Art and Community Engagement. Chang-Jin Lee’s Comfort Women Wanted, 2007–2012

Silvia Fok

Abstract

This paper examines the issues related to community engagement in Chang-Jin Lee’s Comfort Women Wanted (2007−2012), a solo exhibition held in Hong Kong’s 1a Space from February to May 2012. The strategies in which she engaged comfort women survivors and witness, feminists, activists, researchers, scholars, and audience are expounded. Considering her shows in other cities such as in New York (2008), Incheon (2009), and Cleveland (2011) prior to that in Hong Kong (2012), the different means of artistic representation of the comfort women issue across nations is investigated too. I contend that through community engagement by means of field research (i.e., engaging the human subjects and the sites) and artistic mediation (i.e., engaging the audience), art can play a role in raising socio-cultural awareness and further contributing to social changes. Trauma-related art is not just a matter of stimulating empathy, as the contemporary art scholar Jill Bennett discussed; it is also a way to lead the audience “toward a conceptual engagement.” As a female Korean artist residing in New York, the manner in which Chang-Jin Lee’s cross-cultural, humanistic perspectives shaped the means she tackled this “taboo” theme, engaged comfort women survivors and witnesses and represented complicated issues such as race, class, gender, and human rights through installation art, audio installation, and video installation in different cities are noteworthy.  Apart from the survivors, the ways her art engaged the community of various nationalities in Hong Kong not only cultivated an awareness of the past, it also raised concern for our present and future, which is another aspect that deserves our attention.



Keywords: Art, Chang-jin Lee, comfort women, community engagement, trauma

 


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References


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