​THE 3RD TWO: Rebellious Femininity Against Systematic Subordination
 

I. Two Exhibitions

If an exhibition on East Asian feminism were to open simultaneously — and coincidentally — in the two major cities of Munich, Germany and Seoul, South Korea, how could we possibly describe such an event? Moreover, the Seoul exhibition refers to modernity and the Asian feminism that challenges it.[1] It is said that the metaphors of masculinity and femininity are most clearly embedded in cultural texts under modernity.[2] In the West, Asia has long been regarded as Europe’s periphery, dismissed as a subordinate subject of modernization. Yet the periphery, with its unique historical experiences, is precisely the political space from which modernity can be critically examined.[3] Modernity and Asian feminism: what lies at the intersection of these two concepts that gives rise to the provocative theme of East Asian feminist artists as subjects who challenge modernity? I encountered these two exhibitions with a sense of wonder mixed with strangeness.[4]

“The 3rd Two: From Postwar-Feminism to Post-Feminism in East Asia” was held at Galerie der Künstler*innen in Munich from October 20 to November 7 in 2024. The exhibition featured 14 female artists from Korea, Japan, and China, spanning three generations, including Tomiyama Taeko, who continually evokes memories of colonial rule and the Pacific War. Strategically, these artists expose the dynamics of the patriarchal societies to which they belong, while revealing aspects of themselves that have never been acknowledged in the mainstream. The curatorial team treated the exhibition space as a platform to reveal and introduce their identities as part of a three-generational wave of feminism. Similarly, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul hosted “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” (September 3, 2024–March 3, 2025), an exhibition that explored Asian feminism from a post-human feminist perspective across 11 countries.[5] This large-scale retrospective sought to test the possibilities and expansion of women’s culture and to understand thought, sensation, art, and life in an integrated manner through the historical and provocative works of major artists from various Asian countries. Yet, despite addressing Asian femininity and women’s culture, it ultimately fails to engage them deeply.

The rise of Asian feminism connects these two exhibitions. Both provided mainstream platforms that led social and cultural conversations, bringing many Asian feminist artists—often overlooked even in their own countries—into the public sphere. This phenomenon, in which reflections and discourses on Asian femininity are being addressed in the public spaces of Munich and Seoul, signals a shift in the ways these regions currently approach patriarchy. In particular, The 3rd Two presents a perspective that sees colonialism, the Cold War era, and the present as a continuum within East Asian feminism. It seeks to expose the taboos formed by male-centered orders through the fissures and gaps created by the artists’ voices, showing a more radical dimension than Connecting Bodies.

As curator Cornelia Oßwald-Hoffmann asserts, “Women are degraded as objects. They are men’s accessories, housewives, and baby-making machines,”[6] this critical awareness of women’s status is a defining feature of the Munich exhibition. The invocation of East Asian femininity in Munich appears to be a kind of detour to examine Germany’s own issues. The exhibition’s historical and political agenda can only be fully understood when connected to the “comfort women” controversy that erupted during the 2021 Art5 exhibition, “Art 5: Art and Democracy.” All the diplomatic pressures and incidents of self-censorship surrounding that exhibition acted like an allegory of reality, effectively completing its theme of “freedom of expression.”[7] This controversy prompted Regina Mühlhäuser of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research to point out that even in German society, war crimes committed against women remain taboo and silenced, and that there is a need to reexamine Germany’s memory culture.[8] The incident surrounding “Art and Democracy” partially revealed the possibility that women’s voices could still be erased from artistic expression, even in a society that believes gender equality laws have been achieved and anti-discrimination protections for sexual minorities are properly functioning. This served as a wake-up call, reminding us that negative perceptions about women’s status still operate at both conscious and unconscious levels. “The 3rd Two” expands the comfort women issue into an East Asian feminist agenda and explores this resistance as a way to realize democracy.

