transPOP: Korea Vietnam Remix Symposium
University of California, Berkeley January 14, 2009
Abtracts & Bios
Panel One: Remembering and Representation: Transnational Histories
Respondent: Jonathon Hall
• Hyun Sook Kim
Title: “Memorials As Battlegrounds: Neo-Colonial Desire and Local Resistance in Central Vietnam”
'Vietnam' conjures up unsettling images of modernity. Its physical and cultural landscape, both urban and rural, is marked by death, destruction and devastation, of lives destroyed by brutal wars and violence. In this shadow, how do war memorials in rural villages of Central Vietnam become places of neocolonial desire and become sites of transnational cultural contestations? How is power re-enacted through the orientalization of Central Vietnam? Gendered war memorials in villages of Central Vietnam today reveal power struggles over the conflicting meanings of locality, place and collective and self identities.
Hyun Sook Kim is Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts. Her research and teaching have centered on the "darkside" of modernity and nationalism, especially in regard to gendered and ethnic violence. Her current project on "food and modernity" examines cultural and political landscapes of cities in food consumption and production.
• H. Lan Thao Lam
Title: Caution, U. S Government
In 1975, after the fall of Saigon, the Library of Congress acquired a collection of 1950-70's films from the South Vietnam Embassy in Washington, D.C. Unidentified Vietnam, components of which are currently on view as part of the transPOP exhibition, is a mixed media installation responding to these propaganda films. Taking her collaborative project as a point of departure, H. Lan Thao Lam will discuss issues of displaced national history, trauma, propaganda, and counter-archival practices. The SVNE Collection was created to support a government that no longer exists. In researching their project, the artists considered what it is that the archive now supports. They propose that it testifies to a promise unfulfilled; it represents its own status of exile. In Archive Fever, Derrida notes: "There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation." Lam will unpack some of the meanings that resonate from this particular archive at this moment in time. Unidentified Vietnam asks what it means for an archive to preserve the history of a deposed nation. Not unlike some Vietnamese-in-exile, the films in the SVNE collection were salvaged from destruction. These films are interned in an institution linked to the very power structure that brought about their displacement. To re-inscribe the archive institutes another reading of the past, one in which the ironies of protecting a displaced history within its paternal domain do not remain hidden.
H. Lan Thao Lam is a bi-national, bilingual artist who has lived in Asia (Vietnam, Taiwan and Malaysia), Canada and the US. For the past seven years, she has been collaborating with artist/filmmaker Lana Lin. The collaboration has made films, installations, and publication projects about immigration, sites of residual trauma, national identity and historical memory. Lam holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from California Institute of the Arts, and considers her experiences in refugee camps in Malaysia and housing projects in Canada also part of her education. She has screened and exhibited her work internationally, including: 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China; Arko Art Center, Korean Arts Council, Seoul, Korea; Taiwan International Documentary Festival, Taipei; rum46, Denmark; Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the New Museum, The Kitchen, and the Queens Museum in New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. Lam has received numerous awards including the Canada Council for the Arts, H.L. Rous Sculpture Award, and James Robertson Environmental Design Award, among others.
• Viet Nguyen
Title: The Authenticity of the Anonymous: Popular Culture and the Art of War
At first glance, war does not make a very good subject for pop art or popular culture. War is a bloody business whose glamour is best-suited for the serious macho of the blockbuster film, the sentimental displays of veterans' reunions, or the high-minded rituals of state culture, where presidents inspect the troops and pin ribbons on burly chests. Movies, maudlin, and medals are certainly parts of a popular culture, but in the postmodern capitalist world of both old West and new East, popular culture has fizzy connotations of ephemerality, while its distant cousin, pop art, smacks of ironic self-awareness. Neither popular culture nor pop art are easily amenable to the serious or sentimental trappings of war, since it's difficult, although not impossible, for the artist or craftsperson to strip away the emotional and political baggage of any given war, at least while its participants still live to remind audiences of war's terror and strife. This talk looks at the complications that war poses for popular culture and art, especially in the context of Viet Nam.
Viet Thanh Nguyen is an associate professor of English and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America; numerous articles in journals such as PMLA, American Literary History, and positions: east asia cultures critique; and short stories in venues including Best New American Voices, Narrative and TriQuarterly (forthcoming). He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, a resident at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and a scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. This year he is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where he is working on a short story collection titled After This Life, Another, as well as a book of cultural criticism, A Country Not Our Own: Remembering the American War in Southeast Asia.
• Christine Hong
Title: Architectures of Grievance: Memorializing Wartime Ruin in North Korea and Viet Nam
Staged in the arena of the global marketplace, South Korea's economic rapprochement with Viet Nam has signaled the return of a former Cold War aggressor in the role of major investor. In this neoliberal drama, the violent tragedy of war repeats less as farce than as inter-Asian romance. Cast not in the uniforms of soldiers, South Korean men, in a discomfiting sartorial twist, now don the garb of suitors to Vietnamese women. Motivated by the timeliness of comparative inquiry into the overdetermined nature of contemporary South Korean and Vietnamese relations, scholars within critical Asian Studies have rightly pointed out the limitations of neoliberal reconciliation absent meaningful historical reckoning. Yet, in their critique of South Korea's post-Cold War economic engagement with Viet Nam, few have paused to examine that other Korean-Vietnamese wartime nexus—namely, North Korea's aid to and support of Viet Nam during the American War.
