Qri Kim
Programme:
Art - PhD/MPhil
Start date:
Sep-20
Mode of study:
Full time
Research title:
The study of Korean Comfort Women’s Haan through The Practice of Korean Monochrome
Biography
Qri Kim is a visual artist and practice-led PhD Candidate at the University of Edinburgh, studying School of Art. Her work as an artist focuses on gender, identity, nationalism, post-colonialism, and repetitive actions through her Monochrome practice using threads.
Qri completed an MRes in Fine Art and Humanities from Royal College of Art in London after receiving an M.A. in Fine Art from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, as well as an Undergraduate degree in Sculpture from Chung-ang University in Anseong.
Qri's practice aims to identify how the subject of Korean Comfort Women has been abstracted as a symbol of the fight against crimes committed by Japan during Korea’s colonization (1910-1945), disenfranchised their femininity, and led to these women being visually mis-represented as prostitutes more recently for the US Army. Comfort women were taken by force and entrapped by deception into sexual servitude by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War (1939-1945). The Korean Comfort Women comprised the majority, although the precise numbers and the personal information of the comfort women was not recorded in official documents. This is explored through examination of Korean movies, newspapers, artworks, and academic seminars, during the process of Korean modernisation.
Specifically, she examines the visual representations of Korean Comfort Women’s trauma, called haan, which is politically constructed by the discourse of two countries nationalisms, Japan, and Korea. The term ‘Haan’ is a Korean conventional way of conveying multiple sentiments such as hurt, despair, resentment, and loss, of an individual over a long period of time. It is an indispensable concept to understand what the women’s personal aspirations are and what makes the women frustrated.
Korean monochrome is one representation of not only K-culture but also Korean modern art, choosing to fill the canvas with mono-colour, using the artists’ repetitive actions. However, the monochrome artist’s repetitive actions could not embrace and represent the 1970’s Korean labourers that sustained the Korean identity, called ‘Koreanness’, and Korean economy. Qri challenges this limitation through her expression of Korean Monochrome, integrating the working class whose value was often overlooked by their society, through the complex repetitive process of cutting, pasting, erasing, and scratching. Her Fiat-Lux series (2020-ongoing) intends to highlight the fact that ‘Koreanness’ was not built in a day, but that there was uncountable labourers’ sacrifice behind it.