Sunmin Lee's Representation of Migrant Women and the Paradoxical Possibilities of Documentary

Young Min Moon (artist/critic / University of Massachusetts Amherst)

There is an English terminology that refers to people of color: “visible minority.” The term is essentially an oxymoron, for it presupposes that Caucasians are without a skin color. People from minorities are “recognized” as Others due to the perceived difference of their skin tones. Paradoxically, people of color are also referred to as “invisible,” implying a relatively low profile in the mainstream society, although their invisibility is rooted in systemic discrimination. For these reasons, people of color strive to gain a positive sense of visibility and recognition. However, even if they are third generation immigrants, they are often mistaken as newcomers.

Who would want to leave behind their home country? Those who voluntarily emigrate are likely to have had difficult, if not painful, experiences that they wish to forget in order to move forward. If not, they have dreams and hopes for a brighter future, a desire to lead a better life than at home. That much could be said to be common among the vast majority of immigrants. On certainly is that the experience of immigration is most often uncertain, and one has to embrace risks in some aspects of life. Emigrating entails relinquishing everything about the life you are familiar with, and choosing to live in an entirely different set of circumstances. Of course, new circumstances are not necessarily and always for the better.

Regarding Sunmin Lee's new work Translocating Women, I cannot help but wonder if the migrant women, newly arrived in rapidly changing Korean society, are considered a “visible minority.” Surely these women are not the only minority group, given the growing racial diversity of South Korea over the past two decades. The main reason Lee focuses on migrant women is because she has been investigating the theme of family for an extended period of time. Through her meetings with migrant women, Lee intends to face their motherhood and the appearance of their “multicultural families” in South Korea.

Facing the New Constituencies of Family

For the past thirteen years Sunmin Lee has been working on the theme of family, based on her own experiences. However, that is not to say that her work is autobiographical. In her early Golden Helmet series Lee represented her father, whom she perceived as a symbol of micro-power through the use of theatrical devices and metaphor. In the later series Woman's House I and II, she focused on representing the absurd circumstances of finding her own self in a different, yet persistent patriarchal order after getting married. Women in Korean families are subject to implicitly demanded responsibilities of the everyday, such as household labor, child-rearing, and filial duties as a daughter-in-law, including serving Confucian ceremonies to pay tribute to ancestors. It is through deliberate orchestration of gazes that Lee portrays the subtle dis-recognition among family members while only women carry out these tasks. Both House of Woman and Dogye Project reveal the common patriarchal values consistently found in homes in South Korea, despite the differences in economic orders in urban centers and provincial towns, and in lifestyles of high-rise apartments and traditional Korean houses. Her Twins series made visible the goal-oriented desires of upper middle class mothers in Lee's vicinity who seem to profoundly influence, if not dictate, every aspect of the lives of their young daughters within the standardized apartment culture.

Critic Pyungjong Park interpreted the images of Korean women in Lee's photographs in terms of “the status of women within the patriarchal order, and the common situation in which women relinquish the subject positionality of their life due to their lack of economic independence.” Through Translocating Women, Lee now extends her investigation of the pervasive condition of many Korean women to the predicament in which migrant women from Cambodia and Vietnam find themselves. Therefore, the new work not only represents of a different kind of motherhood than was portrayed in her earlier work but also confronts the new social and family constituencies who arrived in South Korea after the dissolution of the myth of homogenous ethnicity inculcated until the recent past.

Returning to photography after several years' hiatus due to marriage and child rearing, Sunmin Lee resolved to photograph: “first, those whom she finds within her arm's reach; second, situations that command an empathetic response from not only herself but also the society at large.” House of Woman and Twins were indeed based on her own experiences and/or situations that she could easily find around her immediate neighborhood; hence these projects were feasible and convincing. However, migrant women from Cambodia were not so easily approached. As the artist put it, her relationship to the migrant women was readily defined in terms of the dichotomy of the local and the migrants, thereby inducing a sense of distance operating at complex strata. Hence, Lee resolved to become their friends over an extended time frame.

Lee became interested in migrant women out of her respect for their courage to leave their home countries and become mothers, for their strength of motherhood. Such a viewpoint strikes me as somewhat romantic, but it seems plausible that Lee's own experience of growing up with her grandparents, away from her parents, compels her to naturally gravitate toward resilient motherhood. Lee is moved by the fact that young women become “migrant mothers,” and identifies with them. She confessed that, after prolonged interactions with them, one day she finally experienced a moment of “shared empathetic gazes” with the young mothers when she had a chance to gently rub her own face on a baby's cheek in her arms.

“Migrant Mothers” and Resilient Motherhood

Cambodia's per capita income is less than one-tenth that of South Korea. Despite the rapid growth of its economy, the vast majority of its population lives in poverty due to sustained political and social instability. The general populace experiences poverty, abuse, and lack of education due to societal structural problems. It is said that the purpose of some Cambodian women marrying Korean men is simply to enter South Korea. Even one of the Korean men married to a Cambodian woman refers to such international marriage as “a struggle to escape poverty.” In the process of a marriage, the parties involved are routinely subject to abuse, corruption, and exploitation by Korean brokers in Cambodia and Cambodian government officials, largely due to ineffective policies or lack of policies. Eventually, the migrant women move out of the repressive society back home and enjoy a relatively free lifestyle and higher standard of living in South Korea. While it is true that some women are satisfied with their newly wedded life, it is also true that many become subject to yet another system of inhibiting social order.

