CAA Paper run-throughs
CAA Paper run-throughs
Both Melanie Nguyen and JooHee Kim have been selected to give papers at this year's edition of CAA next month in New York, for which they have been awarded travel funds.
In order that they might have an opportunity for one last run-through in front of a discerning audience before they deliver their papers in New York, we have organized a run-through in the Collaboratory Thursday, January 26th at 3:30 pm. Please join us in the Collaboratory to help Melanie and JooHee give their ideas a fine polish!
Here's some details on JooHee's paper, which is titled "Fantasies of Korean Girls: This Isn’t What It Appears":
A black-and-white 1950s photograph depicts a topless Korean Camptown woman wearing a faint smile. She grasps a sword in one hand, holding it above the shoulder as if ready to plunge it into a supine American soldier. The picture’s back reads, “This isn’t what it appears.” But, what do we see in the image, and why does each side of the photograph point to a different truth? Who has the authority to declare the “truth” of this image? Half a century after this strange performance, the artist Heehyun Choi (b. 1994) took up this picture and other never-before-seen photographs for her 2022 film, This Isn’t What It Appears (2022). Choi uses a camera, a mirror, language, and her voice to intervene in the web of gazes and power relations produced by photographs taken during the Korean War. Drawing on the concepts of “reciprocal dialogue” and “Mirror-Writing Box” propounded by Ariella Azoulay and Trinh T. Minh-Ha, respectively, this paper presents an improved comprehension of the dialogic potential of the photography vacillating between the manifested image from the perspective of American cameramen, the notes on the back, and the intervention made by the artist a half-century later. These three elements venture beyond the limited frame of the camera and disclose the broad, reciprocal perspective that undercuts the photographer’s authority. I argue that Choi’s work offers an example of feminist spectatorship that undermines the male-centered authority in Asian girls’ images. Ultimately, it challenges the context of the consumption of the fantasized Asian girls’ images within the war, enabling its comprehensive interpretation.