The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

We wanted to address the unnamed time suspended between past and present, the flat space of systems and developments, individuals with no sense of belonging, and our own moments of absence. 1 A project team centred on artists Cho Jieun and Yang Chulmo, mixrice formed in 2002 as an attempt to find alternatives to media representations of issues facing migrant labourers in South Korea. Generally, these depictions fell into two categories: the sensational, where workers were portrayed as objects of police stings and tabloid exposés, their precarious legal status elevated to the primary register of identity; and the humanist, where the same workers were portrayed as victims, either of an unjust system or unfair circumstances. The inherent limitation being that both were predicated on subjective positions within the mainstream of Korean society — a gaze, sympathetic or otherwise, reinforcing perceptions of migrants as outsiders or others. At no point were the workers themselves allowed to participate in establishing the terms of reference or engagement. Accordingly, mixrice set about developing media workshops, teaching technical and presentational skills and engaging in ongoing discussions to equip these marginalised migrant labourers with the resources to tell their own stories. Theirs is a model of education that might be described as broadly Brechtian, providing skills, knowledge and critical awareness as a means to negotiate and enhance social agency. Political art tends to struggle with the question of how to establish an ontological ‘hit’, a moment of pure communication that produces for the audience — or the artist’s ‘other’ — an unmediated, transformational encounter with a given work. mixrice’s practice is predicated on inverting this relationship, where the work is produced from within the encounter with this ‘other’, and where the encounter is mutually transformative. In this way, by providing migrant individuals and communities with the means to make their voices heard, mixrice become students as well as teachers, implicated and integrated into learning and artistic processes. As artists, mixrice position themselves as social mediators, integrating personal and collective memory. Their strategies are diverse, incorporating workshops, graphic design, photography, video, comic books, murals, street performances and the development of archives. Collaboration is intrinsic to the works produced from these activities, and, as a result, mixrice can rarely lay exclusive claim to their authorship — projects such as Mixrice Video Diaries 2002, an extraordinarily intimate collection of films produced by Burmese workers about their own lives, and by Nepalese workers about their brilliantly-named Everest FC football team, now sadly dismantled due to the deportation of players. Recent projects have taken mixrice as far afield as Cairo in 2010, where they were themselves in the rare position of ‘others’. Surveying the meaning of home for migrants from neighbouring regions through the question, ‘What can’t you leave behind?’, answers were illustrated with a poignant set of photographs. They also took the opportunity to research the trade in black market goods through the smugglers’ tunnels that run between Egypt and Gaza. Translating this idea of geopolitical division into the context of a divided Korean Peninsula, their work for APT7 expands on the notion of the tunnel, literally and figuratively, as a breach, a link, a hiding place. As a graphic and conceptual device, it connects three bodies of work. Badly Flattened Land 2010 is a series of photographs of the levelled no-man’s-land in the city of Rafah, straddling the border of Egypt and Gaza. Dungapsul, An Occult Magic of Transformation 2011 comprises sculptures and photographs produced during public interventions in the South Korean port of Gunsan, a former fishing and industrial hub undergoing rapid transformation into a free trade zone. These two projects are absorbed into, and consequently expand, Underground Tunnel 2010–12, a wall drawing first produced to unite the various documents of their Cairo research, and to depict the tunnel smugglers’ goods of choice: chocolate, motorcycle parts and live sheep (for slaughter for religious feasts). mixrice operate at the juncture of two historic moments in Korean culture: the first, South Korea’s transformation from labour exporter to labour importer, and, the second, the emergence of social possibilities for art beyond the dogmatism of 1980s minjung , or ‘people’s art’. While specific, these moments operate within larger global flows. Zooming out to view the spokes, nodes and movements of these networks is a tempting option, but mixrice offer alternatives. Theirs is a process of delving beneath: of entering clandestine spaces where the self is exposed to the other, and history and memory blur; of creating secret passages, escape routes and supply lines; and of staging disappearances for the possibility of appearing together. Reuben Keehan 1 mixrice, ‘What we encounter’ (excerpt, 2011), in Jong-Gil Gim et al. (eds.), 100. art. kr. Korea Contemporary Art Scene , The Open Books, Paju, South Korea, 2012, p.392. mixrice Going underground 160