By Kristina Grünenberg
Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
University of Copenhagen
An artist whose work stands out for its radical methods often involving the use of her own body is the Korean-Danish performance and visual artist Yong Sun Gullach who was adopted from South Korea and grew up in a small village in Western Jutland, Denmark.
Since Yong Sun Gullach is an adoptee her perspectives on belonging and home although in many ways similar to the quest for a space of some form of belonging that comes out in other artists work also differs.
Yong Sun Gullach herself, who has no knowledge of her past nor biological parents and was adopted with false papers, phrases it this way: In many ways my experiences are the same as that of immigrants in Denmark, but I envy the fact that they know their heritage, they have a place to relate to, a storyline, a language – I have none of that. My immigrant friends on the other hand envy the fact that I am generally included in the Danish “we” by virtue of being an adoptee, speaking the language, knowing the codes
For Gullach the continuous search for a space of belonging and home often takes place through her work on, through – and with her body. Of coming to terms with a body, which, although defined as Danish, always feels out of place by virtue of its Korean body features. slide
In her performance “the starchild; a performative experiment” performed in 2018/2019 Gullach takes this bodily estrangement as a point of departure and attempts to come to terms with her body, through the recognition of the way it is constituted as a socio-material assemblage, consisting of material objects denoting colonization and estrangement. The title “Star child” is inspired from the ‘star child project’, which revolves around the identification of a 900-year-old skull with a human-like appearance, yet very unusual bone features, found in Mexico in the 1930s. Although the skull has been tested and examined by medical and scientific experts since 1999 its abnormal characteristics still remain to be explained. The skull is therefore believed by some alien enthusiasts to be at least partly alien (https://www.starchildproject.com).
The title chosen by Gullach thus plays on the notion of the alien and the ongoing search for identity and identification.
I am the star child
alienated from other space
deprived from past, present, future
always encapsulated
always other
(Yong Sun Gullach 2016)
In the performance Gullach is standing on a world map from the 17th century as her body is being pierced with needles that attach large transparent spherical plastic bulbs, which could be thought along the lines of German Philosopher, Sloterdijks concept of sphere – a concept which points to the fundamentally entangled “spaces of coexistence” between and among human beings, and thinks through the implications of existence as a ‘being-with’..in Sloterdijks sligthly eccentric vocabulary ‘we find ourselves living in a complex sea of fragmentary yet contiguous spheres, which he likens to a “foam.”
Each of Gullachs plastic spheres are filled with material items and objects carrying a colonial reference linked to the global East and to adoption (poppey seeds – opium, porcelain, silver – asia believed to have large reserves, little baby figures (fertility industry), silkworm cocoons, washing powder(..) and shows how materailty and being, objects and subjects are co-constituted – A little like Alfred Gell’s (1992) reference to the hunter and the trap in his article the Vogels net. Here Gell argues that it just as the hunter makes the trap for an animal, it is just as much the animal and the trap that “makes the hunter”. Along the same lines, we could read the spheres tied to Gullachs body as what makes her – a Korean adoptee!
In the performance Gullach shows how the spheres inhibits and changes her way of walking in her attempts to move her body with the spheres around in the performance space without harming her skin, which could otherwise be easily torn by the needles placed in the flesh of her womb. Gullach ties herself to the audience with silk threads from India wearing a whilte Chinese silk shawl – as if to implying not only the complicity of the spectator but also the inherent entanglement and complicity of the Korean adoptee and her immediate and more distant surroundings.
Gullach’s search for home takes then place through the exploration of the socio-material infrastructuring- and sensed ambivalences of her body, and we might say that she herself applies an infrastructural and postmigrant lens, a la Römhild, in the sense that she does more that focus on herself and her experiences as an adoptee. She does this by investigating and making visible the entanglements of the socio-historical, the material, the audience and the body of the performer – her body – which is not only marked by, but produced in this entanglement..while at the same time showing the ambivalence produced, the pain related to this ambivalence and the work of coming to terms with it.
The work is not without critique – but rather than a denouncing critique from a position of some form of ‘realist outside’ or a ‘view from nowhere’ as Haraway phrases it – Gullach’s critique in my reading consists of adding layers to the complexities of growing into, through and with an adopted body, making me think of The Latourian notion of the critic as someone who assembles and offers arenas in which participants may gather, rather than someone who merely debunks or “lifts the rug from under naive believers” (Latour 2004: 246)