
Frequencies of Tradition
Client:
KADIST
Year:
2020년
《Frequencies of Tradition》은 아시아 지역에서 전통과 근대화의 복잡한 관계성을 살피는 기획으로 세미나, 신작 커미션, 전시회로 선보인 시리즈이다. 이 시리즈는 KADIST의 국제 프로그램의 일환으로 2018년에 시작되었고, 《Frequencies of Tradition》을 위한 협업은 예술가, 연구자, 큐레이터들과의 긴밀한 대화를 바탕으로, 그리고 국제 기관, 비엔날레와의 파트너십을 통해 시도되고 이루어졌다. 프로그램의 마지막 결과물인 전시는 2020년부터 광동 타임즈 미술관(传统的频率, 2020-2021), 인천아트플랫폼(《송출된 과거, 유산의 극장》, 2021-2022), KADIST 샌프란시스코(Frequencies of Tradition, 2022)의 세 개의 국제 예술기관을 순회하며 열렸다.
<송출된 과거, 유산의 극장 Frequencies of Tradition>은 아시아 근대화를 비판적으로 바라보고 그에 대한 이해를 다원화 할 수 있는 논쟁적 공간으로서 전통을 이해하는 것에서 출발한다. 아시아인들에게 전통은 여전히 일상생활의 일부이며, 세대를 연결하고 지역 사회의 가치를 전하며 미래 문화의 출현을 위한 살아있는 아카이브로서 기능한다. 하지만 동시에 가부장제, 권위주의, 구습의 근원이라는 부정적 인식으로 인해 환영받지 못하기도 한다. 이는 전통에 대한 보편적인 이해라고 할 수 있지만, 아시아에서는 범아시아주의, 오리엔탈리즘, 냉전 이데올로기 및 민족주의 등의 경로를 통과하며 더 복잡하게 굴절되어 왔다.
전시되는 작품들은 전통이라는 개념에 관한 포괄적인 의미들을 풀어낸다. 이를테면 과거를 서술하고 재수행하는 기술, 소속감과 정신성을 상기시키는 조상의 상징, 공동체의 신념 체계를 유지하고 고무시키는 문화적인 것들, 지금도 진행 중인 문화적 재생산과 관련한 모든 것들, 취약성과 변형이라는 전통의 실제적 속성과 같은 것들이다. 작품들은 20세기 아시아에서의 근대화와 전통이 충돌하는 역사적 서사에 주목한다. 사상, 신념, 방법의 실천을 오늘날의 흥미로운 매체로 제시하면서 말이다. 이는 정통 전통주의자들의 접근이나 과거의 박물학적 박제술과는 거리가 먼 것이다. 직조 공예나 수묵화 같은 오래된 전통적 기술이 등장하고, 고대의 애니미즘은 지구의 사변적 기억 잠재성을 드러낸다. 폐허는 근대와 비근대 사이에서 요동하는 감정적으로 또 심리적으로 복잡한 현실을 소환한다. 마지막으로, 식민지적 경계를 넘어서는 억압 불가능한 여성들의 초상, 황폐한 공동체에 힘을 불어 넣는 노인들의 구전, 현대적 기계가 지탱하는 유쾌한 순례의 세대들, 그리고 젠더-타자 공동체와 엮여 들어가는 전통의 퀴어링 등은 전통의 흥망성쇠가 인준된 제도가 아니라 바로 민중들에 의한다는 것을 보여준다. 즉, 전통이 발명된 근대성으로서의, 국가주의적 장치로서의 전통-되기에 머무르지 않고 특별한 수행을 통해 다양성의 세계를 향하는 모습들을 발견할 수 있다.
전시는 개발, 근대화, 관습의 폭력, 민족주의, 그러한 역사의 규범이 오늘날 어떻게 나타나고 구체화되고 있는지를 비판적으로 질문하는 동시에 집단 기억, 정신성, 아카이브적 상상력, 테크놀로지와 전통 사이의 상호 개입, 민중의 자기 성장 등을 매혹적인 방식으로 제시한다. 그리고 마침내 통치할 수 없는 것으로서의 전통을 드러내며 매혹적인 탈주의 공간, 바로 아시아 근대화의 지역적이면서 다원적인 상태들과 조우할 수 있는 하나의 풍요로운 장을 그려낸다. 노래하고, 염불하고, 소리와 리듬에 맞춰 춤추는 신체들, 그것은 바로 공동체의 기억, 자연의 이야기를 전하는 장소이자 또 하나의 역사적 서사로 도래할 무엇이다.
