“An Ordinary Scene that Someone Might Have Seen”
Yeonsook Less (a.k.a. Rita)
I first encountered Boyun Jang’s work at Art Spectrum 2012, held at the Leeum Museum of Art. In this exhibition, the artist presented A Thousand Years, a project in which she collected over 350 abandoned photographs and foregrounded the recurring presence of Gyeongju. In the 1970s and 80s, Gyeongju was a must-visit destination for school trips, honeymoons, and family vacations. As we know, the Gyeongju of that era no longer exists—not only because its heyday as a tourist hotspot has passed but also because photography, as a medium, attests to the absence of the present. This absence evokes a tender nostalgia for a past never experienced—someone else’s life captured in the photographs that make up A Thousand Years—or an eerie premonition. Photography, regardless of its subject, immediately detaches itself from the present moment of "now," marking a past that is no longer "here." This inevitable temporal disjunction between past and present, as we know, opens up a space-time where traces of art's aura—democratized in the age of technological reproduction—continue to linger. Consequently, photography continually generates residues or surpluses—elements that cannot be fully reduced to interpretation—due to the inherent disjunction between time and materiality.
Through a “fantasy or imaginative reconstruction” of the "debris" of a past that can never be fully restored to its original form, Boyun Jang presented a "possible world" in A Thousand Years—a kind of counter-history that might have existed somewhere between fiction and fact. Jang adopts a similar approach in two projects undertaken at the Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. Her ongoing series Black Veil, which began in 2021, explores the “other stories” of Korean nurses dispatched to Germany—stories discarded and forgotten within the “official narrative” of their lives. The project includes a video in which an international student actress residing in Korea recites scripts written in the form of letters, based on the real lives of these nurses, as if reading on their behalf. It also includes a publication that collages fragmentary texts in various forms, featuring fictional reinterpretations of historical records—such as facts and testimonies about these nurses—and blurring the boundaries between past and present. The Korean nurses dispatched to Germany in the 1970s were hailed as key contributors to the Miracle on the Han River and, like the miners who went to Germany, were regarded as export laborers tasked with earning foreign currency. In Black Veil, their lives emerge as indistinct figures of someone, occupying the unbridgeable and unfillable “gap between history and the individual, between record and memory” . These nameless and faceless figures are summoned through the voice of an actress and the words of the artist. This voice represents the “shadows” or “ghosts” forgotten by History with a capital H. Ghosts have no tangible presence. Still, as Jacques Derrida observed in his reading of Hamlet, they demand nothing more than the possibility of a response—a responsibility—to their voices.
For Boyun Jang, the notion of responsibility seems to signify the capacity to empathize with ghostly others, even while confronting the limitations of historical records and testimonies, which can only hint at possible truths about the past. Like a medium bridging life and death, Jang channels the irreproducible “footage” of a past that cannot be fully captured through the language of official or dominant historical narratives, transforming it into a form of fictional and alternative truth through her works. This approach extends to her Okinawa series, which draws inspiration from the life of Bae Bong-gi, a Japanese military comfort woman whose story is recounted in Fumiko Kawada’s book The Red Tiled House. Enticed by the promises of making a living, Bae left Yesan in Chungcheong Province in 1943 and was forcibly taken to Tokashiki Island in Okinawa Prefecture to serve as a comfort woman for the Japanese army. To avoid deportation from Okinawa, she became the first person from the Korean Peninsula to testify that she was a survivor of the comfort women system. Despite the profound shock and impact of Bae Bong-gi’s testimony on Japanese society in 1975, her name remained virtually unknown in South Korea, largely due to postwar ideological divides. A feminist scholar Kim Hyun Gyung analyzed Bae as a “subaltern”—a marginalized subject—and examined how her life and death became engulfed in silence. Before publicly coming forward as a survivor of the comfort women system, she was voiceless due to her statelessness. After her testimony, her ties to the pro-North Korean Chongryon (General Association of Korean Residents in Japan) rendered her a taboo figure in South Korean society, leaving her with no audience. Even after her death, her remains became a site of political contention, as both Chongryon and the pro-South Korean Mindan (Korean Residents Union in Japan) appropriated her life and death within their respective political frameworks. This process “activated the politics of speaking for,” perpetuating a vicious cycle that foreclosed any possibility of alternative representations of her life and death. Yet, when historical evidence—such as records and testimonies—is scarce and even such evidence cannot be verified as “complete facts,” the possibility of alternative representations must inevitably begin at the limits of its inherent impossibility.
I am referencing Saidiya Hartman’s concept of “critical fabulation.” Hartman argues for the need to “imagine what might have happened or what might have been said or might have been done,” both alongside and against the painful legacy of slavery's official archives. Her reason for employing this approach to historical narrative is as follows: “By flattening the levels of narrative discourse and confusing narrator and speakers, I hope to illuminate the contested character of history, narrative, event, and fact, to topple the hierarchy of discourse, and to engulf authorized speech in the clash of voices.” Similarly, Jang’s Okinawa series serves as an entry point for imagining the “ordinary” landscapes of Okinawa—those that Bae Bong-gi might have once encountered—beyond her publicly sanctioned identity as a “victim” or “survivor” of war, state power, and male violence. Boyun Jang’s photographs capture the serene yet seemingly indifferent silence of Okinawa’s landscapes, interspersed with fleeting glimpses of people laughing and chatting, wild plants growing untamed, and man-made objects that look as though they have been there for ages. Among these images, what drew my attention most was a cluster of bananas hanging heavily from a tree. In The Red Tiled House, Bae Bong-gi recounts how she was lured to Naha Port, en route to Tokashiki Island, by false promises of abundance: “If you go to the mountains, fruits are everywhere, and if you lie beneath a tree with your mouth open, the fruit will fall right in.” Looking at the photograph of the bananas—captured as though to belatedly fulfill Bae’s long-lost wish—I reflected that photography today might serve not only as a medium to summon the voices of forgotten others into the “here and now” but also as a vessel to create a fictional, ritualistic space on their behalf. “An ordinary scene that someone might have seen” emerges as the only moment of suspended judgment within the seamless master or dominant narrative that connects past, present, and future. By evoking such moments, Jang’s Okinawa series offers solace to the unreachable utopian dreams of the past. In this sense, her work becomes a fragile yet persistent “response” to the other—a quiet defiance against history, enacted through history itself.