This article examines the counterstrategies of East Asian feminist artists in The 3rd Two and the landscape of rebellious femininity they construct through an analysis of feminism and the concept of femininity. The participating works can be broadly divided into two categories. One tendency explores the terrain of femininity as a form of subjugation by referencing the uncomfortable historical memories of colonialism, the Cold War, and authoritarianism that shaped East Asia and Korea’s modernization. Artists such as Tomiyama Taeko, Jane-Jin Kaisen, Yukiko Nagakura, Miji Ih, Siyoung Kim, Yoshiko Shimada, Jungyeob Jung, and Jeong A Bang belong to this category. The other tendency consists of works that question and rediscover feminine identity at the subtle level of everyday life. Hyesun Jung, Mio Okido, Haha Wang, Seulki Ki, Eunju Hong, Jianling Zhang, and Fumie Ogura are in this area. In particular, the history of East Asia and Korea’s modernization—shaped by colonialism and militarism, extending through the Cold War—serves as a mirror for the participating artists to explore and find their feminine identities. It also forms a practical realm where they attempt to reposition the memories and experiential expressions of women, precariously situated between memory and forgetting, within a historical narrative. Inevitably, I will focus on the fact that artists addressing the Korean context form the main coordinates of the exhibition’s counter-discourse.[9]

​

II. East Asian Feminism and Femininity

In the exhibition, “East Asian” feminism refers to the fundamental background that is closely tied to the formation of these women artists’ experiences. The shaping of these experiences is intertwined with the characteristics that the existing institutions, legal systems, and cultural frameworks of their societies impose on women. The folktales “Baridegi,”[10] cited by Kaizen, and “The Tale of Sim Cheong,” another story about a daughter sold off, clearly reveal how male-centered rules operate and how East Asian femininity emerges from them. Both tales share the trait of enforcing obedience to the family patriarch and distinguishing conformity and devotion as virtues like “filial piety,” while presenting physical domination and violence as if they were neutral. On the surface, the narratives focus on “filial piety” as the self-sacrificial love of a daughter. In other words, the East Asian “femininity” embodied by Bari and Sim Cheong encompasses virtues such as obedience, diligence, and self-sacrifice. When these traits are used as behavioral standards that women are expected to follow, this physical usage reveals their subordination to the dominant viewpoint, and femininity as a trait serves as a norm that justifies male domination and the structure of women’s oppression. In this way, this essentialist perspective, based on biological markers, becomes the foundation for justifying the rule that normalizes gender roles and femininity.[11]

Surprisingly, even in the end, the act of parents or fathers abandoning their daughters or selling them for 300 bags of rice is presented as if it were entirely natural—never questioned, excused, or justified. The patriarchal masculinity within the narrative serves as the reference point that defines the opposite of femininity.[12] This gendered distinction is presented and enforced as neutral from the outset and does not even need to be rearticulated within discourse to justify the dominant perspective. In fact, conformist femininity appears in an idealized form for the benefit of the male collective, and the mechanisms of trust and care that support the social system are appropriated as concepts that justify domination, aligning with cultural patterns of privatization, domination and obedience, distrust and control, sexism and racism, and competition.[13] The fact that the male order governs this relationship without requiring justification makes it all the more apparent. Because this logic functions as a massive symbolic machine that acknowledges male domination,[14] the collective narrative structure of the folktale operates as a mechanism that thoroughly suppresses the memory of daughters to protect the patriarchal status.[15]

The femininity portrayed in the folktale shows a typical example of how male domination is imposed and accepted through conformity. The established order easily leads to power relations, rights and privileges, favoritism, and injustice—and even intolerable situations are often tolerated or taken for granted. In a social atmosphere that encourages the role of the dutiful daughter Sim Cheong, male domination takes root deeply in our unconscious, making it difficult to perceive or challenge. This violence takes place astonishingly within everyday social relationships, carried out under the guise of symbolic principles that are recognized and accepted by both the dominant and the dominated.[16]

The narrative structure of the folktale, which praises the systematic subordination of daughters in the name of virtue and ethics, in fact reveals the patriarchal power system embedded in the collective unconscious. The memories contained in the folktale serve as a medium that still reminds us of daughters who sell their bodies today. At the margins of Korea’s modern and contemporary history in the 20th century, memories of comfort women, Yang Gongju, and women exploited for sex tourism exist across complex layers of the global-local context.[17] In this memoryscape, the father who sold his daughter and the daughter who was sold remain an unspeakable memory that no one wishes to confront—a place actively expelled from the existing patriarchal order.