Frequencies of Tradition centers on tradition as a space of contestation. Tradition is a significant part of daily lives in Asia, connecting generations and reverberating as a living archive of cultures across time. Tradition also retains and upholds patriarchy, authoritarianism, and obsolete customs. Through collective memories, spirituality, archival imagination, technological engagements, and alternative modes of empowerment, the works in the exhibition–predominantly video installations and photography–upend conventional notions of tradition and examine how regional modernization entangles with the emergence of tradition and where the violence of social conventions, nationalism, and the impact of such histories on the everyday manifest. Together, the works allow for a critical reflection on modernization in East Asia and where an expansion of our understanding of the regional modern takes place.
Frequencies of Tradition is a series of seminars, commissions of new artworks, and exhibitions that reflect the intricate relationship between tradition and modernization across Asia. KADIST initiated this series in 2018 as part of its international programs devoted to drawing connections between different localities by addressing shared issues, often of global relevance. Curated by Hyunjin Kim, who served as KADIST's Lead Regional Curator for Asia (2017-2020) and later as the Artistic Director at Incheon Art Platform (2021), this collaborative endeavor was grounded in partnerships and close conversations with artists, researchers, and institutions around the world. Three exhibitions unfolded at the following international venues: Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou (2020-2021), Incheon Art Platform (2021-2022), and KADIST San Francisco (2022).
Curator's Essay
"On Frequencies of Tradition: From Ghosts of Modernity to Spirits of the Ungovernable"
Hyunjin Kim
Tradition is still a prominent and practiced form of daily life on the Asian continent, connecting diverse generations, transmitting community values, and serving as a living archive for cultural posterity. On the other hand, tradition also retains negative perceptions as a source of patriarchy, authoritarianism, hierarchy, and outdated customs. Frequencies of Tradition challenges the understanding of tradition as a space of contestation, providing the tools to critically reflect on East Asia’s accelerated modernization. Presenting works by sixteen contemporary artists, collectives, and filmmakers, the exhibition explores tradition as an enchanting and liminal space that complicates and interpellates our understanding of the regional modern.
The works in the exhibition rely on unraveling notions of tradition—the art of narrating and reenacting the old; ancient and ancestral symbols which bring a sense of belonging and spirituality; and cultural ordinances which sustain and stimulate a community’s belief system—in order to relay strategies of ongoing cultural production and to shed light on the substantive nature of tradition as a source of vulnerability and transformation. Despite the tropes, traditional constructs have been further refracted and complicated through prisms of pan-Asianism, Orientalism, Cold War ideology, and nationalism. Nonetheless, nostalgia evoked by significant social changes in modern time recalls and provides an impetus to uphold tradition. Seen as a relatively recent phenomenon, Eric Hobsbawm argues that tradition is the invention of modernity, becoming entangled with significant parts of the modern nation-state building process of the 20th century.1 Tradition, thus, has proven a useful tool for forging a sense of community, national cultural identity, and even towards the practice of patriotism for those living enmeshed in historical, ethnic, economic, or religious differences.2
The economic achievements of countries in East Asia, such as Japan, South Korea, and China, were accelerated by the governmental adaptation of aspects of Western modernity, especially Western industrial infrastructural development. Therefore, it can be argued that westernization has always been synonymous with East Asia’s modernization. For the region’s inhabitants, as noted by the renowned Chinese scholar of East Asian studies, Sun Ge, the geopolitical conception of Asia—between the biopolitical concept of race and otherness and the geopolitical concept of locality—was constructed by the time the West began to invade. Whereas Edward Said argued that Western Orientalism originated in the vein of Western self-centrism. Sun Ge, conversely argued that what became the antipode of Asia was not the West, but in fact, the figure of the West—a self-made construct generated to promote the discursive cultivation of “Asia” and its colonization in its dynamic complexity with the West.3 Since the latter half of the 19th century, the Japanese elites and intellectuals who sought to emulate the West immediately after the Meiji Restoration strove to construct “Asianness” as a counterpoint to the image of the “West.” From early on, emphasis on the uniqueness of “Asian” values or spiritual symbols, including the separate discourse of pan-Asianism, knotted “Asianness” to associations with images of the sublime and mystical, such as the lofty Himalayas (Okakura Kakuzō emphasized this as the integrity of two supreme pillars of Asia—Chinese Confucianism in the north and Indian civilization in the south), Kegon Falls, Nikkō, Japan (which one of the Kyoto School scholars illustrated as the towering symbol of Japan in the world history), and Mount Fuji.456 “Non-modern”, elements such as the purportedly primitive nature of Zen Buddhist philosophies, were instrumentalized as Asian spiritual tradition under Japan’s Pan-Asian ambitions. They were also wielded as tools for collusion in the Pacific War through Japanese militant nationalism.
