"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
Kim Insook is a photographer and 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.