Described in documents on Viet Nam's official ministry site as an "old friend," North Korea has been relegated nostalgically to Viet Nam's socialist past as the latter forges an economic future with its former foe, South Korea. The comparative question that this paper seeks to pursue is twofold: not only how built space has historically served to foster socialist consciousness in North Korea and Viet Nam but also in what way and to what degree unredressed war-era grievances survive the transition to post-socialism. In particular, this paper focuses on the apparent anachronism of state-sponsored wartime memory in North Korea and Viet Nam, as respectively inscribed in the museological forms of the Sinchon War Museum in Hwanghae-do and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Pedagogically conceived with the intention of making visible the Asian civilian underside of past U.S. "hot wars" during the Cold War, these two memorial museums are situated within a region primed to forget—conditioned less by historical recollection than by the forward propulsion of market-driven Realpolitik. This is to say, even as both museums offer intriguing case studies in how the legacy of the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim has been formally recalled within the national memory projects of states whose alliance with global communism made them Cold War targets for U.S. "police action," they raise difficult questions about whether the promise of outside economic uplift has rendered the formal pursuit of justice moot.
Christine Hong is a Chancellor's postdoctoral fellow in English at UC Berkeley. She is completing a project tentatively titled Legal Fictions: Human Rights Cultural Production and the Pax Americana in the Pacific Rim, which examines the relation of post-1945 human rights cultural production, as an extra-juridical mode of appeal, grievance, and critique, to the Pax Americana, the U.S. military "peace" that restructured the Asia-Pacific following World War II. Her research looks comparatively at a trans-Pacific corpus of Asian, Asian American, and African American writing, political performance, and visual art.
• Jonathan Hall
Jonathan Hall is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies, but he also teach courses in East Asian Languages & Literatures and Queer Studies. His research focuses on fantasy and politics in postwar Japanese fiction and film. He is not an anime "otaku," but he loves pulling apart the images and stories that make up the genre.
Panel Two: Media and Migration
Respondent: Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
• Lan Duong
Title: Bawdy Humor: Gender and the Grotesque in Souls on Swings
In recent years, a young generation of Vietnamese male directors from southern Viet Nam has been producing films marked by a preoccupation with hybridity, change, and fluidity, all of which are founded upon the mutable Vietnamese body. Comedic narratives about pregnant men, bodily transformations, sexual reproduction, and gender switching are increasingly popular tropes in contemporary Vietnamese cinema. Such tropes are, in fact, in concert with state discourses about identity, sexuality, and gender, as the state deliberates upon gay and lesbian marriages as well as the right for transgenders to undergo sex operations.
This presentation focuses on a recent film called Hon Truong Ba, Da Hang Thit [2006], or Souls on Swings. Based on a myth about a legendary chess player named Truong Ba and the comeuppance he receives when he crosses a chess deity, it is a cautionary tale about male hubris. Rather than conform to the story's message, writer and director Nguyen Quang Dung uses it instead to engage in topical issues such as male homosexuality and identity formation in Vietnamese society. It ends with multiple body switchings, a queer male coupling, and a plea for an understanding of difference in 21st century Viet Nam. Most effectively, with its emphasis on the carnivalesque, this farcical comedy upends gender norms and social conventions in its grotesque humor about the body.
"Happy ending" notwithstanding, in discarding the queer male body, the film advocates for a bodily transformation for the more effete character, allowing viewers to "see" heterosexual coupledom in the final images, and restores -- rather than dissolves -- gendered and classed identities. Ironically, given its message of tolerance, the film's logic is in keeping with the preservation of discrete identities that the government promotes when it adheres to a mind-body split and permits transgenders to claim a new identity, provided their psychological and physical selves are clearly at odds. Gays and lesbians are not accorded the same privilege. Investigating the impetus for such improbable comedies to be produced against the changing contours of the Vietnamese film industry, the country's bifurcated socialist-capitalistic economy, and its social mores, this paper performs close analyses of the filmic text and the political and cultural contexts from which this film and others like it have arisen.
Lan Duong is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Cultural Studies Department at UC Riverside. She is working on a book entitled Family Binds: Betrayal and Loyalty in Viet Nam and the Diaspora. The book explores the films and literature of the Vietnamese and Vietnamese diaspora through the theme of treason and the practices of collaboration. Dr. Duong's second book project, From the National to The Transnational: Cultural Revolutions of Vietnamese Cinema, examines Vietnamese cinema from its inception to the present-day. Her research interests include transnational feminism, postcolonial theory, youth culture, gender, sexuality, and queer diasporas. Her critical works can be found in Amerasia, Asian Cinema, and Transnational Feminism in Film and Media. She is also a poet and has been published in Watermark, Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Poetry, and Crab Orchard Review.
