siren eun young jung (b. 1974) has been dedicated to researching marginalized and forgotten histories, reviving them in the present and repositioning them within the realm of art. Among her notable projects is an artistic exploration of “Yeoseong Gukgeuk,” a genre of performance art that gained popularity in the 1950s but faded into obscurity without securing its place as either traditional or modern theater.

Her body of work seeks to uncover voices of resistance that challenge the patriarchal and binary frameworks surrounding gender and sexuality. Through diverse artistic mediums such as video, performance, and archival practices, she recontextualizes these voices within contemporary discourse.

Before her renowned Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project, jung had already been exploring the imagery of marginalized groups in her work. For instance, from 2007 to 2009, she developed the Dongducheon Project, which documented the buildings of the U.S. military camp town in Dongducheon, Gyeonggi Province, through photography and sound recordings. This project sought to bring to light the lives of marginalized individuals who had resided there but remained invisible to mainstream society.

For this project, jung conducted in-depth research and field investigations in Dongducheon, focusing on the lives of various minorities, such as female club workers and second-generation children from multicultural families. These individuals, often excluded from official administrative records, lived like invisible figures, and jung’s work aimed to highlight their existence and stories.

As a stranger, the artist maintained an appropriate distance from the people of Dongducheon, observing their small and seemingly insignificant landscapes and the structures of life these landscapes created from a liminal perspective. With this approach, she captured photographs of the unusually narrow doors connecting buildings or clubs in Dongducheon and the women's rooms that lay beyond them.

Later, the artist combined these photographs and textual narratives that revealed their lives into posters. She also recorded sounds from their daily lives and created a video piece featuring the audio alongside images of Dongducheon's narrow doors.

Since 2008, the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project has been an ongoing artistic endeavor based on research, investigation, and analysis surrounding Yeoseong Gukgeuk, a Korean performing art exclusively performed by female actors. For the artist, Yeoseong Gukgeuk serves as a critical ethnographic lens through which to examine how gender norms and cultural contemporaneity are recognized and constructed.

Rooted in Pansori (a traditional Korean musical storytelling genre), Yeoseong Gukgeuk emerged as a form of Changmu-geuk (singing and dancing theater) in the aftermath of Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule. It was a genre pioneered by female performers who resisted the patriarchal violence of the traditional music world.

During the 1950s, Yeoseong Gukgeuk gained widespread popularity as a new genre of popular art. However, it began to decline in the 1960s with the rise of television and the burgeoning film industry. Despite its significant role in modern Korean history, Yeoseong Gukgeuk ultimately failed to secure a place within either traditional or contemporary art, fading from collective memory.

jung has collected and studied the scarce archival materials of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, interviewing the remaining performers to bridge the gaps in its fragmented history. Based on this historical research, the early works of the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project were documentary-style videos capturing rehearsal scenes and interviews with performers.

In particular, jung focused on the male character actors of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. These actors, who performed masculinity both on stage and in their daily lives for the sake of achieving more authentic portrayals, embodied and practiced new subjectivities that resisted fixed gender categories. The artist explored the lives of these male character actors, who disrupted the rigid binary of gender performance imposed by the modern nation-state and documented their presence through video.

For instance, in The Masquerading Moments (2009), jung captured the act of "masquerading" as performed by Yeoseong Gukgeuk’s actors to transform themselves into male characters. The video features three elderly women who were iconic male character performers of their time—Jo Geum-aeng, Cho Young-sook, and Soja Lee. Filmed in the liminal space of the dressing room, situated between the stage and everyday life, the work captures the process of makeup and transformation, revealing the fluid, boundary-blurring moments where the physicalities of femininity and masculinity coexist.

The artist focuses on the entire "becoming" process leading up to the stage performance, including makeup and rehearsals. In The Unexpected Response (2009–2010), she captures rehearsal scenes featuring Lee Deung-woo, considered the most exceptional Nimai actor in Yeoseong Gukgeuk. A Nimai is the heroic male protagonist characterized by gallantry, virtue, and a romantic sensibility. In this work, jung removes all external conditions and contexts surrounding the actor, concentrating solely on her actions and performance.

The artist meticulously documents the actor's refinement of an "ideal masculinity" through expressions, voice modulation, delicate gestures, and precise eye movements. By portraying an actor perfecting the performance of another gender, the work challenges essentialist notions that biological men are the sole embodiments of masculinity. Instead, it offers an entirely unexpected response to such preconceptions, illustrating the fluid and constructed nature of gender.

In this way, jung uncovers the idea that gender is not fixed but is instead lived, performed, and revealed through life experiences, as observed in the stages and lives of Yeoseong Gukgeuk actors. She brings these insights into the present through various forms of documentation, including video.

In her Off/Stage (2012) series, jung captures interviews in which Yeoseong Gukgeuk actors who performed male roles reflect on their pasts. These actors not only embodied male roles on stage but often maintained their male personas offstage as well.

In her solo exhibition “Trans-Theatre” at Art Space Pool in 2015, siren eun young jung presented materials related to Yeoseong Gukgeuk that she had been collecting since 2008, alongside her own artworks inspired by them. The exhibition, conceptualized as a kind of Yeoseong Gukgeuk archive, leaned on the discourse of archival practice while resisting conventional archival methods. 

