The Portraits of 108

<The Portraits of 108> was on a group of women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. I am trying to pay attention to this very place, Korea where I, myself, stand right now with those imbued with ideologies, by taking ‘comfort women’ as the theme of my work. When I first started working on this project, there were 108 surviving comfort women. This number by chance, coincided with the 108 defilements in Buddhism, with which human beings are said to be burdened. From a physical standpoint, the women look as if they are floating in the foreground. I thought this worked as a metaphor for the present reality, in which the ground upon which they stand is gradually disappearing. What is more important in this work is hidden meanings it contains: “calling” and “facing” in the frame of photography. “Calling” is a reference to the boundary between remembrance and forgetfulness while “facing” is a trigger to speculative or dialectic examination. I want my work to stir up questions about our tragic past and human dignity, and portray the reflection on violated women’s rights as seen by men as sexual objects. They began to disappear into the dustbin of history, tragically, while not knowing which of the history they belong to. It is what I would like to call attention to through my work. My photography is the reproduction of Roland Barthes’ statement, “there is a superimposition here: of reality and of the past.”