All forms of feminism, despite their various characteristics and categories, share a common point in that they examine women’s subordination as a single issue and assert that this subordination can and must be changed.[18] Feminist practice begins with diagnosing and resisting femininity itself, which has been given as a flaw in opposition to symbolic power. Therefore, this story begins when daughters who were excluded from the symbolic system return as diseuses[19]—speaking women reclaiming their voices to connect life and death. Tomiyama, Kaizen, Ih, and Nagakura revive this hidden memory and question East Asian femininity. Furthermore, The 3rd Two includes the obsessive and neurotic suffering of younger artists who violate and resist the virtues imposed on women by the male-centered order, placing them within the continuum of feminist history.

III. Genealogical Landscape: The Return of the Abandoned Child

Kaizen’s The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger[20] moves between metaphor, symbolism, and documentation to present a genealogy that connects women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the Pacific War, women who worked in prostitution rings around US military bases after the Korean War (known as “Yang Gongju,” (Western princesses) a Korean term for women involved in prostitution around US military bases), and Korean adoptees sent abroad through adoption agencies.

In academia, Japanese military “comfort women,” “Yang Gongju” in US military camptowns, and “adoptees” sent to the West are addressed in separate disciplines due to their different historical contexts and conditions. However, in Kaizen’s work, the bodies of women spanning three generations transcend the boundaries of memory and forgetting, connecting them to the history of Korea’s modernization. The kind of history she brings forth is one that no one wants to remember; it is avoided in public discourse and media, erased so it cannot be recorded, and therefore remains difficult to access. In an interview, he describes the “spoken history” as a form of memory excluded from official historical narratives—an unrecorded history that chooses silence over inscription, a history of the dead that can only be spoken through the body of a shaman.[21] Her process of chasing fragmented and blurred memories of comfort women, Yang Gongju, and abandoned child, and naming each of them, creates a genealogical map that exposes the systematic violence and blatant exploitation inflicted by the state’s multi-layered life-management system. Adoptees who return to Korea as adults confirm that the suffering and violence inflicted on women and children continues unbroken to this day, and by speaking about it, they prove themselves as subjects resisting history. Thus, what paradoxically connects and completes the entire film is Kaizen’s relentless question about why she was adopted to Denmark—and the clear anger of those who continue this lineage.

The methodology of reexamining modern and contemporary East Asian history through the eyes of oppressed and excluded women is also evident in the works of Nagakura and Ih. They propose the memories of sold women as a counter-narrative to official history, reinterpreting the metaphor of the sold daughters through video, photography, and sculptural installations. Nagakura’s About 161 Birds highlights the “yellow slave trade,” in which Asian women were imported to the United States for prostitution in the early 20th century, through meticulous research on YAMADA Waka, who ended up in San Francisco’s Japantown.[22] The girls who were sold contributed to their countries’ economies through prostitution with white men but were regarded as shameful and discriminated against at home, and they were erased from Japanese history. The “little bird” was a euphemism for women engaged in prostitution, but Nagakura’s “little birds” represent her mourning for these sold girls. Ih’s Münder (German for “mouths”) is a photographic installation that follows the life story of BAE Bong-gi, who traveled from Busan to Okinawa. BAE was the first woman to officially report in 1972 that she had been a former Japanese military “comfort woman.”[23] When her existence became known in Japanese society, she was introduced with a photo of her back and the initial “A.” A newspaper article wrote that she “could not return to her homeland because she was ashamed of her ‘work’ on the battlefield.”[24] Her chosen silence exposes the hypocritical face of the patriarchal ideology that shames comfort women and becomes a site where colonialism and imperialism are spoken. The “absence” of her that appears throughout Ih’s work shows one way of remembering the violence embedded in how her body was used and abandoned as material to construct masculinity within a militarized world order. For Nagakura and Ih, this act of remembering is a painful process of gathering fragments of the past and reassembling them to understand a trauma that persists to this day.

