K.NOTe no.62
Yuri An
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K.NOTe no.62
Yuri An
Publisher Total Museum Press Pyungchang 32gil 10, Jongno-gu, Seoul Korea (03004) Tel. 82-2-379-7037 total.museum.press@gmail.com Director Jooneui Noh Editor in Chief Nathalie Boseul Shin, Yoon Jeong Koh Coordinator Haeun Lee Intern Jihyun Yoon, Seyeon Kim Designer Flaneur Sponsor Arts Council Korea Date of  Publication July 2019 Š Author and artist The reproduction of the contents of this magazine in whole or in part without written permission if prohibited.
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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K.NOTe #62 How Little You Know About Me Joowon Park Curator of MMCA
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA, Seoul) held the exhibition ‹How Little You Know About Me› in the first half of 2018. Taking the keyword ‘Asia’ as a starting point, the exhibition extended its inquiry into the difficulty of defining boundaries, the state of constant fluid change, and the things we think we know, but in fact know very little about. With these questions, the exhibition recalled traditional concepts of nation, boundaries, ethnicity, and identity, and asked how these invisible forces raise anxiety and isolate individuals. Since long ago, this ‘invisible power’ has swirled around and around without a sound, controlling our lives and determining history’s winners and losers. Artist Yuri An video work ‹Rogue Stars›(2018), made especially for this exhibition, is a story about Joseon-jok (ethnic Koreans in China), who along with other Korean emigrants dispersed from the Korean peninsula to other parts of the world in the late 19th century, but who continue to speak and write in the very same Korean language. She focuses on ‘not being defined as one’. Yuri An suggests that beyond questions of ethnicity and national identity, the concept of ‘Joseon-jok’ offers us various different ways of looking at the issues we face and our world. In this three-channel video, although the many interview subjects identify themselves under the label of ‘Joseon-jok’, they nevertheless have completely different views on the issue. One interviewee points out how strange it is for Koreans, who (somehow still) consider Korea to be an ethnically homogenous nation, to differentiate between nationality and ethnicity. At the same time, he says, he is proud of his own identity as Joseon-jok, one of the 56 minorities of China. Another interviewee declares that Koreans and Joseon-jok are the same people in the end. Someone else considers himself Han 6
Chinese under the concept of ‘One China’, but talks about how others identify him as Joseon-jok. Through these stories, ‹Rogue Stars›(2018) exposes the shifting status of Joseon-jok, that constantly changes depending on the environment and circumstances. Even though Joseon-jok live in the Chinese territory as Chinese people, their lifestyle and language is clearly inherited from Korea. As time goes by, their language has transformed into something that is neither Chinese nor Korean, to the extent that one writer talks about her worries about how her words can be accurately expressed when they are translated from the Joseon language into the Korean one. The video goes beyond simple and careless questions such as who are Joseon-jok and what is their identity; it raises the questions of whether it possible to define a body as one through the concepts of a nation and ethnicity, and subsequently whether those conceptions are ultimately necessary at all. Through its narration, ‹Rogue Stars› (2018) comments on this fascinating situation whereby boundaries are erected and blurred, and as a result rendered entirely meaningless: “I do not know my homeland. I don’t have a territory where I have erected a national monument. I do not wish it. My homeland is the time in which I was born. My territory is the eternal time in which my two-horse carriage marches.” 1 This is the story of the individual. Although at times the state and the individual or ethnicity and the individual seem diametrically opposed, this world is made up by the stories of individuals. Just as the most personal of issues are close to the most social of issues, if we concentrate on individual voices that have been blurred by the invisible power of the traditional customs and concepts that restrain our thoughts, might it not be possible to select a proper approach to understand the essence of a subject? Just as individuals, under the same label of Joseon-jok, bear their own respective viewpoints, we may in observing our surroundings and making an effort to understand one subject, come to recognize the existence of different, alternative perspectives and come closer to the essence of the subject. That is why it is necessary to acknowledge ‘how little you know about me’.
1 Lee Yong Ak, “Two-Horse Carriage”, Watershed, 1937
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Rogue Stars, 3-channel video projection, 16min 16sec, 2018
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Yuri An Yuri An has been living a moving life in the past years. She became interested in disappeared words and stories those lived in there before even though place still existed. Instead of immobilizing a material property by doing reproduction of object, she prefers watching it by recalling to here and now. Therefore, she expresses her work through medium that easy to mobile such as text, video and sound. Since 2016, She focuses on Korean Diaspora project. She graduated from Gerrit Rieveld Academie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands and came back to Korea in 2014. Yuri An was selected as ‹Emerging Artists 2015 of Seoul Museum of Art›, then she held her first solo exhibition The Unharvested Sea(Art Space Pool, Seoul, 2015). In the same year, she held second solo exhibition Sailing Words(Cheongju Art Studio, Cheongju, 2015). Her third solo exhibition River of No return(Seoul Art Space Seogyo, Seoul, 2016) held due to support by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. She participated in several group exhibitions: Neo Geography 1(Centre d'art Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 2017), Neo Geography 2(Post Territory Ujeongguk, Seoul, 2017), How little you know about me(National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, 2018), Moving & Migration(Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, 2019)
Joowon Park Curator of MMCA
Yuri An