The Chronicles of Family and MotherhoodSunmin LeeI remember how one day, after coming back home from work, I seated my nine-month-old daughter in a baby walker and set up my camera and lighting in the living room. At the time I was a young mother in my early 30s who had not been married that long. I documented myself as I looked at my daughter in her baby walker along with an iron, milk bottles, a poster to measure height, and a frame in the living room without making any adjustments. I was in a chaotic situation: I didn't know how to handle or interpret the new role and situation that came to me with marriage. I needed logic and support to enable me to understand this predicament. It was from that point that I began to visit my friends' homes with my camera and lighting equipment. With the group exhibition Living Room (1999), my work of shedding light on the everyday life of a baby and a mother in their living room lasted nearly two years. In the work Woman's House, I would turn into a photographer on Sunday when my husband was off one or two times per month and photographed the scenes in my friends' living rooms. I inattentively viewed the everyday lives of my friends who had become mothers like me through my camera, staying a distance away from them. I took notice of their motherhood love for their children, their backs fatigued by domestic chores, their weariness caused by daily routines, and the sense of emptiness, isolation, and loneliness they felt after their babies fell asleep. While doing photography, I gradually grew accustomed to the identity of a mother and began to think about motherhood. While Woman's House I questioned the identity of young mothers in their early 30s, Woman's House II which I had worked on since 2004 casts a more extensive light on Korea's patriarchal culture and its aspects including ancestral rites and special holidays in which more than three generations of descendants flock home. This work features scenes in which members from a large family come together, share a meal, and perform an ancestral rite during the holiday season when three generations of family members—my parents' generation, my brother and sister's generation, and my children's generation—throng together. Their mental state is metaphorized through the direction and intersection of their eyes. As a photographer who had just married into a solid Confucian patriarchal family system, I intended to make observations and synchronically inquire into the question “What is family?” in Uiseong, Yangyang, and Cheongyang where the patriarchal family system is still very much in place. I executed portraits of a mother and a daughter over a period of two years in the Bundang area where I lived after completing my solo show Woman's House II. Twins I (2006), a work to shed a light on the relationship and desires of a mother on her daughter, is a photograph featuring a girl between the ages of 6 and 11 whose identity is not yet molded. She is pictured with her mother against the backdrop of the young girl's room in Bundang, a less standardized new town for the middle class. I launched this work after being inspired by the new relationships I had made with other school parents after my daughter (who was nine months old when I did Woman's House) entered elementary school. The word “twins” in the title does not refer to a physical set of twins, but to psychological twins in which a mother's desire is reflected onto her daughter. Twins I features the girl in a floral pattern dress and a tutu, a lacy curtain and chandelier, books in a bookshelf, dolls, and shoes while capturing her mother or a woman's desire reflected onto the child and her room. Women as mothers and daughter-in-laws who were weak in the patriarchal system radiate a rather powerful, subjective energy in the work space of Twins I. I paid close attention to the signs of desire as I examined the mother and daughter who were psychological twins and the child's room using bright lighting and a large format camera. My daughter Jayun is nine years old while I am 38. I turned my attention to the father and son in the Twins series produced in 2008, starting a new itinerary while transferring the series' spatial background to mountains, fields, and vast natural scenes from home. Twins produced in 2011 features the father and son standing on the seaside with their bikes on the car, the mother and daughter on a rocky mountain as the day breaks, and the father and son posing with guitars around a bonfire. Twins II (2011) features journeys the parents shared with their children based on how they enjoyed nature and elegant things when they were in their 20s. I called to mind the parents' memories of their youth, changing locations to mountains and seas across the nation over the course of four years. I then described their desire to pass down their preferences and hobbies to their children by capturing charming scenes in which they spend time together. When my solo show Twins II took place in 2011, my daughter was 14 years old and had entered middle school. My second son in the fourth grade posed for some photographs for the Twins series while on a cycling tour with his father. My photography has been growing with myself and my children in this way. While mapping out my next work following the completion of the Twins series in 2012, I came across Hoang who came from Cambodia and made a family in Taepyeong-dong, Seongnam adjacent to Bundang where I lived. At that time Hoang was an 18-year-old pregnant girl who was due to give birth a month later. I met Hoang and her friends and kept an eye on their everyday lives and growth as mothers. Despite our different nationalities, age gap, and different economic levels, I was able to have some photographic interactions with them over the course of two years. I felt confused when I was incorporated into the patriarchal system and remembered the motherhood I depended on to give birth and raise my children. About 20 years ago I was undergoing a psychologically radical trauma that was brought on by moving after getting married. It was caused by my identity as a mother, my husband's family which I was still quite unfamiliar with, and the patriarchal family culture. I asked Hoang and her friends, “What is family and motherhood?” They had also gone through psychological and physical migrations at the same time. This