It is probably safe to refer to the Cambodian migrant women as “migrant mothers,” even if they gave births to their children after arriving in South Korea. I mention this term because Lee's photographs of young migrant mothers and children recall the images of Americans during the Great Depression in the 1930s, especially the renowned images of “Migrant Mother” by Dorothea Lange. These historical images offer us an important clue to understanding Lee's recent work.

In Lange's photographs, the subject, Florence Thompson is akin to an icon. Lange confessed that she was not interested in Thompson's name or her personal narrative. Exhausted from prolonged travels, Lange took photographs of Thompson within fifteen minutes after she got out of her car, then hit the road again. Initially she photographed Thompson and her children from a distance, including a tattered tent behind them, and then she gradually zoomed in on her head and torso. While this close-up view of Thompson also includes the backs of her children's heads as the children cling to her, by eliminating the background, Lange strengthened the abstract quality of her image, thereby turning it into a symbol of resilient motherhood despite the abject conditions. In short, Lange compressed her subject into a time-tested theme of mother and children, and solidified it as an icon of strong womanhood and motherhood that could withstand the Great Depression itself. By turning resilient motherhood into a myth, Lange's photograph of Thompson became one of the most reproduced images in the twentieth century. In fact, as the image gained the status of an icon, this photograph has been appropriated and re-appropriated countless times through repetition and transformation.

By contrast, Sunmin Lee's work emerged as a result of a year of research and two years of solidarity and friendship. Migrant women depicted in her photographs are situated within specific locations of their every day life: the alleyways of Sungnam, markets, and their homes. The women and their family members are portrayed in the concrete specificities of these individuals' lives: on moving day, at their weekend farm, among their extended family, on routine visits to the neighborhood market, and most of all, through intimate views of their interiors and bedrooms with their little children. In a photograph depicting an interior, one glimpses a universal wish for a more affluent life by noting the 50,000 Korean Won bill stuck to the family photo taken during the years of economic hardship. In addition, the photographs of migrant women are full of indexes that suggest the conditions of migration. A picture shows an older mother of a young migrant mother at the airport, along with a large box presumably filled with consumer goods purchased in Korea. From small details of domestic interiors to fragments of travels, the photographs offer evidences of the intertwining of life and economy beyond borders.

Such concrete details are diametrically opposed to the abstraction and universality found in Lange's photograph. Curiously, Sunmin Lee finds strong motherhood in the young Cambodian women who leave home to marry Korean men whom they have just met, to alleviate the economic burden in their own family, start a new family, and give birth to and raise a child. While the migrant women's new life in Korea is far more comfortable, beyond comparison with conditions during the Great Depression, Lee seems to find a similar resilience among her subjects. I believe that this is possible due to her prolonged friendship with them. But then, given the mythic symbolism of resilient motherhood attained by abolishing the specific context in Lange's case, it remains to be seen whether Lee can attain a similar symbolism by relying on details of individuals and contexts. Given that particularism stands opposed to universalism, if Lee can find the former in the latter, is perhaps only by disregarding the context of social class. But is that truly possible? What would be the rationale for approaching motherhood when generations of feminists have already deconstructed it? One wonders if her pursuit of motherhood might stem from her longing for the “pure motherhood” that has been lost, and if Lee is projecting such a longing onto the Others. On the other hand, in light of the paucity of serious social documentary today, I think that we do need such difficult and serious kinds of documentary despite the conundrums inherent in representing Others.

Social Documentary Reconsidered

A paradox of documentary is that it is limited, in the sense that the photographer's relation to her or his subjects will always be revealed in the photographs. At the same time, the intentions of the photographer are not always revealed. Given the dissolution of blind acceptance of the truth-value of the photographic image, photographers can no longer insist on the neutrality, objectivity, and even indexicality of photography. Especially in the case of social documentary, even if a photographer has all good intentions in representing Others, there is no guarantee that the viewers will see their images with a greater sense of familiarity. For the majority of viewers who have not had close relationships with social Others, one cannot assume that representing them through formal sophistication will necessarily result in an improved degree of social acceptance. The pertinent question, especially, is how we are to take the silence of Others in the photographs, the subjects perceived to be different from the mainstream Korean audience.

Do social Others have the power to refuse to be photographed? Perhaps they allow themselves to be photographed out of naivety; at times they may allow it out of a vague hope that dissemination of their images might help their predicament. Sunmin Lee would have most likely recognized such latent implications in her practice. Which is why she strove to consider the migrant women not as the object of her practice but as subjects. The problem is that, as time passes, the subjectivities of the photographic subjects gradually become diluted, as it were, due to ignorance on the viewers' part or loss of the context of the moment in which the photographs were taken. The result is that the images tend to assume universal meanings that viewers project onto them. While it remains to be seen if social documentary is capable of preventing such tendencies, Sunmin Lee's new work must be understood in the context of the fact that it is meant to be seen not in the mass media but in a gallery setting, that she has sought permission from her subjects to display their images, and that she has invited them to her exhibition.

