Professor Soyoung Kim (Korea National University of Arts, Seoul) will be hosted at two events on the Homewood campus next week.
The event is co-sponsored by The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute (AGHI).
Mediating Eurasian Pasts February 10, 5-7 PM, Gilman 479
The Weight of the (Un)/written February 11, 1:30-3:30 PM, Gilman 35
Soyoung Kim is Professor of Cinema Studies at the Korea National University of Arts, Director of the Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute, and Visiting Professor at Duke University, UCBerkeley and Irvine, She is the editor of the History of Korean Cinema ( 10 vols), National Research Foundation of Korea, co-editor of Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space, with Chris Berry and Lynn Spiegel, and Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture: Worlding Asia in the Anthropocene with Shiuhhuah Serena Chou and Rob Wilson.
As a filmmaker, Soyoung Kim has directed the Women’s History Documentary Trilogy “Koryu: Southern Women, South Korea” (2000), “I’ll Be Seeing Her” (2002), and “New Woman: Her First Song” (2004), as well as the feature film “Viewfinder”. She was previously invited as the Guest of Honor for the Guanajuato International Film Festival. KIM also directed the full-length documentary “Drifting City” (2015), and an exile trilogy epic about the Eurasian Korean’s diaspora “Heart of Snow”, “Heart of Blood”, “Sound of Nomad: Koryo Arirang”, and “Goodbye My Love, North Korea”. Her most recent projects is the Women’s History Trilogy, “Ana Inn: Harvesting the Light” (ACC,2022).
Mediating Eurasian Pasts: Soyoung Kim’s Exile Trilogy and Other Works (2014-2024)
In her cinematic and scholarly work, filmmaker Soyoung Kim engages with theoretical and practical questions on national and global cinema and mediates, through cinematic media and installations, historical events such as colonialism, dictatorship, and displacement before, during, and after the Cold War. Particularly in her documentary essayistic work on the Koryo minority, a Korean-ethnic population displaced thrice—under Stalin, through the Japanese occupation, and after the Soviet occupation following the Cold War—Soyoung Kim retells the historical trauma of this people and articulates it in vivid ways within larger geopolitical and climactic archways. Her visual work touches on “scales of time and space, which do not nest neatly but have oddly configured geometries.” Her work contributes to the decolonization of memory and foregrounds spaces of subalternity within Asian cinema but also discusses the impact of globalization on this cinema.
The Weight of the (Un)/written: Manifolds of Memory, Material, and Image in Ana Inn
Ana Inn is a series of projects including Ana Inn: Harvesting the Light – the media wall for ACC ( Asian Cultural Center) in Gwangju, Ana Cosmic Archivist (short) and Ana Inn at the end of the world (a feature length fiction film, and a work in progress).
From the notion of phantom cinema in Soyoung Kim’s book “Korean Cinema in Global Contexts: Postcolonial Phantom, Trans-Cinema, and Blockbuster” to the method of harvesting light and the liquid hauntology of the Ana Inn project, Kim will discuss the weight of the (un)written—perhaps what is written in the wind and tombs—and the pursuit “to read what is never written,” as well as to unfold the manifold of memory, materiality, traces, and image through the cinematic practice .
The “Ana Inn” project in a speculative fiction, focusing on the hilltop tombs of Gaya, a political confederation that once thrived in the southern region of Korea, spanning the present-day Yeongnam and Honam regions from the 1st to 6th century, invites a consideration of the weight of unwritten history. These burial mounds, rich in historical resonance yet lacking official historical records, leave their traces not only in the landscape but also in the surrounding streets, buildings, and shops, whose names and titles echo their resilient legacy. The site was granted UNESCO World Heritage designation in 2024.