Imaginary Maps: Feminist Art Beyond the Center
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, performance and black-and-white photographs, 1975
For 2024-2025, we will explore how to engage with feminist art beyond the Euro-American axis and the center/periphery model that has governed the writing of its histories. We want to shift the paradigms for studying art practices aligned with feminism from linear time, which is linked to concepts such as progress and development, to what Marsha Meskimmon calls a “global cartography.” The spatial thinking Meskimmon argues for can create “maps of affinity” rather than influence and therefore moves us away from narratives in which feminist art originated in Europe and the United States and then unfolded to impact and include practices in other parts of the world. Related to this shift, we follow how feminist artwork offers models for understanding how the symbolic body of “woman”—and particularly what Chandra Tapalde Mohantyidentifies as the “Average Third World Woman” (1984)—has been mapped as the ground of family, race, and nation, both as the result of colonial dominance and resistance to it.
We can see the challenges of this project in well-meaning curatorial efforts focusing on artists whose work emerges out of places shaped by the west’s exploitative reach. As demonstrated by the Brooklyn Museum’s 2007 exhibition Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (one of the big exhibitions devoted to feminist art in the first decade of the twenty-first century), often artists are asked, whether implicitly or explicitly, to speak for and bear witness to the truths of oppression. Nuanced feminist artwork can be read as a refusal to this assignment, and by staging refusal, begins to map places in the imagination where women from oppressive historical circumstances are not forced to make victimization present for western consumption.
The title for this research theme comes from Mahasweta Devi’s Imaginary Maps (1995), a triptych of novellas translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Exploring the links between mapping and writing, in the “Translator’s Preface” (1995) to Imaginary Maps, Spivak illuminates “gender ethics”—the basic idea that women are essentially good and naturally give—at the conceptual core of the sign “woman” and the key to gender oppression. Considering the representation of women in Imaginary Maps, Spivak writes that Devi “confronts” a “severe truth,” which is that “one of the bases in women’s subalternity (and indeed unequal gendering on other levels of society) is internalized constraints seen as responsibility, and therefore the very basis of gender ethics.” According to Spivak, Devi’s literary texts demonstrate that “internalized gendering perceived as ethical choice is the hardest roadblock of women the world over,” which leads us to ask how this ethical imperative, which naturalizes gender subordination, manifests in the global image economy. Spivak makes the concept of “ethical singularity” the counterpoint to “gender ethics.” As she explains, “ethical singularity” emerges from a scene of reciprocal revelation that resists the presumption of subjective transparency and holds the “sense that something has not got across,” which could be a way to describe the psychoanalytic encounter or, an engagement with a work of art.
Biographical Sketch of Dr. Soyi Kim
Trained in cultural studies and art history, Soyi Kim specializes in contemporary feminist art history, media studies, and the body politics of modern and contemporary South Korea and the Korean diaspora. She is the inaugural LB Korean Studies Postdoctoral Fellow at the East Asian Program at Cornell University (AY 2022-2024). She earned her doctorate in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature with a minor in Art History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2022). As a Fulbright scholar, she received her Master’s degree in History and Theory of Contemporary Art at San Francisco Art Institute (2014).
Before starting her Ph.D. program, she worked as a docent coordinator at the National Museum of Korea (2014-2015), and a volunteer worker and a satirical cartoonist for a civil organization, Cultural Action, located in Seoul, Korea (2007-2010). She has also held an art residency at the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea, in Fall 2020.
She is currently working on her first book project "Against Health: Feminist Art in Contemporary South Korea and the Korean Diaspora," which examines the troubling rhetoric and image of the body that Korean and Korean diasporic artists critically employ as a tool for their critique of the notion of public health. Additionally, she is developing a second project on biophobia in Korean and Asian diasporic art. Her scholarly contributions include essays on Korean diasporic artists such as Anicka Yi, Jane Jin Kaisen, and Soni Kum. Her work has been published in OMNES: The Journal of Multicultural Society, Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and Cultural Critique Online.