Such a context is tangential to the absorbing narratives in Ho Tzu Nyen’s Hotel Aporia, (2019) which provides a glimpse into the lives of historical characters including Kyoto School scholars and their philosophical arguments over the notion of void (왕, or 虛無), and members of the Kamikaze unit during the Pacific War. Based on Zen Buddhist thought, the Kyoto School is noted for having popularized philosophical debates which delved into issues of Western canonical hegemonic ideology at the time. However, despite their significance, members of the Kyoto School were considered condemnable as intellectuals for justifying Japanese imperialism in China and other parts of Asia. They managed this by way of secret meetings with the Japanese navy. During a Chūōkōron (a monthly Japanese literary magazine)-organized symposium “The Standpoint of World History and Imperial Japan” on November 26, 1941, one of the Kyoto School scholars, Kōyama Iwao presented the notion of Japan’s spirituality and history as compressed into the image of the Kegon Falls in Japan, arguing that the nation was the new protagonist of world history. In addition, and to add to the growing hostility towards members of the Kyoto School, one of its prominent members and scholars Tanabe Hajime gave a lecture about “Shisei [Death-Life]” (1943) which wielded immense influence over young Japanese men such that many volunteered themselves as suicide Kamikaze bombers for the war.
To continue the theme of symbolic ascription and making Japanese world history, Fiona Tan’s Ascent (2016)*, as part of the off-site screening program, is a visual study of Mount Fuji, revealing the religious and cultural significance of Mount Fuji and images of the mountain as produced and consumed by modern Japanese militarism, Japanese society, and individuals. The work consists of 4,500 still photographs of Mount Fuji taken in the past 150 years and follows a fictive dialogue between two protagonists, one of which speaks positively on the concept of “void” in Japan considering it as something that can be “filled,” resonating with the philosophical concepts of “nothingness” and “void” unique to the Kyoto School.
In South Korea, as the nation initiated and accelerated industrial modernization during the latter half of the 1960s, a military dictatorship oppressed and launched a movement to eradicate age-old, traditional religious forms such as shamanism despite the fact that they were deeply embedded in people’s daily lives. At the same time, however, the regime was selective about which “traditions” got a pass and were allowed to remain based on their ability to preserve and maintain the state’s cultural and spiritual competitiveness through modernization and through institutionalization. The vicissitudes that tradition underwent in Asia in the latter half of the 20th century, when statism and Cold War ideology were one and the same, were also grounded on the utility or negativity of tradition as an ideological device. In 1966, amidst the Cultural Revolution in China, Confucian traditional culture was viewed as a feudal remnant. Meanwhile, books, artworks, handcrafts, and Chinese opera were condemned, as well as numerous historical and architectural sites such as temples, palaces, heritage buildings, considered of an outdated era. These monuments were considered part of an obsolete culture and were subsequently destroyed by the Red Guards, young people who organized and mobilized for the far left populist movement and guided by Chairman Mao Zedong between 1966 and 1967. Prior to that, the Taiwanese government ran “reverse-mirroring” of divergent cultural policies like the Han ethnic-centered “Cultural Reunification” (1945-1965) and the Chinese Cultural Renaissance Movement (1966) to strengthen the discourse on traditional Confucian culture.7 In South Korea in the 1960s, the dictatorial military regime was pursuing the preservation and institutionalization of tradition while proclaiming “nationalist democracy.” This was a political agenda to gain ascendancy over South Korean intellectuals based on Western liberal democracy as well as North Korea’s communism. Thus “tradition” in Asia came into fruition through complex ideological tensions with neighboring countries. “Tradition” in Asia, then, can be understood as an act of naming.8 Related phenomena such as the national and ideological reproduction of traditional culture are partly explored in Ming Wong’s Tales of the Bamboo Spaceship (2019), which traces the history of the transition from stage to screen of Cantonese opera martial arts in the 20th century. The video articulates the phenomenon of heroic revivals through the screen in places such as Hong Kong and Taiwan and in contrast to the oppression faced by performers of Chinese opera in mainland China during the Cultural Revolution. The work furthermore stipulates the phenomenon as a history of queer performance, expanding it into a chapter of speculative science fiction.
