Speaker: Jaeyeon Lee, International Studies Program, Hollins University - Academia.edu, Google Scholar, ResearchGate

Abstract: »This article explores the hauntology of comfort women's testimonies within and beyond digital spaces by analyzing the Heeum Museum’s on/offline exhibition. 'Comfort women' refers to the approximately 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced into providing sexual, physical, and psychological services to the Japanese imperial army during WWII. In the on/offline exhibition "Time, Place, and Testimony of Japanese Military Sexual Slave Survivors" in 2021, the Heeum Museum created virtual spaces for visitors to revisit Daegu and its satellite cities, based on the ghostly presences and testimonies of comfort women. Drawing on field research that I conducted in South Korea in 2021, including in-depth interviews with the Heeum Museum’s representatives and archival research, this article examines how the museum turned urban landscapes into open (post) colonial wounds. Specifically, this article examines how the VR exhibition invites viewers to enter the ruined house of Kim Oak-sun, encounter her absent presence, and listen to her eternal ghostly testimonies. Second, this work interrogates how the exhibition remaps and rephotographs Daegu based on Moon Oak-ju’s testimonies to reveal the city's (post)colonial wounds. By doing so, this article illuminates how the ghostly testimonies of comfort women haunt postcolonial cityscapes, unsettling the boundaries between past and present, here and there, absence and presence, and virtual and actual.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Asia: History of Japan / Shōwa era | History of Asia: History of Korea / Korea under Japanese rule, History of South Korea | Museum: Museums in South Korea | Prostitution: Forced prostitution / Comfort women | Sex and the law: Wartime sexual violence / Wartime sexual violence in World War II | War: Pacific War / Japanese war crimes