- Hayoung Chung
Artist: Sung Hwan Kim
Queer bird faces presents films and excerpts from Sung Hwan Kim’s ongoing research into undocumented early 20th-century Korean immigration to Hawaiʻi. Titled A Record of Drifting Across the Sea (2017–), this multipart project explores Korean immigrants’ arrival to these islands—the first “U.S. soil” they stepped on in 1903, after the US’s annexation of Hawaiʻi in 1898. The artist examines microhistories of individuals whose stories are more overlooked within discourses of immigration. Kim’s visual re-creations—through enigmatic narratives, nonbinary figures, and idiosyncratic subtitles—invite us to envision these immigrants’ systematic erasure from history and education shaped by national boundaries.
Two films—Hair is a piece of head (2021) and By Mary Jo Freshley 프레실리에 의(依)해 (2023)—illuminate the unseen faces within these histories, with one screened each month of the exhibition. The first includes a look at picture brides, who arrived to the US knowing their prospective grooms—mostly sugarcane plantation workers—only from photographs. Kim focuses on how these women wore traditional clothing and makeup to avoid being mistaken for Japanese, as their fellow laborers became targets of hate crimes during the Asia-Pacific War. The second film examines the act of transmitting Korean dance in Hawaiʻi and uncredited figures involved in its dissemination. It follows Kim’s lessons with Mary Jo Freshley, an American instructor of Korean dance trained by the notable Korean American dancer Halla Pai Huhm (1922–1994), and revisits Halla Huhm Dance Collection, an archive Freshley organized now housed at the Center for Korean Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
The exhibition also includes excerpts from and reproductions of Kim’s research materials, such as his Blue Stand, which questions didactic texts and from one of which this exhibition takes its name, Queer bird faces. These materials guide viewers through Kim’s intricate, radiating constellation of stories. An exhibition publication features poems by early Korean immigrants to the US, including from The Korean National Herald (1913–1968), a newspaper local to Hawaiʻi. A concert piece by David Michael DiGregorio, a musician and Kim’s long-time collaborator, will mark the transition to the second month.
Support for the publication is provided by BKCNC.
