The De-Satirized Zone

ESSAYS

The De-Satirized Zone

BY HARRY C. H. CHOI

The winner of ArtAsiaPacific’s second annual Young Writers Contest looks at the limits on free speech in contemporary art from South Korea

There is a remarkable shortage of memes about Park Geun-hye, despite the former South Korean president’s political scandals and ongoing lawsuits. In 2017, Park was impeached for allowing a cult leader’s daughter, Choi Soon-sil, to unlawfully meddle in presidential affairs, and for soliciting bribes from the nation’s mammoth conglomerates. Though the circumstances supplied ample opportunities for dark humor, a quick Google search for memes—or jjal, as they are known in Korean—on Park yields unsatisfactory results. One merely encounters a handful of screenshots of her embarrassing public remarks—such as the statement that students would be haunted with “abnormal spirits” if they did not learn the “correct” version of national history, a message through which she pushed for a single, state-authorized history textbook. Entertaining as they might be, such disgraceful snippets of Park would hardly qualify as memes. Without punchy, original catchphrases or doctored images, the satirical potential of these scenes is left unexplored.

Yet the dearth of memes featuring Park does not come as a surprise. Although South Korea boasts one of the largest economies in the world, the country has experienced persistent acts of censorship throughout its recent history. The Park administration instituted an infamous blacklist of 9,473 artists for their “left-leaning” tendencies, which included well-regarded contemporary figures such as Haegue Yang, Park Chan-kyong, and Minouk Lim. The list was a shameless threat to free speech that compromised the careers of those named, as the Ministry of Culture deemed their practices unworthy of state funding and endorsement. In a nation afflicted by a largely dormant art market, chaebol-owned museums with corporate agendas, and limited academic opportunities, such exclusion proved particularly isolating for emerging artists.

The same administration also demanded the removal of Hong Sung-dam’s painting Sewol Owol (2014) from an exhibition marking the 20th anniversary of the Gwangju Biennale, for it portrays the former president as a scarecrow controlled by her late father Park Chung-hee, who ruled South Korea under a military dictatorship from 1961 to 1979. Indeed, the painting is rife with iconography that enraged Park and her devout coterie—such as depictions of torture that were condoned during her father’s regime, as well as the Sewol ferry disaster, which resulted in 304 deaths partly due to the government’s lackluster response to the vessel’s sinking. What seems to have infuriated Park’s devotees the most, however, was Hong’s satirical sensibility that tarnished her presidential status. After the painting was excluded from the exhibition, Hong submitted a revised version of the painting that replaced Park’s head with that of a chicken—as chicken reads dak in Korean, Park’s most vehement critics frequently used the nickname for her as a phonetic word play. Unsurprisingly, city officials rejected the revised version as well, and Park’s supporters eventually launched defamation charges against the artist in 2014. Yet Hong’s case was hardly a singular instance in which political satire prompted lawsuits. In 2016, Ha Lee was fined for mass-distributing leaflets lampooning Park, as the court concluded that Lee had plenty of alternative avenues to exercise his freedom of expression rather than his chosen method—unleashing some 4,000 leaflets from the rooftop of a high-rise building in Seoul—and argued that his actions constituted “illegal advertising.”

Where less-than-glorious representations of politicians may be construed as a criminal offense, political satire within artistic discourse cannot thrive. But defamation is not the only charge that satirists in South Korea potentially face. The nation’s contested National Security Act, passed in 1948 and enforced throughout South Korea’s succession of dictatorial regimes to persecute so-called anti-government figures, still remains a potent threat to artists. A vestige from the Cold War, the ambiguously worded act outlaws statements that characterize North Korea as anything other than the enemy of the state, allowing creative practitioners with a bent for irony to be prosecuted under the statute. Photographer Jung-geun Park, for instance, was indicted in 2012 for altering a North Korean propaganda poster and sharing it on Twitter, notwithstanding the ostensibly humorous nature of his post—a North Korean soldier’s face is swapped with his own, and the soldier’s rifle with a bottle of whiskey. Such laws render South Korea a hostile environment for memes and other creative materials that function as agents of political satire, despite the nation’s cutting-edge online culture. As David Joselit theorized in After Art (2013), memes and online images remain relevant by creating a “buzz” and emerging everywhere at once. In a country where retweets could lead to an arrest, however, buzz could come at the cost of state scrutiny.

What replaces explicit political satire in contemporary Korean art are explorations into the dichotomous psychology that has fueled such deplorable restrictions on artistic freedom. Minouk Lim’s seven-channel sound installation, O Tannenbaum (2017), traces the transformations of the eponymous German folksong, “O Christmas Tree,” as it was transmitted and translated across several continents throughout the 20th century. While Lim invites the audience to sing its different iterations in her installation, such as the British Labour Party’s anthem “The Red Flag” and its Japanese counterpart “Akahata no uta,” Lim also points out the uncomfortable reality that the North Korean interpretation “Jeokgiga,” popular in its military circles, cannot be sung legally under the National Security Act. The monitor displaying the North Korean lyrics, as well as the microphone in front, is tellingly covered with a piece of black cloth. Lim’s project suggests that if the North Korean version of the song can be neither performed nor exhibited, the only possible mode of artistic engagement is to point at the absurdity of the situation. Deftly navigating the boundaries of legality, the artist unflinchingly provokes the audience to question their society of control.

Yet even such indirect political commentary is largely unseen in works by younger Korean artists. This seems a natural tactic, since state sponsorship of the arts is unpredictable and so heavily determined by the personality of whomever currently holds office. While the Park administration had asked Youn Bum-mo to resign from his post as curator of the Gwangju exhibition for commissioning Hong’s Sewol Owol, the current liberal administration led by President Moon Jae-in recently appointed him the director of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Such a climate breeds apathy to artistic strategies of political critique, particularly when coupled with the overwhelming sense of paralysis that today’s Korean youth experience in “Hell-Chosun”—a pejorative nickname for the motherland rife with precarity, patriarchy, and prejudice.

Capturing the palpable torpor of Korean millennials in his films, Heecheon Kim imagines a situation where everyone in Seoul wears the artist’s face after he wakes up from a wild night out in Sleigh Ride Chill (2016)—perhaps an uncannily “apolitical” face-swap, in contrast to Jung-geun Park’s. Kim weaves his thought experiment with a web of farcical narratives, ranging from live YouTube coverage of the video game Gran Turismo 4 to a digital simulacrum of central Seoul and news reports about the emergence of “suicide clubs” across the city. Throughout, the film overflows with self-deprecating humor; Kim inserts his face onto a plastic surgery advertisement, a samba dancer, and dozens of tourists on a crosswalk in front of the city’s Gyeongbokgung Palace complex. The amusing project is a portrait of his frustrated peers, who inherited a country where poking fun at the great leader—let alone the enemy’s—could hold grave consequences. And yet the generation’s malaise and apathy are also a chilling reminder that the parameters of satire are still circumscribed in South Korea—however necessary it might be for artistic and democratic discourse to further mature.

HARRY C. H. CHOI is the Marjorie Susman Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Previously, he worked in the Department of Media and Performance Art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.