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Performance Info

In her works that blur the boundaries among video, installation art, and performance, Lim Minouk explores different possibilities in the relationship between theater and audience. He questions the line of division between the collective and the individual, brings back things and people that have gone missing or been cast away, and zooms in on scenes in life that are invisible or that should have been mourned. With his production New Town Ghost in 2005 and S.O.S_Adoptive Dissensus introduced at Festival Bo:m in 2009, he has expanded his archiving projects based on performance. He staged a series of site-specific productions including FireCliff which began in 2010; in 2014, he introduced Monument 300 – Chasing Watermarks as a part of CineRadioBus, DMZ Peace Project; his Navigation ID was the opening performance for the tenth Gwangju Biennale. In his most recent production series O Tannenbaum, he continues his experiments by expanding the boundaries of the site-specific performance genre.

Q. You started out working as a visual artist, but now you work without any distinctions among genres, including display art or performing arts. Can you tell us what process you went through to get where you are now, working in a wide range of genres?

A. When I drew or painted in my younger days, I didn’t really think about what I was working with. I never even asked questions about why one has to work with only one medium of art. I didn’t start out to become an artist. I drew as my teachers taught me to do, and I produced satisfactory outcomes. After finishing school, however, I began to have questions. And I felt stifled by the categorization of art genres. Instead of the genres of painting, theater, or film, which are divided into different families of art, I became more interested in experimenting with mixed genres. What was important was the content that I wanted to express, and I needed a new approach of expression, not necessarily my own unique genre or medium. In other words, I moved away from expressing myself in my work and toward having people look for pauses between things. When one is working with different mediums using objet, visual installation, text, or performance, one is bound to encounter practical difficulties. It becomes very difficult to make one’s way into the art market, which has been standardized according to genre. Also, there are no fellow artists to work with. Despite these difficulties, you have to make the decision and put it into action so that you will not be controlled by the existing standardization and the same criteria. When I was younger, I put myself into self-imposed isolation in search of the true essence of art, but as I became older, I threw myself into problems of the real world and began dealing with them in my works. When I met people working as spokespeople for those suffering from pain or enraged by injustice, the shock I felt was at a different level altogether. It seemed impossible for me to share with people a world which I could not truly understand. What I had done was stand in front of the gateway called art and analyze the different genres, but after witnessing real problems of life, I felt as if I had stepped into a blackhole. Or it could be that a sense of indebtedness to the people who had sacrificed themselves for justice and equality brought me out from where I had been. What I did not do was present a re-enactment of injustice. I thought about how to represent it as a different visual reality, and this in turn made it necessary for me to employ different mediums of art.

Q. Can you tell us about the intention behind your work?

A. An intention behind a work depends on a problem that one is critical of; the problem can be of history, memory, identity, or relationship. Being critical of a problem leads one to embark on an adventure in pursuit of the problem which you cannot ignore, and this is brought about when you face things that are unknown to you instead of choosing to work with what you already know. Artists are the people who see things that have no name or things that are not talked about; artists bring them out into open, into the realm of the senses. They bring out entities that have been eliminated from the public realm in the name of social good. What art does is to unveil these entities to the eyes of the public. In that light, I can say that the intention behind my work is to prepare for the disappearance of things; my approach is somewhere between welcoming those things and offering them condolences. Therefore, instead of using my accumulated experience based on things that I had seen and done, I reacted more to loopholes in the things that I saw, felt, and learned. And I needed a form that could traverse these loopholes. Some try to work their way back to the past by discovering and restoring the past, but in my opinion, artists should raise issues when the past is being relegated to the past while it is still being repeated in the present. And this was what I wanted to do. But I was only able to do this when I broke away from the genre that I had been trained for. When I broke away from the very place where I had been standing with the ultimate goal of achieving success or fame, I felt liberated. From that perspective, I used the concept of “the disappearing mediator”in order to explain using art for practical purposes. This did not mean converting a certain social class or occupation into a symbol or seeking to achieve social betterment. My mission is to subvert efforts to consign the past to the past or to relegate the past only to memory.