Tomiyama’s video Memory of the Sea, shown at the entrance to the exhibition, consists of four presentations based on her own colonial experiences and memories of the Pacific War. To fully understand her work, prior knowledge of modern and contemporary East Asian history is essential. For example, the massacre in Gwangju was caused by the oppression of the Korean military regime, but Tomiyama sees that oppressive structure as already reproduced by the power structures of US hegemony and Japanese colonial rule.[25] Therefore, her presentation, which condenses her intense pain, anger, and reflection, is both a confession of her identity as a “daughter of imperialism” and an indictment of colonial power structures and the violence inflicted on comfort women. Her sense of responsibility toward colonial history becomes a driving force that visualizes solidarity grounded in empathetic values.

Another group of artists visualizes patriarchal symbolic orders through their bodies, which have been strictly disciplined by specific social and cultural systems. The subtle sensations they uncover reveal the pain of conforming to the structures that render them subordinate. In reality, the negative identities they expose are not permitted within social consensus. Therefore, their transgressive acts form the basis for feminist resistance, organizing the future from the ruins of hypocrisy and fear, and marking a return to where they stand today.

Hyesun Jung’s installation Pessimist, Optimist fills the interior of a standardized kitchen cabinet with materials related to premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and medication, suddenly exposing her neurotic physical reaction that violates the role assigned to her by an object representing submissive, harmless, and invisible femininity. Haha Wang’s performance video Wicked Wickeder invites viewers to a lavish banquet in the basement of the Künstlerhaus Dortmund, once part of a mine, prompting them to reflect on self-repression manifested as bulimia. Seulki Ki’s Bitter Orange visualizes the precarious anxiety and tension of fiercely recognizing one’s own exposed body. The self-defensive awareness of power dynamics appears as the fragmented figure of a faceless woman, reduced to mere flesh without self-determination. Shame is political. This emotion erodes their identity.[26]

Jianling Zhang’s The First and Final Girl is a project video that begins with an exploration of femininity and reproductive capacity—especially motherhood that produces offspring without eggs, free from male control, inspired by the idea of hermaphroditic motherhood. Like the “Final Girl” cliché in slasher films, where the last girl survives to the end with moral purity, the honor of femininity is a virtue that extends from virginity to chastity. All situations in which women are forced to internalize the prejudice that they must constantly embody femininity because of discrimination embedded in language become a logic of curse.[27] However, Zhang literally reclaims this term and roots it in a vibrant community of elderly women who celebrate their “aged bodies.” By presenting their non-hierarchical interactions through a three-channel video, the work explores the meaning of reproduction and motherhood while maintaining a matriarchal myth of parthenogenesis where the patriarchal symbolic order has been dismantled.

What is revealed through the daughters’ voices is the logic of the curse that reduces femininity to virtues or moral purity, and the unconscious practices that enforce this logic upon them. At both collective and individual levels, the unconscious memories dominated by this logic serve to protect the state and patriarchy while simultaneously marginalizing femininity and reproducing violence. This allows the trauma of individuals long suppressed within the system to finally become visible. Traumatic memory runs through the violent modern and contemporary history of East Asia, constituting an unsettling and strange femininity that resists the logic of curse. This is the moment of encountering a new paradox—one that calls for a complete revolution in the way women’s history is constructed. Thus, the daughters, in their final return, forge a “community of parting” that insists—at every moment—on severing itself from the masculine, territorial world of the father.[28]

IV. Feminism: A Wave Flowing Toward the Lowest Place

The 3rd Two is significant in that Munich is a place that is related to the hegemony of Western modernity. The Yang Gongju in US military camptowns mobilized for white males and the many children adopted into the West are still taboo memories in Korea, deeply imprinted with the history of colonial rule by non-Western countries on the periphery of the periphery and the modernization process that followed. The 3rd Two shows that women’s physicality is the subject that cuts across all conditions of domination and violence from the lowest level through the memories and experiential expressions of East Asian female artists. All the negative experiences of comfort women, Yang Gongju, adopted children, daughters, and wives in the exhibition are the result of all forms of domination that perform and reproduce an order that demands subordination. The artists’ feminist terrain challenges the internalized unconsciousness of systematic subordination, cracking the virtues of sacrifice, abandonment, and silence imposed on women. It escapes the symbolic power that assigns an ominous essence to women within a male-centered order, opening a crack through which they can envision another world.

