도미야마 다에코의 ‘미술운동’이라는 현재적 공명판 - 1950년대와 1980년대 강제노동(탄광) 및 위안부 관련 작품·다큐·글을 중심으로

Abstract

I suggest that Tomiyama Taeko’s life and art works can be characterized as practical engagement through doing arts. where her activities were against colonialism, war, sexism and the like. I turn on the currently potential effects her works may make on the attitude of the Korean people towards the displaced residing in Korea with the perspective of decolonialism. I deal with her art works, writings and documentaries of the 1950’s concerning the Japanese victims who suffered from the forced labor in the coal mine areas in the 1950’s and those of the 1980’s concerning the Korean laborers and comfort women who were conscripted by force during the colonial period. The themes in her works range from the mine workers in the 1950’s, to Japanese fired workers who emigrated to Latin America in the 1960’s, to pro-democracy movements including Gwangju Uprising in the 1970’s and beyond. They show the empathetic understanding of the comfort women, refugees from Afghanistan, and other discriminated Asian women. They also criticize the nuclear power plants and represent the disasters as we saw from the Fukusima and Chernobyl accidents. Tsuchimoto Noriaki produced a documentary film titled as “Run Away with it, Garden Balsam: My Chikuho, My Chosun” in 1982 and suggested that the forced mobilization during the colonial period be a source of highly rapid economic growth in the post-war Japan. In the film, Tomiyama chose lithographs instead of oil paintings in order to represent the terrifying pitch-darkness in the mines. Here she acknowledged the imperial Japanese as perpetrators. Her photographic slides are as impressive as her lithographs. With the photographic images, she features a shaman, who laments the sufferings, agonies, and pains of those who have no right to speak and have been denied any chances to be heard. In “Run Away with it, Garden Balsam,” the shaman pleads with the sympathy for the benefit of those Korean coal miners buried in the underground with grudge and resentment. In “Comfort Women in the Sea,” the testimonies are expressed by silence, onomatopoeic words and mimetic words, not by verbal words. “Apocalypse from the Sea”, which came out after the tsunami and nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, enables us to hear oral testimonies of those who have no power to speak for themselves. The representations throughout her works implicate intricate and elaborate alliances with feminists, activists and artists both in Korea and Japan. The movements done by Tomiyama through doing arts involve colonialism and war, capitalism and imperialism, and racism, anthropocentricism and species-ism. Her life-long works in turn display how testimonies and oral statements express the words of invisible subjects who cannot speak of themselves, and how far they transcend the victimhood they have experienced till now and they will onwards. I, also, argue that the spirits in her works extend to the socio-economical conditions of the displaced or refugee women, and even to the animal conditions in the slaughterhouses. I believe that her life and works provide a motive for the escape from the closed-mind set of the Korean people towards the minority groups.