Q. Can you tell us more about what you believe to be the hierarchy that exists among the art genres?

A. The people who need to have a barrier called “studies” or “major” are the people who need to use the established order as their background. In a time of transition, we often say that we need a new paradigm, but when you look closer, you see that people are trying their best to shut down any novel ideas. People in different genres of art are waging territorial fights, and the genres of art that share borders or crevices are like public properties with unclear borders. Those genres look as if they could belong to either side, and this becomes the reason they are the first ones eliminated. For example, let’s say there is someone who paints, writes, and performs on and off stage, and he needs to find funding for his work, or a teaching position. It is likely that he will become the first one to be ostracized within the system. Even though the art he pursues is contemporary art. Because contemporary art is like the Other; it’s a monster inside oneself. Because contemporary art is like a spy that unearths the empty spaces that are neither the fixed stage nor the theater. Some people see it as a threat to authority. Because it produces cracks in existing genres, some people oppress it by raising an issue of its identity. Just as there is a reaction to every action, you can think of it as a reaction to something new and different. And this explains why an art category called “interdisciplinary arts” had to be created.

Q. The stories you create in your works are told in the format of a performance that can only be staged once and is impossible to restage or reproduce. How do you choose a place to stage a performance with a strong sense of immediacy? And how do you format the story you want to tell in that performance? How about you start with your production, International Calling Frequency?

A. I do not choose a place of performance in order to disclose a social problem or to remind people of the past. I am very doubtful when the purpose of a performance is to re-enact a pain or to heal it. It would be more accurate to say that what I do is to chase after stories that you cannot see or hear at a place but that are rooted to the place. The past is not simply gone. But when you are able to send it off, wouldn’t it be possible to welcome something new? A place of performance is like a place of ritual. What I tried to do was to bring out two parallel lives – two lives that run parallel in either two different times or two different places. In 2011 when I produced International Caling Frequency, my mind was constantly occupied with thoughts of parallel lives or events. Kim Jin-suk was protesting from the top of a crane the laying off of workers, and a group of fellow protesters headed out on buses from Seoul to Busan to show her their support. At the same time, the news of the disaster in Fukushima was on TV every day. I was preparing for my first solo exhibition at the Walker Art Center in the United States, and I felt that the news from my own country and Japan was prodding me to do something about them. With these events taking place simultaneously, I lost my sense of purpose in the present moment, and these events also completely derailed my sense of space. With disasters that had become a part of everyday life, I began to feel a sense of complete emptiness in the spaces I was in, which prompted me to ask questions. And I thought about voices that called upon people. I thought about creating coincidences. I needed a format of performance. I asked Lee Min-hwi, a member of the female duo Mukimukimanmansu to write me music. I introduced her to “The Internationale”and also to its humming version in Brazilian, and by working on the song together, we were able to come up with a melody. It was important for me to imagine the most vulnerable voice while hired thugs pushed and shoved people out of their homes with brute force because we decided to sing a song without lyrics for the people who were being chased away from a place. We went out on the street, gave people a copy of the musical score for the song, and sang the song. The question about how I should prepare to welcome things and prepare for their disappearance led me to wonder how I should employ mediums of art. So that the performance would not end when the song ended, we asked people to take pictures with their phones and to share them. I wanted to intervene and create a situation, and I also wanted everyone to move in a way they wanted and to create a moment which would not revert to being one and the same. The project underwent this stream of processes as the sound came together and grew louder, and the project was International Calling Frequency.

Q. The series of FireCliff with five productions from 2010 to 2015 was also about disappearing entities and places and memories. The theme of Navigation ID which was staged as an open performance at the Gwangju Biennale in 2014 was also about disappearing things. Can you tell us more about these productions?