Rebellious femininity can claim its own position only by resisting the very conditions of subordination it has internalized.[29] The rebellious femininity in The 3rd Two contests the history, discourse, and memory embedded in the power relations between the sexes. It is a political act that reckons with the enduring structures and consequences of domination in order to sever ties with systems of exploitation and oppression. [30]

References (Alphabetical Order)

Adorno, Th. W. and M. Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Kim Yoo-dong, Seoul: Moonji Publications, 2001.

Bae, Myung-ji. Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists. Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2024.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination, trans. Kim Yong-sook et al., Seoul: Dongmoonseon, 2000.

Cha, Hak-kyung. Dictée, trans. Kim Kyung-nyeon, Paju: Munhak Sasang, 2024.

Cho, Young-ah. “The Concept of ‘Femininity’ and the Feminist Dilemma.” Philosophical Inquiry vol. 76 (2024), pp. 123–153.

Felski, Rita. Modernity and Feminism, trans. Kim Young-chan et al., Seoul: Georum, 1998.

Gil, Yunhyeong. “The First Comfort Woman Witness We Forgot… Her Name, Bae Bong-gi.” Hankyoreh Newspaper, 19. October 2019.
https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/japan/703614.html

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Conceptual History Dictionary 13: The Modern/Modernity, Modern, trans. Won Seok-young, Seoul: Blue History Publisher, 2019.

Herrera Montero, Bernal. “Rethinking Modernity from the Margins,” Cogito, no. 77 (2015): 7–19.

Himmelsbach, Andreas & Regina Muehlhaeuser. “Conquests. Sexual violence and intimate Relationships of German soldiers in the Soviet Union, 1941-1945.” MILITARGESCHICHTLICHE ZEITSCHRIFT vol. 70 no. 1 (2011), pp. 224–226.

Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, trans. No Shin-ae, Seoul: Mati, 2021.

Jeong, Ji-young. “The Uncomfortable Memories of Shim-Cheong, the ‘Sold Daughter’.” Korean Women’s Studies vol. 27 no. 1 (2011), pp. 155–187.

Kawada, Fumiko. Red Tiled House: Stories of Korean Women Who Became Comfort Women for the Japanese Military, trans. Oh Geun-young, Paju: Kkumkyo Publishing, 2014.

Kim, Hyesoon. Women, to Poem, Seoul: Moonji Publications, 2017.

Kwon, Tae-hyun. “Interview: Jane Jin Kaisen, The Community of Parting.” The One Art World vol. 81 (2019), pp. 89–93.

Lee, Eun-joo. “Community of Parting and Affect as a Genealogy of Zoe: On Jane-Jin Kaisen’s Community of Parting (2019).” Korean Journal of Feminist Philosophy vol. 38 (2022), pp. 153–182.

Lee, Eun-jung. “Unfinished Memories of War and Commoditized Bodies: Jane-Jin Kaisen’s The Woman, the Orphan, and the Tiger.” Asian Women’s Studies vol. 63 no. 2 (2024), pp. 115–149.

Lee, Kyung-hwa. “A Modern Interpretation on Violences Displayed in Baridegi.” Our Language and Literature Research vol. 174 (2022): 505–529.

Lee, Na-young. “Global/Local Gender Order and Women’s Body in Korea: Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ and U.S. Camptown ‘Yanggongju’.” Dongbanghakji vol. 161 (2013), pp. 3–38.

Manabe, Yoko. “An Artist Crossing Borders: The Life and Art of Tomiyama Taeko: from Intersection of Postcolonialism and Feminism.” Democracy and Human Rights vol. 21 no. 1 (2021), pp. 77–112.

