screen itself as a way of reconceiving the history of the theatrical genre. Not only does she recompose the history of the art form, but she also recontextualizes it through her regular use of screens. jung does not work to address a shortcoming or gap in the history of modern Korea, but to question Korea’s heteronormative approach to its national identity.

Moreover, jung recreates the physical staging of the performers, which takes place not only on theatre stages in front of enthusiastic audiences, but are also experienced on screens in art galleries, by people who may have never seen this type of performance.

EXPLORE
– how, through this strategy, jung democratizes access to this art form by extending the scope of its reach to contemporary audiences.
– Reflect on the ways in which siren eun young jung’s work uses and transforms the gallery space.

jung has spent years exploring the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, sometimes inviting its main characters/performers to speak about their personal histories, or sometimes by replaying some of its scenes. Her approach contrasts with conventional archival and conservation practices, which are often reductive because they aim to conclusively determine the meaning of previously produced works. Although jung locates and uses the historic materials she collects as part of her research on the Yeoseong Gukgeuk, she reconstitutes these documents as a way to contest their formal and official historiography. In fact, jung doesn’t present these in a linear or chronological fashion, nor does she claim to have amassed an all-encompassing archive from her research materials. Her work doesn’t advocate a historical evolution of Yeoseong Gukgeuk’s emergence, apogee, and decline. Instead, jung presents an alternative way of treating her archives by bringing forth non-official histories, personal accounts, and intergenerational communities of female practitioners with non-gendered bodies in the gallery space.

jung refuses to promote a homogenous and singular history of this form of theatre. The Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project: Hijack the Gender! considers the limits and ability of archival practices to contain and reconstitute memory, suggesting that a complete historical recovery is impossible. Her archive is performative in the sense that it is alive, always in flux, and constantly changing. jung doesn’t seek to salvage the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk’s particular style of performance. Rather, she explores the potential gender fluidity that this form of theatre offers and relates it to the political context of gender in Korea and East Asia.

The artist uses this form of performance in a contemporary project with works in multiple, fragmented configurations. The same people often reappear in her works—evidence of her strong ties with the queer community and her commitment to sexual and gender-based minorities. siren eun young jung’s project is politically subversive and a threat to the pre-established, heteronormative order of both social codes and artistic practices.

Through the use of video, jung hones in on each protagonist, carefully observing their sensitive qualities, minutely examining their emotional range: from assurance to impulsivity to fragility.

In A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (2019), jung shows protagonists who express themselves in their own voice, and with their own, often failing words. Their accounts vacillate between self-expression and an ambiguity or unease at expressing their emotions. jung’s work could be interpreted as a truly alternative archive of affect, one that is non-hierarchical and non-linear, that reunites subordinate minority stories and filmed and staged bodies. The work strives for a regional solidarity that transcends borders thanks to the shared recognition of subjectivities. The protagonists’ strong presence conveys the artist’s intensive research and her willingness to find queer ways of expressing, loving, living, existing, and co-existing in alternative human relationships that aren’t based on patriarchal heteronormativity. As a result, a solidarity emerges between the performers and the public.

EXPLORE
– how the protagonists’ passionate accounts create a feeling of communion and how this affects us as a public.

웨딩
The Wedding, 2011–2023
Pigment print, 118.9 × 84.1 cm

Courtesy of the artist

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지연된 아카이브
Deferral Archive, 2018–2023
Mixed media (photographs, articles, advertisements, videos, etc.), variable dimensions

Pigment prints
120.4 × 85.6 cm (x 2)
145.5 × 112 cm (x 4)

Embroideries on fabric (x 16)
31 × 23 cm

노래는 부르지 않을 것입니다
I am not going to sing, 2016
Single-channel video, colour, stereo sound, 15 min. 40 sec.

(오프)스테이지/마스터클래스
(Off)Stage/Masterclass, 2013
Single-channel video, colour, stereo sound, 85 min.

무영탑
Mu-young-tab [The Shadowless Pagoda], 1987
Single-channel video, colour, sound, performance recording, 118 min. 25 sec.

여성국극의 짧은 역사
A Brief History of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, 2017
Single-channel video, colour, sound, 4 min 25 s (loop)

Courtesy of the artist

Through the archives of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk project, siren eun young jung introduces us to the genre of Korean traditional women’s theatre. She also—and especially—invites us to think about how historical narrative is constructed. For fifteen years, jung has been developing deliberately “abnormal,” even “deviant,” approaches to the document. She reframes and assembles photographs, press clippings, and videos (of interviews, master classes, performances), which she reconfigures from one exhibition to the next in a strictly disordered archive. History is necessarily fragmentary, formed of memories, fantasy, dazzle, and blindness. The wall partitions lined with reflective emergency blankets play on the threshold between legibility and illegibility: they open a space of metamorphosis between the preservation of heat and memory and the hallucinatory dissolution of the form.

정은영은 여성국극 (女性國劇) 아카이브를 통해 전통적인 한국여성무대의 한 장르를 소개하며, 특히 역사적 서술이 만들어진 방식에 대해 숙고하도록 제안한다. 그녀는 15년 전부터 여성국극과 관련된 사료에 대하여 의도적으로 “변칙적”이고 “일탈적”인 접근을 시도해왔다. 신문기사나 사진을 비롯하여 인터뷰, 마스터클래스, 공연 비디오 등을 수집, 편집하여 전시마다 새롭게 구성하면서 의도적으로 헝클어진 아카이브를 구축했다. 역사란 기억, 환상, 섬광과 눈멈으로 이뤄진 파편들일 수 밖에 없기 때문이다. 구급용 호일보온담요로 도배된 전시실 내벽은 가독성과 불가독성의 경계를 넘나든다. 열기와 기억의 보존, 형태의 환각적인 와해 사이에서 변신의 공간을 여는 것이다.

