This ongoing project reflects the recent ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art. I juxtapose the

photographic and textual materials from different sources to imply that all archives are not only

incomplete on any given subject but also partial to their ideology. The group of images and text

pertains to the story of one of the truly extraordinary but buried tragedies of the Cold War: the

“return” of over 93,000 people, most of them ethnic Koreans, from Japan to North Korea from

1959 onward. Promoted to the world as a humanitarian endeavor and executed under the

auspices of the International Red Cross, the scheme was actually the result of political stratagem

involving the governments of Japan, North Korea, the former Soviet Union, and the U.S.

Though most left willingly, persuaded by propaganda that a better life awaited them in North

Korea, the historian Tessa Morris-Suzuki’s work on the recently declassified documents in the

International Committee for Red Cross in Geneva reveals how the Japan Red Cross exerted

covert pressures to hasten the departure of this unwelcome ethnic minority. North Korea only

offered poverty and hardship for most of the returnees, while thousands faced brutal persecution

and death. In short, the massive migration amounted to “exile to nowhere.” The repatriation

signals the significant ruptures in the continuation between nativity and citizenship in the era of

modern nation-states.

I exhibited the photographic and text pieces at Beyond the Instance of Ending in conjunction with

Martha Rosler Library at Herter Gallery, UMass Amherst, and subsequently as part of The

Multicultural in Our Time at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in Ansan, South Korea, in 2010. In

Ansan, where some 60,000 foreign workers reside, Koreans and multiethnic populations must

learn to live together. Given that many of the migrant workers have been living under the fear of

being deported for their “illegal” status, I engaged the audience with the fate of the Korean

migrant workers in Japan in the 1960s, and the notions of home, belonging, nationalism, the bare

life, and the possibility of transnational citizenship in the age of the global Empire. An expanded

version of the work will be shown in a solo exhibition at Sarah Doyle Gallery at Brown University

in April 2011.