led me to name my work Translocating Women. Five years have passed since my solo show Translocating Women was held in 2013. Hoang is presently quite fluent in Korean and her son will start elementary school soon. There were many changes in her life but her motherhood has embraced such changes and conflicts, and has helped her to keep her seat as a mother. This is perhaps the impetus that enabled me to build up a friendship with her over the course of seven years. While the backdrops of Twins I and II moved from indoor scenes to outdoor scenes, the Dogye Project (2007) sought after patriarchal family culture and its members' quotidian lives. It takes a multilateral, synchronic point of view toward the inside and outside of a home over a three-year period. In this respect, this project can be thought of as an extension of Woman's House I and II capturing indoor family scenes. This multilateral, synchronic approach enabled me to catch a glimpse of everyday aspects of families in Dogye both inside and outside of homes in terms of their rooms, yards, family gravesites, and workplaces in three dimensions. Dogye was a mining city which led the modernization of Korea beginning in the 1960s. It is now a city in decline with only one mine currently in operation, with most of its residents being those who became mine workers to follow in their father's footsteps. I have simultaneously pursued holiday scenes in which family members of second and third generations flock together, scenes of people visiting their ancestral graves and weeding around a grave against the backdrop of Gangwon-do's beautiful mountains, and mining scenes. What I observed are diverse aspects of Dogye residents' everyday life, such as taking a commemorative photograph as a large family, an old couple in a small room which was perhaps once boisterous with many family members, visiting ancestral graves to weed around them, and Gyeongdong Mining Office which is the last mine in Dogye. I had an encounter that greatly shook up my awareness while I was carrying out my project. I took photographs of an older woman who came to Dogye cemetery to remove the weeds from around her husband's grave with her family. The woman who appears to be over 80 posed for a picture with her husband's grave in the background. Any force of the patriarchal system that overflows in the series Woman's House could not be sensed in her hand as she stroked the grave, nor in her appearance as she gazed at the camera while leaning on her cane. This old woman who was infirm—I didn't know if she was a man or a woman at first—seemed to lead us to erase any vertical classification of the patriarchal system of man and woman and announce the horizontal proposition of life and death. Her family members stand in line piously behind the grave as if proving the solidarity between life and death. For me as a photographer who had concentrated on motherhood identity and the patriarchal family structure, the location on this day made me question the nature of death that overwhelmed the system and structure and the nature of solidarity that embraced even death. This question also called for me to explore both the interior and exterior of the family structure and was the motivating power for Mine Workers in Dogye (2007) featuring miners in their workplace. Ten years have passed since I worked in Dogye and I am now in my 50s. It is not until now that I am able to see aspects inside and outside the home and workplace in three dimensions without separating them. I have amassed a great deal of power to comprehensively view one's journey of life, going beyond the structure of the family. Maybe I have almost reached the age where I finally realize that the serious, elemental problem of death no one can escape from overwhelms the solid patriarchal system. I held my solo show Woman's House (2004) eight years after my first one-man exhibition The Golden Helmet (1995). It was an outgrowth I attained after six years of resuming my work, predicated upon the principles that I would work with photographical objects that are authentic, content that will not run dry even if I continue working on it for ten years, and subjects that raise a bond of sympathy in our society. Choosing the themes of family and motherhood was the best choice I could have made as an artist with sincerity and authenticity as well as a mother raising her children in reality. Perhaps it was an inevitable choice a female artist who is a member of Korea's solid patriarchal family culture could have made for survival. The question “Where am I?” may be in the same context with the small outcry of “I am here” by a woman whose presence has been overshadowed by the patriarchal system. My nine-month-old daughter pictured in a baby walker in photographs is now a 21-year-old college student while my three-year-old son who gazed at the camera from my husband's lap is now much taller than his father. I have been angered by something and forged solidarity as an artist, questioning Korea's family culture and the identities of its members. I have also grown with my photographs, solaced by my family's life. A series of works I did over 15 years, such as Woman's House, Twins, Translocating Women, and Dogye Project, are not only my own autobiographical journal of growth but also a chronological self-portrait of the Korean women of our time who ask questions concerning their identity in Korea's patriarchal family structure. Those who I have met through my camera as either family members or women with a motherhood probably face this strict system and structure in the name of both mother and family, enduring changes and continuing solidarity between life and death. This common mission might be a driving force to work under the themes of woman and family for the last 20 years or it might be an issue that needs to be solved. Ten years from now on I will keep asking and answering the question “Where am I?” with “I am here” as an artist, a woman with a motherhood, and a human who moves forward toward death. From my Artist Note 1995-2013
< The Golden Helmet 1995-1996 >
< Livingroom 1999 >
< Woman's House Ⅰ 1998-2004 >
< Woman's House Ⅱ 2004 >
< Twins I 2005-2006 >
< Twins II 2007-2011 >
< Dogye Project 2005-2007 >
< Mine Workers in Dogye 2005-2007 >
< Translocating Women 2011-2013 >
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