J JOON LEE
Black Portraiture from the Streets of Dongducheon: Rethinking Race, Intimacies and the Visuality of the Korean Camptown
Wednesday, 7 August 2024
6:00pm - 7:30pm
Art Gallery of NSW
Centenary Auditorium, South Building
Part of the 2024 Sydney Asian Art Series, convened by Olivier Krischer and Yvonne Low, and co-presented by the Power Institute and VisAsia at the Art Gallery of NSW.
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While seemingly existing supra-territorially, US military bases across South Korea depend economically and socially on local camptowns neighbouring the bases and catering to GIs, contractors, and their families. Although Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” may not detail the legality of camptown rights and restrictions in the context of United States Forces Korea, it is at least an apt descriptor for the state of camptowns in the collective memory formed largely by cultural production: exception legitimized by the unfinished war, which, in turn, requires that very exception. Hence, this space of transnational militarism needed to be kept as imagined spaces beyond the sovereignty of South Korea in the name of peace keeping.
In this lecture, Lee zeroes in on the Korean photographer Yong Suk Kang’s long forgotten 1982 camptown photography series, From Dongducheon, and interrogates the racial capitalism undergirding camptown service economies. How does Kang’s work destabilize the ethno-nationalist narrative of camptown victimhood? How can the theory of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983) help us unlearn the continued capitalization on the hypervisibility of Blackness to turn the Black subjects of camptown photographs into the manifestation of American imperialism and gendered violence? Lee proposes what aesthetics can still do in the seeming normalcy of the state of exception and examines how the transoceanic history of racial capitalism sheds light on the transnationality of the military industrial complex.
Jung Joon Lee is Associate Professor of the history of photography and contemporary art in the Department of Theory and History of Art and Design at Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s research interests explore the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Her new book, Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War (Duke University Press, 2024), treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens through which to examine how photography makes meaning and shapes history. Lee is currently working on a book project about photography and art exhibitions as spaces for transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair. She was a 2022-23 Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communications and Arts in 2022.
Image: Yong Suk Kang, from From Dongducheon series, 1982, gelatin silver print. Courtesy of the artist.
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HISTORIES, TACTILITY AND MATERIAL CULTURE: STUDIES ON CHINESE BELT TOGGLES
Elizabeth Carter, Shuxia Chen, Min-Jung Kim and Claire Roberts
Thursday, 18 July 2024
6:00pm - 7:15pm
Chau Chak Wing Museum
University of Sydney
A panel conversation to launch the book Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature (2024), co-presented by the Power Institute, the Powerhouse Museum, and Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.
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Curators, historians and scientists will be brought together to introduce the understudied cultural objects of the Chinese belt toggle, known as zhuizi (坠子). Similar to their better-known Japanese counterparts netsuke, these small carved ornaments offer a rare glimpse into everyday life in early modern China.
Toggles were a common feature of traditional Chinese garments from the 17th century but were scarcely collected. More than personal accessories, toggles were wearable symbols, embodying Chinese folk traditions and cultural beliefs. The exhibition Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature, a collaboration between the Powerhouse Museum and Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney, reveals one of the world’s largest collections of these extraordinary objects.
The associated publication, Chinese Toggles: Culture in Miniature, co-published with Power Publications and edited by the exhibition’s curators, introduces these unique objects to a broader audience for the first time, pairing academic enquiry with detailed photographic documentation of the exhibition and catalogue of 80 toggles.
This conversation between editors and authors takes its lead from the book, combining historical, curatorial and scientific perspectives to unlock the mysteries of the Chinese toggle—an everyday object long overlooked, but uniquely able to speak to 300 years of Chinese culture and across all levels of society.
Image: Toggle made from a walnut depicting a frog on a lotus leaf, China. Powerhouse collection, gift of Alastair Morrison, 1992, 92/480.
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The Power Institute is a Foundation based at the University of Sydney dedicated to understanding the visual world, through art and visual culture. We support research, publish texts, and organise public programs.
The Power Institute would like to acknowledge and pay respect to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land upon which the University of Sydney, and the Power Institute, is built. As we share our own knowledge, teaching, learning and research practices, may we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.
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