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유예극장
Deferral Theatre, 2018
Single-channel 4K video, colour, sound, 35 min. 5 sec., carpet

Courtesy of the artist

The video Deferral Theatre explores the staging of gender, from traditional Yeoseong Gukgeuk theatre to contemporary drag performance. The work interweaves the voices and moving bodies of four artists with different forms of practice, all of whom challenge tradition and gender identity: Nam Eunjin, from the last generation of women actors who received Yeoseong Gukgeuk training; Park Minhee, a performer of traditional Gagok songs; Kim Dawon, alias the drag king Azangman; and the historic Yeoseong Gukgeuk actor Cho Youngsook. Each talks about the complex question of the persistence of archaic forms today and the collective relevance of their transmission. The disruptive montage conveys the ghostly temporality of a constantly “deferred” theatrical form: countering any attempt to reconstruct an “original” Yeoseong Gukgeuk, jung imagines, instead, the forms of its afterlife.

비디오 작품 <유예극장>은 전통적인 여성국극에서부터 현대의 드래그 퍼포먼스에 이르기까지 젠더에 관한 연출들을 탐구한다. 여성국극 교육을 받은 마지막 세대의 배우인 남은진, 전통가곡 가수인 박민희, 드래그킹 아장맨 (김다원), 여성국극의 역사적 인물인 조영숙 등, “전통”과 “젠더”를 고민해야 하는 서로 다른 장르에 속한 배우들의 몸짓과 목소리를 엮어낸 작품이다. 이들의 증언은 현재까지 유지되고 있는 원형과 그 계승의 당위성에 대한 복합적인 질문을 다룬다. 불연속적인 편집은 끊임없이 “유예”되는 무대의 유령적 시간성을 보여준다. 정은영은 여성국극의 원형을 재생하려는 시도 대신, 그 잔존의 방식을 생각한다.

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먼지
Dust, 2023
Single-channel 4K video, colour, stereo sound, 14 min. 45 sec.

Courtesy of the artist

깃발
Flag, 2023
Mixed media (pole, digital frames, printed fabric, emergency blanket, clamps), variable dimensions

Courtesy of the artist

The new works that siren eun young jung has created for this exhibition pay tribute to the Yeoseong Gukgeuk actors Cho Youngsook and Lee Soja. Both women have been featured in jung’s works since the inception of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk project, along with dozens of other actors who have since passed away. As this theatrical genre is currently being rediscovered and commodified by Korean popular culture, in webtoons and other sentimental K-dramas, the embodied knowledge of grandmothers seems to be once again threatened with collective oblivion. The video Dust explores Cho Youngsook’s personal archives, which are presented haphazardly, like motes of dust in the pauses of a rambling conversation with jung; the installation Flag, between sail and standard, brandishes the presence of Lee Soja, a palimpsest body, a living and impermanent archive.

이번 전시에서 처음 선보이는 신작에서 정은영은 여성국극 배우인 조영숙과 이소자에게 경의를 표한다. 이 두 인물은 현재는 작고한 십여명의 다른 여성 배우들처럼 정은영의 여성국극 프로젝트 초반부터 함께 했다. 여성국극을 다시-재현하는 오늘날 한국 대중문화나 신파적이고 감상적인 웹툰과 K드라마는 할머니 연기자들이 대변하는 기억을 집단적 망각으로 위협하고 있을지도 모르겠다. 비디오 <먼지>는 조영숙 배우와의 대화와 배우의 개인적 아카이브를 허공을 부유하는 먼지 속에 띄운다. 설치작업 <깃발>은 베일과 상징 사이에 위치한 이소자 배우, 반복해서 쓰고 지우고
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섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음의 공연
A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise, 2019
Audiovisual installation, Full HD, stereo sound, 27 min. 36 sec.

섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음의 공연
A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (Part 1), 2019
Single-channel 4.5K video, colour, no sound, 10 min. 22 sec. (loop)

섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음의 공연
A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (Part 2), 2019
Single-channel Full HD video, colour, stereo sound, 5 min. 7 sec. (loop)

섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음의 공연
A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise (Part 3), 2019
Single-channel 4K video, colour, stereo sound, 2 min. 55 sec.

Courtesy of the artist

Production sponsored by Korea Artist Prize Promotion Fund, from SBS Foundation and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.

The video work A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity and Noise is composed of four interrelated parts spread through the spaces of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery. Here, all appearance of historical, conceptual, aesthetic, and even sensory unity is shattered. Among the protagonists of the immersive video, deployed as a monumental installation, are the drag king Azangman, previously featured in Deferral Theatre; queer Korean female actors such as Lee Yii; Seo Jiwon of the disabled women’s theatre group Dancing Waist; and the transgender electronic musician Kirara. Flash, afterimage, velocity, noise—all of these elements contribute to the transgression of social and aesthetic norms, to hijacking the gender.

비디오 작품 <섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음의 공연>은 상호 연관된 4개의 파트로 구성되어 있으며, 레오나르와 비나엘런 갤러리 여기저기에 흩어져 설치됨으로써, 역사적, 개념적, 미학적 그리고 감각적으로 단일한 외관을 조각낸다. 대규모 프로젝션으로 펼쳐지는 이머시브 비디오의 주인공들은 <유예 극장>에서 이미 만난 드래그킹 아장맨을 위시하여 한국 공연계의 퀴어공연자들인 연극배우 이리, 장애여성극단 <춤추는 허리>의 서지원 배우, 트랜스젠더 전자음악가 키라라가 등장한다. “섬광, 잔상, 속도와 소음” 은 사회적이고 미학적인 기준을 위협하고, 젠더를 탈취하기 위한 풍요로운 제안이다.

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