Between Nothingness and Infinity: Revisiting the Bodies of the Colonized (original) (raw)

2018, Between Nothingness and Infinity

This paper will review the initial staging of Korean-American artist, Yong Soon Min’s 1991 exhibition deCOLONIZATION at the Bronx Museum of Art and its consequential restaging in the larger group exhibition Between Nothingness and Infinity (November 3, 2017 – November 17, 2018) at the Navel Gallery in Los Angeles. At the Bronx Museum Yong’s work was allocated an elongated, albeit narrow, hallway-like room that functioned to visualize her exploration of the Western and Korean dichotomy by occupying an emblematic in-betweeness: that is, between other rooms, exhibitions, etc. Utilizing this physical space to express this dichotomy, many of the works featured in deCOLONIZATION were situated in direct parallel to one another, with each component operating simultaneously as a singular work, a collective of work, and in direct duality with one another as segments in a series of work. Yong’s complex series was curated by the Bronx Museum’s late Executive Director and Curator, Holly Block, whose curatorial framing of the exhibition remains ambiguous at best since the only exhibitionary records available are primarily from independent and/or local newspaper sources as archival references posted on Yong’s personal website. The erasure of documentation and ephemera related to deCOLONIZATION emulates the same colonialist epistemology that the exhibition aimed to rebut and contest. Yong’s theoretical engagement with subjective interpositionality (that is, a subject whose cultural/gendered identity is simultaneously situated between history, place, and memory) is an enduring contemporary point of concern, which prompted the 2017 re-staging of deCOLONIZATION in the Navel Gallery. Through an analysis of gender schema by feminist philosopher Maria Lugones and the support of Fanonian theory, this paper’s examination of history, place, and memory in the act of restaging will be presented in the context of the original deCOLONIZATION exhibition alongside its contemporary re-presentation.