Maturana, H. & G. Verden-Zöller. The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. Imprint Academic, 2008.

Moises, Jürgen. “Eine Geschichte, über die man in Japan ungern spricht.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16. August 2021.
<www.sz.de/muenchen/ausstellung-muenchen-japan-suedkorea-trostfrau-1.5382816?reduced=true>

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists. Gyeonggi Province: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2024.

Stone, Allison. Introduction to Feminist Philosophy, trans. Yang Chang-ah, Seoul: Ihaksa, 2022.

Vahldiek, Andra. “Ausstellung in der Galerie der Künstlerinnen und Künstler: Rückeroberung des Körpers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 8. November 2024.
<www.sz.de/lux.V5Fij6yUCPgpCUcce6oS1U>

Endnotes

[1] Bae, Myung-ji. Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists. (Seoul: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2024), p. 10.

[2] Felski, Rita. Modernity and Feminism, trans.  Kim Young-chan et al. (Seoul: Georum, 1998), p. 21.

[3] According to Koselleck, the concept of modernity has been understood in Western history as a paradigm of continuous progress built upon the achievements of the past. See Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Conceptual History Dictionary 13: The Modern/Modernity, Modern, trans. Won Seok-young, (Seoul: Blue History Publisher, 2019), p. 87.

The Enlightenment, which underpins modernity, was originally aimed at liberating people from domination through the exercise of reason. However, this liberation is only temporary, and reason itself can lead to a new form of domination—namely, domination by instrumental reason. See Adorno Th. W. and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Kim Yoo-dong (Seoul: Moonji Publications, 2001).

While peripheral non-Western societies may undergo processes of modernization, modernity itself is historically rooted in the West—indeed, in Europe. See Herrera Montero, Bernal. “Rethinking Modernity from the Margins,” Cogito, no. 77 (2015): 10–12.

[4] This article is a preliminary study comparing the two exhibitions — “The 3rd Two: From Postwar-Feminism to Post-Feminism in East-Asia” in Munich and “Connecting Bodies: Asian Women Artists” in Seoul — focusing mainly on the Munich exhibition.

[5] Jeong Jeong-yeop, a leading Korean Minjung artist, participated in both the Munich and Seoul exhibitions.

[6] “Die Frau wird zu einer Sache, einem Objekt degradiert. Sie ist das Schmuckstück des Mannes, die Haushaltskraft, die Gebärmaschine.” Vahldiek, Andra. “Ausstellung in der Galerie der Künstlerinnen und Künstler: Rückeroberung des Körpers.” Süddeutsche Zeitung. 8. November 2024. URL=<www.sz.de/lux.V5Fij6yUCPgpCUcce6oS1U>

[7] “Art 5: Art and Democracy” was an exhibition featuring artists from Korea, Germany, and Japan. It explored freedom of expression in art and examined its relationship to political freedom, focusing on the potential for democratic advancement.

However, after the Japanese Embassy in Germany learned in advance that the exhibition would include the Statue of Peace (by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Un-sung), it exerted considerable diplomatic pressure. As a result, the gallery preemptively censored the statue from the main exhibition, and the curatorial team was forced to arrange a separate exhibition space for it.

For further details, see this article. Moises, Jürgen. “Eine Geschichte, über die man in Japan ungern spricht”, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 16. August 2021. URL=<https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/ausstellung-muenchen-japan-suedkorea-trostfrau-1.5382816?reduced=true>

[8] Regina Mühlhäuser noted: Im Vergleich dazu ist die sexuelle Gewalt, die Wehrmachtssoldaten und SS-Männer während des Zweiten Weltkriegs in den besetzten Gebieten und während des Holocaust verübt haben, in Deutschland und Europa kein Thema. Auch die Zwangsprostitution weiblicher Häftlinge in den KZ-Bordellen ist wenig bekannt. Hier gibt es keine Klägerinnen, die Gerechtigkeit einfordern, und keine breite Unterstützungsbewegung, die Statuen errichtet. Warum ist das so? Wie verstehen wir das Sprechen, aber auch das Schweigen über diese Form von Gewalt seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges und bis heute?” See also: Himmelsbach, Andreas & Regina Mühlhäuser. “Conquests: Sexual Violence and Intimate Relationships of German Soldiers in the Soviet Union, 1941–1945.” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift vol.70 no.1 (2011): 224–226.

