| This dissertation examines the movements of Koreans living abroad in diaspora and explores ways in which overseas Koreans use artistic activities to express self and configure identity. Whereas Part I treats the historiography, history and policy of Korean migration, Part II focuses on artists who participated in controversial exhibitions including the 2002 Kwangju Biennial's There Project and the 2004 Korean Diaspora and Art Symposium held in Tokyo. The There exhibition brought together twenty-four artists from Brazil, China, Japan, Kazahkstan, and the U.S. while the exhibition in Tokyo presented artwork, performance, and multi-media installations by thirteen artists, in part organized as a response to the dissatisfaction with There. The two sites showcase a scale of identities and tensions produced in the attempt to understand Korean diaspora, especially in relation to the archive that posits Korean migrants and migration history as one that is hierarchical in nature based upon ethnic oneness and pure-blood relations.;I propose diasporic art is produced by artists residing outside a homeland. Key to Korean diasporic art is that artists explore a shared history of displacement and present historical memories of events reconstructed affectively and re-imagined nostalgically, a reason why I use ethnographic methods. The visual arts, artists, and cultural production, thus, provide the material means to cast diaspora in order to communicate the complex subject-position and history of Koreans in diaspora in a way that can engage with the local communities of those residing abroad and a Korean audience that is still insistent upon connections to homeland, as the Kwangju and Tokyo exhibitions reveal. Through the study of these diasporic artists, the dissertation brings light to multiple identity formations that resist dominant narratives of the nation and reflect differing experiences of class, gender, global and national politics, and particular local situations. However, one also sees a paradox of diasporic art as it pertains to Korean artists in that some artists still reinforce monocultural or singular conceptions of national culture and belonging bound by homogeneity and blood ties. In other words, the paradox of diasporic art reveals that artwork critical of essentialist understandings of self, community, or nation both undermine master narratives of the nation-state at the same time as they reinforce them. |
