The Role of Father for Kim Hee-Jung

Lee Young-Jun
Image critic / Professor of Kaywon School of Art and Design

To everyone, the father is powerful. However, what is actually powerful is the name of the father, rather than the individual father. And the name of the father is reproduced in every corner of the society; in the names of a company president, a teacher, a commander, and so on. To work on the powerful father means to work on the typical father. Of course, Kim Hee-Jung's work on the father is about her own private, specific father. In her work notes, she wrote that she felt a sense of distance from the father. I t is not possible to dislike the typified father. It is possible to dislike one's own individual and private father. Naturally it is possible to like him, too.

 Kim Hee-Jung's father is the hero of a success story who overcame poverty, as appears in an epic novel, the generalized incarnation of the tireless workforce that led the country's development and an immortal and imperishable being. That father has left the place of Kim Hee-Jung's father and already become a part of the generalized symbolic order of our society, and she finds it difficult to determine whether the father from whom she feels a sense of distance is the individual father, or the father as a part of the symbolic order. This is inevitable because every father is the father within the symbolic order. Like it or not, the father as a member of a family is the name of the father. The name is presented through photographs in Kim Hee-Jung's works.

 However, "Ultra Super Powerful Father" series photographs in which Kim Hee-Jung herself impersonated the father arouse a certain kind of sympathy. One feels distant but sorry for him at the same time. There seems something missing in the father kept merely in the name. Nevertheless, I stopped asking about the father. What we can understand about the father is just the name. It won't help to learn more about other people's fathers, because all individuals have distinguished ways and patterns of recognizing the differences and discordance between the two types of fathers and it is thoroughly related to their own individual chances.

  "Father", who is the hero of self-made success and a father to his daughter, spent his youth working hard in his hometown, and then left the place for Seoul to live on bean paste noodles eaten at factory offices. Despite his hardship, it is always in a reverent manner that he salutes the national flag as the Korean national anthem is played, and when he goes back to his house with a ridiculous interior he watches television trying hard to make out this world. This is the father who can be found anywhere. Previously, Kim Hee–Jung presented in her "Kim-Chi" series the pathetic expressions of a mother who makes kimchi. The reason her expressions are pathetic is because she makes kimchi not for herself, but for her family. Kim Hee-Jung could not love, nor understand her mother who got off the plane at the New York airport carrying in both hands the kimchi she had taken pains to make. The mother's kimchi was prepared for the other person, but Hee-Jung, the target of her love held in the kimchi, could not either feel or accept the love. The mother's love carried through kimchi is doubtlessly altruistic, but the object of the altruism does not feel herself to be the recipient of this love. This is the pattern of the mother and what is signified by the "Kim-Chi" series

 Although the love of the mother or father is one-sided and thus difficult to accept, it was not easy for Kim Hee-Jung to keep distance from such love in her works. That is why she intervened in their personas with her own images. This method of hers may be comprehended in two different layers. First is Kim Hee-Jung's identification with the father or mother. However, her attempts for identification can never make her the same as either of them. This is not due to the outwardly recognized distance, but because Kim Hee-Jung and her father are separate beings and products of differences.

 By the way, it is interesting to note that Kim Hee-Jung looks similar to her father in his youth. Thus, in a slightly different layer from those mentioned above, Kim Hee-Jung takes the role of her father's doppelganger. It is similar to the status of Cindy Sherman's faces that appear in her works. Sherman says that her works are not self-portraits, but the fact that Sherman's faces, and not those of others, appear constitutes the core axis of her works. What is "I", symbolized by these images? How can it be acknowledged to be "I"? What is the code of the symbolic order that acknowledges these images as "I"? How the code captivates people and persuade them to accept these images to be "I"? These questions rotate around this axis.

 Kim Hee-Jung poses the same question. What is "I", that resembles the father? What makes me resemble him, and what makes me different? Is it the physical similarity or difference of the faces, or the similarity or difference from cultural and physiognomic views of recognizing faces? In these questions is held the basis of the sense of distance that Kim Hee-Jung feels towards the father. If the father had nothing to do with me, it wouldn't matter whether he looked like me or not, what family he came from, or through which path he made his success. In other words, his name wouldn't matter to me. The problem is that he is not a name, but a person. And this person incorporates "I". Kim Hee-Jung's work is to find this "I".