Chia-Wei Hsu’s Sprit-Writing (2016) summons Marshall Tie Jie, the spirit of a Frog deity who migrated to the Taiwan Strait from a destroyed temple during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Collaborating with local villagers, the artist’s interrogation of the spirit, is reenacted in a 3D space. The movement and sounds of a divination chair are digitally restored, gesturing to the possibility that these technologies can restore temples or holy sites which no longer exist. The juxtaposition of the 3D modeling space and the spiritual chair over the digital matrix brilliantly interrogates the compatibility between non-modern tradition and high-tech modernity as common in today’s East Asian society and daily life.
While this exhibition features several traditional performances and dances from Asia and related portraits of performers and the record of their work, it is far from a mythologization or museological representation frozen in time. Instead, the exhibitionary goal is to bring attention to the particularity of the liminal space of modernity within tradition—to present both a history that distorts artistic aspirations and an enchanting artistic trajectory that exceeds its history.
A video documentation of shadow play, Gala Porras-Kim’s Muscle Memory depicts both the movements of the muscles where traditional dance is remembered and stored as well as the discernment of the dancer by adding her own interpretation to the transmitted choreography. Presenting the body as a locus of transmission, preservation, and interpretation, Muscle Memory provides a dialogue on representation surrounding memory, archives, preservation, tradition, and bodily limitation. Likewise, Hwayeon Nam’s video Against Waves (2019), includes testimony by two Zainichi Korean women learning the dance footsteps of the international diva Choi Seung-hee, on a wavering North Korean ship, a gesture to the strong but precarious aspiration for the East Asian dance of Choi which exists in a liminal space. Further, this secret dance lesson and memory transmission in Choi’s choreographic work Against Waves from 1956 insinuates an ontological vulnerability found in the transmission of traditional dance, with particular respect to the Zainichi Korean community’s precarious life in the context of national and ideological borders.
Tradition continues through communities through the act of intergenerational transmission or else it dies out. The ebb and flow of tradition escape official authorities. Rather, tradition persists through engagement, embodiment, and commonality, as consensus through the community. The works in the exhibition consider this practice as a medium by invoking longstanding traditional methods. Freely adapting artisanal skills and linking vernacularism and universality to aesthetics, Seulgi Lee creates a nubi, a traditional Korean quilt, blanket series in collaboration with nubi artisans in the southern city of Tongyeong in South Korea. Lee’s blanket adopts Korean proverbs that reflect community spirit and satire, translating them into geometric patchworks of witty pictograms.
The ruins observed in Yoeri Guépin’s video work Garden of Perfect Brightness (2019) and Lieko Shiga’s photographic series Rasen Kaigan (2009-2021) linger between enchanted and haunted, invoking an emotionally and psychologically complex reality that sways between the modern and the non-modern. Repetitively depicting typical images of Korean jesa (Confucian ancestor veneration rites), such as that of a prostrating man and an offering table, Young Min Moon’s painting series goes beyond meanings forged by tradition and the individual to reveal personal, social, and communal points of intersection that the artist—who has experienced both the modernization of South Korean society and a diasporic life in the United States– holds onto as “rituals,” cast by the shadow of death.
