Synchronic Study on Women and Family Consciousness

Choi Bonglim (critic)

Sun-Min Lee's <Women's House> is dedicated to search for socio-psychological changes in the traditional role of women that remains in today's nuclear family structure. For this purpose, the artist takes picture on family events or Holidays for which various age groups of women gather, or choose extended family with elderly parents as the subjects. The artist grasps unconscious actions and facial expressions of the family members of three generations to persuasively suggest the evidences of collapsing traditional family consciousness. Without the nostalgia for disappearing thing, feminism, or forced acting, the changes in women and family consciousness are synchronically caught in the present. Therefore, <Women's House> motivates us to question that for how long the tradition of gathering scattered family, which includes the distressful aged generation because they were woman and the happy new generation because they are women, and of sharing food would last. We cannot help but question what the tradition of gathering the unbearable sights really mean today.