Most of all, in addition to doing research for her project, Sunmin Lee made earnest efforts to establish rapport with the migrant women. Her approach is far from the typical mode of documentary that readily objectifies social Others, or uses the occasion as a moralistic or political cause to address and rectify the ills of the social phenomenon of migration. For the inherent problem in such positioning is the presumption that social Others lack the ability or the necessary conditions in which to improve their predicament on their own. Instead, from the very outset, Lee accepted this limitation and the gulf between herself and her photographic subjects: the fact that she belongs to the Korean mainstream middleclass, and her subjects came to Korea to marry Korean men in the hope of alleviating the economic burden at home, of escaping poverty. Hence her photographic project could begin only after they had become genuinely comfortable with each other through friendship.

Indeed, Lee regards the women as photographic “subjects.” As opposed to showing the difficulties of life, or in spite of them, she chooses to show the relative abundance and relaxed moments of their new life. There are images that clearly show that the women enjoy the profusion of goods and the unique sense of down-to-earthness that traditional Korean markets offer. In short, Lee represents her subjects not so much as protagonists in a “multicultural family,” victims of social class, but rather as individuals with potential, dignity, and hope for a better future, who already pursue sufficient “ordinary” pleasures in their everyday lives.

Language, and Invisible Community

Due to the recent boom in English language education, South Koreans who emigrate or leave for study abroad do not seem to experience too much difficulty in their command of English. It seems so when I look back on my own experience of immigrating to Canada some three decades ago: I was barely able to ask for a cup of water in the airplane. Perhaps due to my inferiority complex in English as foreign language, I cannot help but be surprised when seeing foreigners who speak Korean fluently. I am even more impressed when encountering foreigners who struggle with Korean. It might have to do with my own slowness in coming to terms with the fact that Korean has come a language of the dominant mainstream for social Others who want to achieve the “Korean dream”: Korean as foreign language. But then, I do think that I have a corporeal response to seeing foreigners struggle with Korean; I feel empathy with them from deep down in my psyche.

For I am well aware of the difficulty of thinking on my tongue in a foreign language. I have a vivid recollection of an art opening in Itaewon, arguably the most popular multiethnic cultural and commercial district in Seoul, where an Arab man hesitantly approached and asked me what was going on, with trembling lips. Resonating in my ears are the voice and the awkward Korean spoken by Hoang, a young Cambodian migrant woman and a friend of Lee whom I visited in Sungnam with the artist. I witnessed that their eyes, head, mind, and tongues not exactly in sync as they speak Korean. At times they seem to work more efficiently, and yet the result can remain even at a childish level.

Many Koreans might wrongly equate foreigners' weak command of Korean language with intellectual weakness. However, many migrants, especially migrant women, do confront serious limitations and inconvenience in their daily activities of rearing children, pursuing education, and socialization due to their difficulty with the Korean language. How are we as viewers supposed to listen to the silence of and difficulty experienced by the women in Lee's photographs, whose gazes meet us halfway through the lens of the camera?

I do not intend to repeat and summarize the current state and complex manifestations of multiculturalism in South Korea, for much information and analysis can be accessed through media and social studies publications, whether the assessment is positive or negative. However, an indisputable fact is that many migrant women come to settle in Korea in interracial marriages administered through an unusual set of circumstances and as a result of specific social and structural problems operating on multiple strata; and that there are serious repercussions in the process. The women represented in Lee's photographs appear to be relatively fortunate, more or less content with their marriages. I would imagine that their Korean spouses are the sincere kind who make some effort to learn about Cambodia's history and culture, and its social circumstances. Lee's photographs of the women are radically different from the common visual culture oriented around the Western imaginary and Korean mainstream culture. Lee's work has merit on the fact that her images are of the underside. Aside from the salon and club photographs in Dongducheon taken by Yong Tae Kim and Yong Suk Kang, and Myung Duk Joo's photographs of children in the Holt orphanage, studies of the “outsiders” within Korean society have been few and far between. In this age of rapid changes, Lee's photographs seem to suggest that because we must coexist with the migrant women, we ought to proactively listen to their voices, rather than merely regard them with tolerance. For tolerance is what “we” as subject offer to “them” as object; a mere tool for managing diversity.

Sunmin Lee's latest work was made possible only through a truly daunting task of coexisting with others, sharing time together. However, such an experience of intimate friendship may be another definition of the complex and paradoxical concept of “community.” For “intimacy is an irresolvable dichotomy. One cannot be an 'I' without an Other, yet one can't fully become identical with an Other. Intimacy is a paradox. Being for the Other is an ethical ideal, absolutely necessary, fundamentally inescapable, and ultimately impossible.” In practice, such a paradoxical relationship reflects the very contradiction inherent even in the best cases of documentary: namely, simultaneously engaging the fundamental questions of how to observe the circumstances of others while offering one's perspective, and how to “negotiate between sensationalism on the one hand and instrumentalism on the other.”