• Sowon Kwon
Title: A Few Portraits
My talk will address two recent projects that reconsider portraiture. dongghab, an ongoing series of works which traces uncanny cosmologies within a web search, and (i), which is based on the musical playlist preferences of its subjects. Both works ruminate on the confluence of personal and historical memory and the ways in which our bodies, perception, and identities are increasingly submitted to and made accessible (and inaccessible) through technology.
Sowon Kwon is a Korean-born artist based in New York City. Her sculptural and video installations, digital animation, as well as drawings and prints, have been featured in exhibitions at The Whitney Museum, The Kitchen, The Drawing Center, The Berkeley Art Museum, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, and LA MOCA among others; as well as internationally, at the third Gwangju Biennale in Korea and the Yokohama Triennale in Japan. She is currently a Visiting Professor at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
• Kyu Hyun Kim
Title: The Ghost and Living Flesh in the Korean Popular Culture Imagery of Viet Nam
In this paper, I would like to examine and critique the media construction of Viet Nam, its culture and its characters in a set of recent popular cultural products: horror films (R-Point, Muoi), TV drama (Hanoi Bride) and a nostalgic melodrama using the Viet Nam War as a background (Sunny). I would like to draw attention to specific instances of "erasure" or—especially in the case of horror films— of "spectralization," of turning living beings, the participants of concrete history, into conjured, symbolic presences, that is, into "ghosts," that attempt to prevent Koreans from the aporia of recognizing themselves as victimizers, exploiters and imperialists.
I want to be clear that I am not trying to reconstitute the alternative imagery of "Viet Nam" as a victim of international capitalism operating from Korea. Theodor Adorno, in his essay "Cultural Industry Reconsidered," presents a powerful indictment of the ideological illusions propagated by the capitalist popular art forms, such as cinema, that the "standards for orientation," the norms exist for the masses to interpret cultures and grasp their "realities." However, I feel that critics of international capitalism following paths blazed by Adorno are just as vulnerable to this indictment, in their insistence that popular cultural products must be "read" in certain (ideologically "correct") ways that uncover their subordinate status to the exchange of international capital.
The Korean involvement in the Viet Nam War has always been a controversial moment in Korean historiography as well as in the discursive construction of the "mainstream" postwar Korean identity, since the latter owes much to the notion that Koreans are (eternally) victims of the (foreign) empires and have never been aggressors toward foreign peoples. The fact that Koreans soldiers have committed just the type of atrocities and engaged in an invasive war in Viet Nam that Koreans blame Japanese, Americans and other imperialist nations for, has a potential to destabilize the nationalist self-image of Koreans. To be sure, there has been in last twenty years at least partial recognition of this "aggressor's" role played by Korea in both elite and mass cultures, in, for instance, Ahn Jeong-hyo's White Badge and Hwang Seok-young's Shadow of the Weapon, but in 2000s, the success of hallyu (Korean popular culture products consumed outside the domestic market) in Southeast Asia and tightening of economic relationship have made it possible to view the presentation of Viet Nam's imagery dissociated from the war.
The movies and TV drama mentioned above are all products of this new development. Therefore, their approaches to the aporia of recognition (of Koreans as "villains/aggressors") are also varied and complex. This paper will attempt to investigate how the conventions of genres—horror, melodrama, historical film—as well as particular aesthetic choices by filmmakers are deployed to deal with this problem, and finally, develop a hypothetical profile of a future film/TV project that could deal with it more honestly and with better historical grounding, but without sacrificing its mass appeal.
Kyu Hyun Kim teaches Japanese, Japanese popular culture and Korean history at University of California, Davis. He received Ph. D. in Japanese History in 1997 at Harvard University. His latest book, The Age of Visions and Arguments: Parliamentarianism and the National Public Sphere in Early Meiji Japan, is available from Harvard Asia Center. His recent articles include "Out of the Watery Closet/Womb: Anxieties about Femininity and Reproduction in Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema," (BOL, Insa Art Space/Art Council Korea, no. 8, 2008) and "The State, Family and Womanhood in the Colonial Period, 1919-1945." (Forthcoming from Palgrave-McMillan Press) Kim also serves as the academic adviser and a reviewer for www.koreanfilm.org , the oldest English-language online information and review for Korean cinema.
• Isabelle Thuy Pelaud
Isabelle Thuy Pelaud is associate professor in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. She recently finished a manuscript titled History, Identity and Survival: Reading Vietnamese American Literature and is co-director of the Diasporic Vietnamese American Network (DVAN). Her academic work can be found in Mixed Race Literature, The New Face of Asian Pacific America, Amerasia Journal and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her essays and short stories have been published in Making More Waves, Tilting the Continent, and Vietnam Dialogue Inside/Out.