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Taken Away

“Apologize Before Us” by Duk-Kyung Kang, 1995 Acrylic on paper.

By Yi Hai Lai

They served the staple wine and cheese. But the usual cool and detached art slummers stayed out of sight. Billed as an art opening, the Quest for Justice: The Story of Korean Comfort Women as Told through Their Art event played out like a global community gathering. Some 50 people of all stylistic persuasions crammed into the bright, small space of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery: Urban, suburban, monastic, eclectic, national and international alike. No doubt most of them were there to be near the petite 80 year old Soon-Duk Kim, one of the artists featured in the show.

Quest for Justice is a political art tour that ends its U.S. appearance in San Francisco. It aims to pressure the Japanese government to make just reparations to the Korean “comfort women” who suffered as sex slaves for World War II Japanese soldiers, and to raise international awareness of sex crimes today.

With her friend and supporter Buddhist monk Hyejin by her side, Soon Duk Kim represented herself as well as Bok-Dong Kim, Yong-Nyeo Lee and the late Duk-Kyung Kang, all former “comfort women” whose art is fast becoming the mouth piece for other sex crime victims worldwide.

In the gallery, the painting and drawings are divided into five headings ,which in turn represent five emotional focuses: Purity, Taken Away, The Comfort Station, Bitterness and Hope. Each artist has work dispersed throughout the categories. From left to right upon entering the space, the viewer experiences a timeline of images. Scenes of spring and harvest season denote purity before the war. The pictorial narration continues with the young women’s initial separation from their families, their journey by boat to war zones, life at the “comfort stations,” the painful, often shame-filled life after the War, then finally, signs of healing and hope. Though the subject matter of these pieces is hardly elementary, many were done in a naïf style. The lines possess a child’s innocence, but the use of symbolic objects and caricature figures has a directness that western political painter Daumier would have envied.

At the show, Kim sat patiently through a round of flash-bulb picture-taking. She swung her legs gently through the opening remarks. Then, she resolutely walked to the first painting to her left and began explaining its personal meaning to the crowded roomful of people.

“Innocence Lost” by Duk-Kyung Kang, 1995 Acrylic on canvas.

“At That Time, Over There” shows a young girl in the fetal position on the ground while shadowed soldier figures stand over her, watching. “This was when I first arrived in Shanghai,” says Kim. The picture turns out to be a record of her first rape by a Japanese soldier while others stand in line waiting for their turn. Kim then moves to her late friend Duk-Kyung’s piece called “Lost Innocence,” which also shows a naked girl curled into herself. She is under a blossoming cherry tree from the trunk of which emerges a soldier with his fist pointed at the succumbing girl. The man’s hand and arm resemble a phallus in its hard outline.

The paintings of Kim and Kang were the highlight of the show. The two different styles play off each other well. They seem to extend beyond style into subject, or rather, focus. Duk-Kyung Kang found a lot of energy in the theme of retribution. In “Apologize Before Us”, she defined with strong pencil outlines the proud, upright figure of a young Korean woman who holds a knife embedded into a bleeding Japanese flag. Under the dripping emblem kneels a small apologetic Japanese soldier. In contrast, Soon-Duk Kim employs line subtly to describe herself as a child. She would rather remember her youth than what happened beyond, though some of her childhood depictions have threatening undertones. One such piece is “Colonial Mushroom Taxation,” which shows a very young Kim squatting on the forest floor picking mushrooms to be sent to Japan. Strangely, if you look longer, the trees behind the girl start to recall the soldiers in the shadow described earlier “To me this piece is more loaded with ominous meaning,” said B. Nguyen, a graphic designer at the opening. “It says that atrocities begin with the littlest signs.”

Kim has been causing quite a stir in the 79 days that she has been traveling in the United States with her artwork. Before it reached America, the Quest for Justice art tour showed in 50 locations in Japan from 1997-98. When Kim first painted, she had no idea she would be traveling all over Japan and the United States with it.

The journey really began in 1991 when Kim heard the testimony of Hak-Soon Kim halmoni, the first of the sex crime survivors to speak publicly in Korea of her experiences in the World War II “comfort stations.” Halmoni literally means “grandmother” in Korean. It is an affectionate way of referring to the surviving “comfort women.” Soon-Duk Kim thought, “I had the same experiences, I should do it too.” Day in and day out, she would hear news of Japanese officials denying atrocities had been committed.

As more halmonis came forward with their stories, Kim found the courage to do the same. In 1992, Hyejin and others of the Buddhist and social communities helped found the House of Sharing, a living quarters and support system for former comfort women. There are currently 10 women living at the House with Hyejin as their caretaker. For many of them, living at home had become difficult after the truth was revealed. Many felt silence to be the only way to preserve their sexual innocence in their families’ eyes. After the House was established, Hyejin asked the residents to think of something they had always wanted to do but never had a chance to. They said, “We would love to study, none of us have ever been to school.” Hyejin posted an ad for a tutor, and among the five candidates that replied, one was also an art teacher. What began as writing lessons soon turned into art sessions that gave the halmonis a new way to express all that had been repressed. Their art is concrete proof of their will to survive.

A screening of Daisil Kim-Gibson’s 57-minute version of Silence Broken—Korean Comfort Women, a documentary made up of interviews, historical footage and some reenactment, also highlighted the exhibition. The key elements to this film are the testimonies of about six halmonis and the counter-points by Japanese University professors and former World War II soldiers. A frank and captivating film, Silence Broken garnered a Rockerfeller Fellowship for Kim-Gibson, who was a professor at Mount Holyoke, and then a federal and state government employee before she picked up filmmaking in 1988. The 52 year-old Korean American filmmaker’s visit from New York coincided with the Quest for Justice’s San Francisco debut. During the opening and earlier at a press conference, Kim-Gibson faithfully translated for the Korean-speaking Kim and Hyejin. Kim-Gibson had a lyrical command of words and a respectful yet playful affection for the halmoni who sat next to her on stage. When Kim halmoni described her family’s reaction to public testimony, Kim-Gibson translated that they were “a little bit pissed off, because she had not consulted them first.”

Later at the gallery, she recounted how she became involved with the cause of the halmonis. “I met Soon Duk Kim and other former ‘comfort women’ in 1992 in Washington, D.C. I was living there at the time. I translated for them at one of the conferences and their pain was like electricity.” She brought to attention the fact that this is an issue that should concern everyone. “It’s not just something that happened to some girl, it’s a crime against humanity that has been ignored for half a century. It is triple discrimination: of sex, race and class.”

In the paintings and drawings of the halmoni and Daisil Kim-Gibson’s documentary, art has performed one of its truest functions as a record of human history, and a reminder of man’s capacity for self-destruction. Perhaps that is why those who came to be a part of this particular evening showed none of the studied detachment seen too often at the typical gallery show.