Whui-Yeon Jin

Yun Suk-Nam Feminist art Mother Post-colonialism Marisol

Suk-Nam Yun (1939–), a leading female artist in Korea, integrates painting, clothing, rubbish, silk-screens, and planks of wood to create installations representing such familiar motifs as family and mother. She often depicts women who have suffered and persevered under the patriarchal conditions of Korean society, a patriarchy that has deprived women of social recognition. Yun attempts to challenge these conventions by recreating images of women as strong historic icons, in much the same way that Escobar Marisol (1930–) approached her subjects in the 1960s. In their choice of materials and subject matter, the similarity is clearly visible. However, Yun’s work is more than simply a copy of her Western counterpart; it is infused with a spirit that is uniquely Korean. Nonetheless, her art’s formal and conceptual ‘closeness’ lends itself to a poststructuralist analysis, thereby revealing layers of desire, resistance, and ambiguity. This article explores Yun’s Mother series using Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘mimicry’ theory in order to demonstrate how her work reveals the disruption and discrepancy between the Korean subject and the “other.” In other words, in her work, we can detect a desire to participate in a discourse with her Western counterparts. Yet strongly rooted in her identity as a Korean subject, Yun expresses a desire to transform and even resist those same conventions.