Places of Victimization and VR Film’s Archiving of the Experienced Place: Gina Kim’s Trilogy on U.S. Military “Comfort Women”
- Ballard (3rd Floor, Sheraton)
Friday, March 15, 2024 Saturday, March 16, 2024
Abstract
Gina Kim’s virtual reality (VR) film trilogy on U.S. military “comfort women,” including Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2021), and Comfortless (2023), posits the places of victimization as the primary subject. The first film, Bloodless, navigates the small alleys of Dongducheon camp town and closes the camera lens in a tiny room where a Korean woman was brutally murdered by a USFK soldier in 1992. Tearless enters a crumbling, deserted building that was once called “Monkey House” where “comfort women” were compulsorily accommodated to remedy STDs, and carefully observes the interior and exterior structures of the haunted place. The final, Comfortless, invites the audience to a town-size entertainment village for the U.S. Air Forces in Gunsan, “American Town,” which no Korean civilians were allowed to enter in the late 1960s and 1970s. This paper investigates the archival impulse in Kim’s trilogy, especially pointing to those VR films’ urge “to connect what cannot be connected” (Hirschhorn in Obrist 2003, 399, as in Foster 2004, 10). In an interview on Tearless, Kim said that she “wanted to archive the soon-to-be-removed site for people to see semi-permanently” (2022). While the VR experience itself is not like what is generally understood as an archival practice, the artist’s intention to preserve what people might experience in the actual places of victimization in a semi-permanent format of virtual reality resonates with the archival impulse. Also, as the subjects that have long been outcast from official archives, these virtually preserved places challenge the symbolic order of capital “H” historicity.
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K Han Sang Kim - Ajou University
Presenter
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