siren eun young jung’s (b. 1974, Incheon/Seoul) video work Act of Affect shows a young Yeosung Gukgeuk performer’s practice routine, backstage preparation, and performance in, and perhaps for, an empty auditorium. The performer’s training is repetitive and physically demanding, as she observes herself in the practicing mirror, constantly modifying and refining her steps. The training consumes almost all of the performer’s time and mental space, to the extent that she is seen lying on the floor whilst still practicing her voice. And yet as she assumes layer upon layer of transformation – from make-up, to meticulous costumes, and finally the lifting of stage curtains – fatigue and boredom give way to not only confidence, but also a desire and pride in a new, transformed subjectivity.
In her seven-year-long project researching the gender-fluid genre Yeosung Gukgeuk – the all-female vaudeville-like theatre genre most popular from the ’40s to the ’60s that combines conventional binary melodrama with traditional Korean music and dance – jung does exactly that. Through her extensive inquiry into the lives, anecdotes, and documents of the Yeosung Gukgeuk groups and performers, she pieces together the historical fabrics of the women who breathed life into the subversive troupe. In some of the iterations of her project, she even builds communities across generations who find new, and renewed, future meanings in the encounters and restaging of Yeosung Gukgeuk, which has otherwise been in decline.
jung’s practice is concerned with gender politics and queerness/queering, as well as fabrication and gaps between memories, histories and archives. In Act of Affect, it is not only Yeosung Gukgeuk as a form that is queering. Through restaging, and indeed a renewed way of staging and engaging with those who are present, the act of queering as a transformative process is embodied and extended to performers, musicians, jung as director of the production, and the audience whose curiosity might have led them there in the first place. Queerness is embodied through continuous acts of questioning norms, subverting stereotypes, and inventing tradition. In that process, new subjectivities are conjured, inhabited, and lived. MW
self-presentation:
Siren Eun Young Jung received her BFA, MFA, and DFA from the Department of Fine Art at Ewha Womans University, Seoul, and received her MA in Feminist Theory and Practice in Visual Art at the University of Leeds, UK. Her artistic interest lies in how the yearning desire of unknown individuals meets with the events of the world; how such contacts become resistance, history, or politics. Since 2008, she has been working on Yeosung Gukgeuk (traditional Korean female theater), in which she follows a community of performers of the genre and deals with sexual politics through their male impersonation on stage. She was awarded the Hermès Foundation Missulsang in 2013 and the 2015 Shindoh Art Prize for the project. She works passing through total direction, such as art exhibitions, film festivals, and performance show cases.