Tradition in East Asia has been known to prolong patriarchic culture and also has been instrumentalized towards nationalism, evident in the nationalist and ideological conflicts inherent to the 20th century. Frequencies of Tradition, however, signals an alternative future to these old stories. Women, LGBTQ2SIA+ community, and the elderly are the subjects and performers of traditions presented. The artworks in the exhibition offer portraits of the figures of unruly women; older generations portrayed as healers in ravaged areas; historical continuity from individuals’ small narratives; and rituals and movements of the gendered other together emerge as fascinating actors and frequencies of unlearning patriarchal traditions and Asia’s male-dominated histories.
The oral transmission of the elderly in Ko Sakai and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Storyteller (2013)* provides an empowering moment for the Tohoku Earthquake area’s community. We see tradition entangled within the genderqueer community in Tomoko Kikuchi’s photographic series Funerals under Neon Lights (2014), where it plays a vital role in the rituals of funerals in rural China. In siren eun young jung’s Deferral Archive (2018), a fascinating cultural space is revealed where women, previously oppressed by a patriarchal apprentice system,9 create self-empowering moments through traditional performances staged without the accompaniment of men as evidence of a gender-becoming mode in the representation of traditional stories. Deferral Archive (2018) is the archival extension of her decade-long ethnographic research project Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project (2008–ongoing). Yeoseong Gukgeuk, which was popular in 1950s until late 1960s, is a form of women-only traditional theater in the Korean peninsula’s post-colonial liberation social space. Deferral Archive invites us to the mesmerizing queer stories and aesthetics through vibrant wall graphics and color compositions made with first- and second-generation actors’ old photo albums. Juxtaposed are videos of an older generation actors’ performances which convey a gendered and political singularity against the patriarchal stronghold of Asian society.
Jane Jin Kaisen’s film Community of Parting (2019)* calls upon shamanism as an ungovernable indigenous spirit that links two incompatible worlds. Critically reflecting on abandonment, separation, migration, and discrimination over East Asia’s borders of brutal Asian andro-modernity, Community of Parting subsumes the ancient Korean shamanic myth of Princess Bari as an invisible spiritual medium as well as a name of the patriarchical other, for the literary and critical notion explored in the film. Kaisen evokes Bari as a liminal being that transcends human-made borders, and finally consoles the many social deaths of the Other, those who suffered expulsion, abandonment, migration, separation, oppression, discrimination, and trauma, as an utterly empowering mediator of radical ethics and spirituality.
Wang Tuo’s film Tungus (2021)* deals with the history of the Siege of Changchun, which took place in 1948 in Manchuria (present-day Dongbei, China). The film features a scholar and two soldiers from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army who are originally members of the Korean Liberation Army. Amidst extreme hunger, the scholar and the two soldiers experience hallucinations from the past—specifically, the May 4th Movement of 1919 in China and of Jeju Island, South Korea, their home, as well as hallucinations of the massacre committed on the island in 1919. Wang’s lyrical work evokes a sense of community and collective conscience around the shared experience of fear and death. It also summons the collective trauma of colonialism, social movements, and the Cold War. Standing on the boundary between life and death in Community of Parting and Tungus, shamanism can be seen as a hauntological passage that summons specters from East Asian history and prompts them to face and overcome inner scars.
Frequencies of Tradition weaves together multiple nodes and trajectories through the compelling aesthetics of time-based media—video, film, and performance. Yet, speaking of tradition in the contemporary art world still risks being a double-edged sword. While pursuing tradition as a thought-provoking medium in our understanding of the unique pluralities of Asia, the exhibition acknowledges the perpetually precarious position of tradition and its intersection with the status quo’s regional political tensions. Through fascinating collective memories, spirituality, archival imagination, different technological engagements, and empowerment, the exhibition reveals a mode of the ungovernable. While asking how the development, modernization, violence of conventions, nationalism, and norms of such histories continue to manifest themselves and materialize today, the exhibition uncovers the enthralling space found in and through tradition, where one can encounter the vernacular and plural state of Asian modernization. The bodies, singing, chanting, and dancing with sound and rhythm, become a sphere to transmit the memories of community, stories of nature, and the manifold narratives of unwritten regional histories.








