"Yearning for Home: Representation of North Koreans in the Work of Kim Insook," Trans Asia
Photography Review, Vol. 5, No. 1, Fall 2014. http://tapreview.org
Revised version re-published as "Citizenship and North Korea in the Zainichi Korean
Imagination: The Art of Insook Kim," with an introduction by Sonia Ryang. The Asia-Pacific
Journal, Vol. 13, Issue 5, No. 3, February 2, 2015.
http://japanfocus.org/-Young_Min-Moon/4263
Included in Trans Asia Photography Review's issue focusinging on diaspora, this essay
discusses the work of photographer Kim Insook, a third generation Zainichi Korean in Japan who
divides her time between S. Korea and Japan. Almost all of Zainichi Korean in Japan has come
from Southern part of Korea during the Japanese colonial era. They have been systemically
discriminated against by the mainstream Japanese society. The essay contextualizes Kim’s
extended series of photographs of children attending North Korea-affiliated schools in Japan,
which Kim, herself a graduate of the similar school, initially regards as her true home. For
it is at this school where languages, ideologies, and cultures of Japan and two Koreas
manifest in complex ways, which were crucial to the formation of her own multifaceted
identity.
The essay surveys Kim’s projects in chronological order in order to reveal the artist’s
increasingly sophisticated awareness of the intricacies of diasporic subjectivity. Kim makes a
journey to various places in South Korea in an effort to locate the ‘essence’ of her
motherland, but not surprisingly, fails to find it. This failure and disillusionment enables
her to regard the Zainichi community in Japan in a different perspective. In some sense, Kim’s
work is a yearning for home, however provisional it may be. In an ongoing search for self, her
project poses the question of whether if there is such a thing as true and authentic diasporic
subject, and whether a hybrid identity is possible for Zainichi Koreans living in Japan where
naturalization is still the only means to become recognized as ‘Japanese’ citizen proper.