About this Artist

Born in 1974 in Incheon, siren eun young jung currently lives and works in Seoul. She studied visual art and feminist theory at Ewha Woman’s University, Korea and the University of Leeds, UK. Her artistic interest lies in how the unveiled desires of individuals encounter the worldly incidents, and how such encounters become resistance, history, and politics. Since 2008, the artist has worked on her Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project with actors of the genre. It is with this project that she was awarded the Hermès Art Prize in 2013 and the Korea Artist Prize in 2018. The artist has developed an art project based on her research of yeoseong gukgeuk, a theatre genre that gained great popularity in the 1950s but has long been forgotten without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theatre. Performed exclusively by women actors, yeoseong gukgeuk is a significant ethnography for the artist, one that reveals how the norms of gender and contemporaneity of culture are perceived and constructed. Discovered throughout the modernity of not only Korea but various regions in East Asia, this “women theatre” allows us to confront the ideology behind the dynamics surrounding the firm binary of gender performance or the development and exclusion of tradition, all that were discovered and identified within the desires of modern nations. The artist intentionally and actively defers the existing methodology of history writing, through which yeoseong gukgeuk has thus far been remembered and described, and rather positions herself behind its related discourses and memory. Furthermore, the artist seeks to fill out this deferred time with the sense of spatial volume and the bodily movements of performing. In doing so, rather than find and restore the fundamental legitimacy of the genre, she employs such sensuous transition to emphasize the political power of an anamolous and queer artistic practice.