[9] Since the 2018 Me Too movement, feminism has become a political agenda that challenges dominant discourse in Korea. For further discussion, see Jang Hee-kyung in this volume.

[10] Kaizen’s Community of Parting draws on the Baridegi legend, where Baridegi, abandoned for being a girl, sets out to find medicine to save her father. See Lee, Kyung-hwa. “A Modern Interpretation on Violences Displayed in Baridegi.” Our Language and Literature Research vol.174 (2022): 505–529.

[11] Cho, Young-ah, “The Concept of ‘Femininity’ and the Feminist Dilemma.” Philosophical Inquiry vol.76 (2024), pp. 123–153. See especially Chapter 2: Femininity as a Justification for Discrimination.

[12] Bourdieu, Pierre. Masculine Domination, trans.  Kim Yong-sook et al. (Seoul: Dongmoonseon, 2000), pp. 72, 75.

[13] Maturana describes trust and care as preferences that enable humans, as social animals, to live. See Maturana, Humberto. and G. Verden-Zöller, The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love (Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 87–94.

[14] Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, pp. 20–21.

[15] Jeong, Ji-young. “The Uncomfortable Memories of Shim-Cheong, the ‘Sold Daughter’.” Korean Women’s Studies vol.27 no. 1 (2011): 155–187.

[16] Bourdieu highlights cognitive and political problems caused by male domination, often unrecognized even by women. See Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, pp. 7–8.

[17] For further discussion on gender order, see Lee, Na-young. “Global/Local Gender Order and Women’s Body in Korea: Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’ and U.S. Camptown ‘Yanggongju’.” Dongbanghakji vol.161 (2013): 3–38.

[18] Stone, Allison. Introduction to Feminist Philosophy, trans. Yang Chang-ah (Seoul: Ihaksa, 2022), p. 333.

[19] Cha, Hak-kyung. Dictée, trans.  Kim Kyung-nyeon (Paju: Munhak Sasang, 2024), p. 13.

[20] The 2010 work The Woman, The Orphan, and The Tiger was a collaborative project between Jane Jin Kaisen and Guston Sohding-Kung. However, in this text, only Kaisen is mentioned. Sohding-Kung remains an important collaborator in Kaisen’s ongoing body of work.

[21] Kwon, Tae-hyun. “Interview: Jane Jin Kaisen, The Community of Parting.” The One Art World vol. 81 (2019), p. 92.

[22] See NAGAKURA Yukiko, artist’s note.

[23] Kawada, Fumiko. Red Tiled House: Stories of Korean Women Who Became Comfort Women for the Japanese Military, trans. Oh Geun-young (Paju: Kkumkyo Publishing, 2014), pp. 3–9.

[24] Gil, Yunhyeong. “The First Comfort Woman Witness We Forgot… Her Name, Bae Bong-gi.” Hankyoreh Newspaper, 19. October 2019. https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/international/japan/703614.html

[25] Manabe, Yoko. “An Artist Crossing Borders: The Life and Art of Tomiyama Taeko: from Intersection of Postcolonialism and Feminism.” Democracy and Human Rights vol.21 no.1 (2021), pp. 79, 82, 90, 91.

[26] Hong, Cathy Park. Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, trans.  No Shin-ae (Seoul: Mati, 2021), p. 109.

[27] Bourdieu, Masculine Domination, p. 51.

[28] Kim, Hyesoon. Women, to Poem, (Seoul: Moonji Publications, 2017), p. 16.

[29] Stone, Allison. Introduction to Feminist Philosophy, p. 43.

[30] This article (critique) was supported by Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Republic of Korea and Korea Arts Management Service.