Unlike typical archive exhibitions, the materials were selectively curated based on the artist's personal interests and displayed in an unstructured, non-categorical manner. Regarding the exhibition, jung described it as "an archival practice of performative gender, which I have tried to embody in my work thus far." 

Her approach to the archive is performative in nature, inherently open-ended and never complete. The exhibition space itself serves as a metaphorical theater—a venue where the ongoing act of collecting and archiving is temporarily staged, emphasizing process over finality.

Meanwhile, Anomalous Fantasy (2016), a theater-based work, addresses the "remnants left after the decline" of Yeoseong Gukgeuk. Directed and written by the artist herself, the work focuses on the story of Nam Eunjin, the last-generation male character actor of Yeoseong Gukgeuk.

Anomalous Fantasy explores the fantasy of the stage through the journey of Nam Eunjin, who was captivated by Yeoseong Gukgeuk and chose to become an actor. However, for Nam Eunjin, Yeoseong Gukgeuk existed as a kind of fantasy, given that the genre had already declined. Alongside the narrative of the last-generation actor, the work also features G-Voice, an amateur choir composed of gay men, adding the voices of other marginalized groups who have been denied a rightful place.

This work brings the anomalies of Yeoseong Gukgeuk into the present context, creating an opportunity for reinterpretation. Reflecting on Yeoseong Gukgeuk from a contemporary perspective, it explores how this genre, which was deliberately omitted and marginalized in the male-centered modernization, broke down the fixed gender norms imposed by society. In doing so, it highlights the political possibilities inherent in the experiences of marginalized groups.

In the 2018 Korea Artist Prize exhibition, Deferral Theatre also showcases how past traditions are read and performed by future generations living in the present. The video highlights the final generation of male character actor in Yeoseong Gukgeuk, Nam Eunjin, the traditional Korean song singer Park Minhee, and drag king AZANGMAN, while simultaneously interweaving recreated images and historical materials.

Nam Eunjin and Park Minhee, who each continue traditions in different genres, offer distinct perspectives on how to bring disappearing traditional cultures into the present, raising questions about how we should perceive tradition.

The scene again alternates between the male role actors of Yeoseong Gukgeuk and the drag king AZANGMAN. The male role actors, who have portrayed a fictional masculinity in Yeoseong Gukgeuk, and the drag king, who performs and liberates their gender identity on stage, subtly introduce a discussion on the politics of gender.

What these three performers reveal is not a grand, historical view of tradition, but rather confessions about their private lives as they stand on stage and sing. As indicated in the title, Deferral Theatre by jung doesn't aim to draw a conclusion, but rather suspends any historical judgment or normative values associated with Yeoseong Gukgeuk. Through this, the work resists definitive interpretations and instead reflects on the complexities of gender and identity in performance.

In the following year, at the Korean Pavilion of the Venice Biennale exhibition “History Has Failed Us, but No Matter”, jung presented A Performing by Flash, Afterimage, Velocity, and Noise. This work explores how the performance of Yeoseong Gukgeuk can evolve and be transformed in contemporary times through queer performance artists.

The video includes performances by transgender electronic musician Kirara, lesbian actress Yii Lee, disabled theater group Dancing Waist's director and actress Seo Ji Won, and drag king AZANGMAN. These performers challenge traditional genre performances, oscillating between formal subversion and the awkward, unusual bodily performances rooted in their personal experiences. Through these actions, jung reintroduces the history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk within the context of queer performance.

With them, the artist weaves moments of performance that are sensed as "queering," continuously evoking the queer turn in artistic practices. At the same time, she questions political aesthetics through a feminist-queer methodology, aiming to revive the narratives excluded from public history.

In this way, siren eun young jung has carried out the Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project as a feminist artistic practice, rewriting the forgotten and de-defined history of Yeoseong Gukgeuk through the movements of the body in performance. Rather than restoring the inherent legitimacy of Yeoseong Gukgeuk, the artist emphasizes the political power of more anomalous and queer artistic practices as a form of sensory transformation.

"I am interested in how the boiling desires of nameless individuals meet the events of the world, and how they become resistance, history, and politics."

siren eun young jung studied visual arts and feminism at Ewha Womans University, its graduate school, and the University of Leeds in the UK. The artist has actively participated in major international events, including the Asia Pacific Triennale (2015), Gwangju Biennale (2016), Taipei Biennale (2017), Shanghai Biennale (2018), Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama TPAM (2018), Serendipity Art Festival (2018), and the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019). She has also received prestigious awards, such as the Hermes Foundation Missulsang in 2013, the Sindoh Art Prize in 2015, and the MMCA’s Korea Artist Prize in 2018.

References

• 정은영, siren eun young jung (Artist Website)
• 올해의 작가상 2018, 정은영 (Korea Artist Prize 2018, siren eun young jung)
• 한국문화예술위원회, 임국화 - 소외와 침묵의 동두천을 긍정과 소통의 공간으로
• 아트 스페이스 풀, 전환극장 (Art Space Pool, Trans-Theatre)
• 서울문화재단, 잊힌 판타지가 진짜 무대를 만났을 때
• 국립현대미술관, 정은영 | 유예극장 | 2018 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), siren eun young jung | Deferral Theatre | 2018)
• 한국문화예술위원회, 제58회 베니스비엔날레 한국관 귀국전 “역사가 우리를 망쳐 놨지만 그래도 상관없다” (Arts Council Korea, The 58th Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion “History Has Failed Us, but No Matter”