Soyean Goak
Gwangju, Korea

“Narrative of Modern Asian Migration:
Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes” (working title)

Mixrice, an artsit duo (Ji Eun Cho, Chul Mo Yang)
 
Soyean Goak invites Mixrice, the artist duo of Ji Eun Cho and Chul Mo Yang, for the new project Narrative of Modern Asian Migration: Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes (working title). This project aims to create a narrative of modern Asian migrations by following the traces and stories of modern Asian migrants who traveled from Korea to Japan, from Japan to Southeast Asia, or through Korea and Japan to Southeast Asia, for different reasons, during the Pacific War and the period of colonial occupation by Imperial Japan. Among these modern migrants are Zainichi Koreans who traveled to Osaka from Jeju Island; Koreans who relocated to Southeast Asia after being enlisted as POW guards during the Pacific War; an ethnically Korean film director who migrated to Indonesia by way of Korea and Japan; and a Japanese cartoonist who fought in the Pacific War. As individuals, these modern Asian migrants—people who left behind their homes amid conflict, colonization, and the chaotic historical situations surrounding the Second World War—are forgotten figures in official historical narratives. This project seeks to approach and invoke the traces and stories of modern Asian migrants, their positions of foreignness and their conflicts of identity, amid the contradictory states of affairs created by ideologies of nationality, state, colonization, empire, and war, in order to shed new light on a previously unexamined part of modern Asian history.