Eleana J. Kim’s Producing Missing Persons: Korean Adoptee Artists Imagining (Im)Possible Lives highlights the work of various artists as they utilize visual art in order to (re)tell, (re)write, and (re)imagine what it means to be a Korean adoptee.
Kim is intersted specifically in visual art as a mode of storytelling, and notes that ”adult adoptees produce images and meanings that attempt to articulate individual subjectivity and collective histories and personhood (78). Given the in-class conversations we’ve had about the importance and complexity of online communities, I was struck by Kim’s articulation of visual art as a modality through which diasporic and adoptee communities are fostered and fortified. As the Internet became more advanced, networks could connect more and more people, and “nascent groups quickly consolidated into a transnational Korean adoptee subculture” (76).
In addition to fostering commmunities, the Internet also provided tools and spaces for artists to share and create their work, as well as connect and collaborate with other artists. Kim mentions Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine—an adoptee who relocated to Belgium in 1968–as a “crucial hub” for the organization of these adoptee communities. As more artists collaborated and spread their work, art shows, collections, works, and exhibitions were able to totally transform the narrative experiences of Korean adoptees being put forth. These artists’ visual work explored their own individual experiences, while also putting them in conversation with others who were using their work to raise questions about adoptee subjectivity and “interrogate the political economy of adoption.”
One piece that stood out to me amongst the work that Kim mentions was KimSu Theiler’s 2008 piece entitled Hair Watch. Before transitioning into silence, the video starts off with a dialogue between Theiller and an unnamed ‘interlocutor.’ The two are discussing the differences in Theiller’s appearance between her photo at the orphanage and her passport photo. The piece focuses on Theiller’s hair growth as a way of measuring her time in the orphanage.
In her text, Kim underscores Theiller’s piece as an example of the ways that artists are expressing and navigating their adoptee identities in ways that are contrary to dominant portrayals which “frame the adoptee identity as a playful mix of ‘Western self’ and ‘Asian heritage.’” Rather, Theiller’s piece is innovative and insightful in that it “instead [captures] existential and ontological experiences of hybridity beyond the surface effects of race and culture” (81).
It was interesting for me to watch the photographs of Theiller unfold, for they captured her own personal growing and the passage of time, while also engaging with the juxtaposing dominant discourse of the “inconsequential non-time of the orphanage, the non-place from which the child must be rescued, in order to be brought into the normative space of the nuclear family, where, it is often presumed, the child’s real life begins.” I found the audio to be particularly provactive. As we hear Theiller recalling and (re)remembering her childhood memories, we are brought to those moments of her youth that were probably so crucial in establishing her own sense of self in a rapidly changing world. The sequence of photos works with the audio to collapse and reconstruct time. The images of Theiller’s growing hair and seemingly unchanging countenance interact with the audio of her recalling her memories in order to convey the complexities of her adoptee identity—a conveying that is remarkably personal and stunningly evocative in that it opens up new discursive channels that are typically untouched within dominant discourses of adoptee subjectivity.
The Politics of K-Pop 
The conversation around adoption is often hard to visualize. From limited documentation in orphanages to the cloudy memory of future adoptees, understanding child development before and after adoptions becomes complicated. Through the Internet, as Kim discusses, an archive grows of adoptee experiences as online communities explore different ways to tell stories. Theiller’s piece is interesting in that she juxtaposes 136 days in adulthood versus 136 days and accompanying photos of herself as a child before adoption. Her mention of the “inconsequential non-time of the orphanage” versus the implied consequential time post-adoption is also fascinating. While both sets of photos show little physical difference, the two sets show wildly different chapters of Theiller’s life; the first having an enormous impact on her future upbringing, no doubt. The voiceover in the audio complicates this notion of pre- and post-adoption life as Theiller discusses her lack of memory beforehand, unaware of the gap of time before her orphanage photo and passport photo. It is clear how relevant such a piece is to Kim’s emphasis on diasporic and adoptee communities forged through visual art and the Internet. I really resonated with her concluding statement discussing how Theiller opens up “new discursive channels” that are often ignored by dominant adoptee discourses. In re-remembering, there is power and ability to re-shape the past, and even through a simple set of photos, adoptees can visually track two very important bookends in their lives.
– Stephanie Yang
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