A. FireCliff can be described as a site-specific performance or documentary theater. By juxtaposing real and unreal situations together, the production creates a gap between the time before and after a certain place becomes permanently fixed with certain memories. It is a different work from mediating things that have disappeared. At a place that has disappeared or is fated to disappear soon, we began by summoning the owners whose voices are no longer heard. FireCliff staged in Madrid in 2010 and FireCliff in Seoul in 2011 were based on research, but the one in Minneapolis in 2012 and Frankfurt in 2015 were designed as opening programs for the exhibitions. Therefore, you can say that FireCliff is a production that subverts fixed ideas or identities about a certain place. I came up with the title to mean a beckoning of something from outside. If you were to say that natural light controls the white cube, a place that is within the system, then the light from a performance is a flickering light like a firefly’s light which can be etched in one’s memories. During the performance in 2009 with the audience riding on a Hangang River ferry, we shed light on the riverbanks; also, producing The Weight of Hands in 2010, I thought about the place that taught me to realize who I really was: the darkness. Chasing after the ones who beckon me in the dark became the very principle of the video documentaries I have produced. And it was also the reason I started using thermal cameras in my works. FireCliff became a series of productions using these ideas. When I encounter things that I cannot understand, they seem to have a power that forces me not to give up. I cannot decipher the signals sent by the entities that are flickering in the dark, which is the reason why I have to respond to them in a way that is synesthesia. And it was the same when I produced Navigation ID. There are two containers that store the remains of the civilians who were massacred at Jinju and Gyeongsan during the Korean War, and for this production, I moved the containers to the front yard of the Gwangju Biennale. The containers were the storage places for the remains of the civilians who were killed during the war; the remains were basically thrown into the containers and uncared for. Because they had been buried away when they should not have been simply buried away, I was forced to see what I should not have seen. Because I started out with the intention to raise questions about remembering history and places, looking into how containers were used in Korea was not an act of deviation perse. The work was designed to begin by welcoming the people who had lost their parents during the war and the mothers who had lost their children during the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. I wanted a different approach to Gwangju, away from the fixed or official ideas or symbols we have of the place Gwangju and the Gwangju Uprising. What would happen if the symbols of massacres from two different times and places met in Gwangju, the very place that symbolizes regional conflict in our country? With the production, people’s sense of historical time and understanding became mixed up, and it became impossible to discern the difference between the victims and victimizers, and the news and media were overflooded with misinformation about the work. And many people misunderstood my work and intention. But it was something that I had to bear as “the disappearing mediator.” The main point of this encounter was to break away from the image of the Other that had become a cliché in history, and to visualize the fissures created by the encounter itself. This is quite a different approach from gaining a political advantage by disclosing the relationship between the history behind a place and its connected memories. Shaking the very core of the fixed framework, and questioning the sentient understanding created by that framework, and coming up with brand new questions, is what I think art should be.

Q. O Tannenbaum is your most recent work, and it was the future archive project that all started with the song. What kind of production was this? And it must have been difficult to research the origins of the songs in the histories of different nations, so can you tell us more about that as well?

A. I happened to hear the song “O Tannenbaum” when I was staying in Berlin in 2016. Many Koreans know the first line of the lyrics,“O pine tree, pine tree.” I started the research just out of curiosity: Tannenbaum means fir tree in German, but how did the lyrics change so that it became a pine tree in Korean? I received tremendous help from Professor Min Gyeong-chang, a scholar in music history, and the transformations of the song that I discovered in my research was amazing.“O Tannenbaum” was adapted into English under a new title, “The Red Flag,”and its transformations continued with its adaptation into Japanese with the title “Akahata no uta.” In North Korea, the song became known as “Jeokgiga”(Red Flag Song), and in South Korea, it became known as “O Pine Tree” and “Christmas Tree.” It was a clear example of the social performativity of a song during the time of modernization. During the time of the Japanese Occupation,“Jeokgiga” was sung by Korean independence fighters as well as communist fighters, but that version was a translation of the Japanese version “Akahata no uta,” which was sung by communists in Japan. It is so ironic, for the spirit of “Akahata no uta” is summarized as taking vengeance on one’s enemies. After Korea became divided, “Jeokgiga” became widely sung almost like the national anthem in North Korea, and because of that, it became banned in South Korea; singing the song was a violation of the National Security Law. Therefore, when I participated in the installation work called Reenacting History (2017), I had to get legal advice. In the end, among the seven song platforms, the sound system that played “Jeokgiga” sung in North Korea was covered in order to visually express the banning of the song. By expressing how the song could be heard, but not sung, I questioned the limitation of the collective and general nature of the song. I also staged a performance related to this in Japan, and I believe I will continue to work with this. “O Tannenbaum” was a project that began with an historical aporia - the history created and produced by the song, and the history of prohibiting the song. Through my research, I discovered how communists in Korea and Japan formed solidarity in the 1920s to fight against imperialism, and how the connection between the song and the idealism of people was manifest in the performance. It was also an attempt to re-define the relationship between theater and audience. From that perspective, the future archive will be an attempt to stage memories that have been cast out from history.

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