Gymnastic for HwanHyang | 2012

2012.11.26- 12.06 pm. 2,4,6,8(Nov.) pm. 2, 4( Dec.) 04:09, Stereo, Screening on Hongjechon Electronic Screenboard

Exhibition 2012.12.07- 12.23 

Gymnastic for HwanHyang departs from the layered history embedded in Hongjechon stream in Seoul. During the Second Manchu Invasion of 1637, tens of thousands of Korean women were taken as prisoners of war to the Qing dynasty. Upon their return, these women — known as hwanhyangnyo (還鄕女), literally "women who have returned home" — were met not with relief but with rejection. Under the rigid Confucian social order of Joseon, they were branded as women who had lost their chastity, and despite a royal decree prohibiting divorce, aristocratic families cast them out. Left with nowhere to go, many gathered along the banks of Hongjechon. King Injo eventually ordered that those who bathed in the stream would be granted a pardon — making Hongjechon a site of state-enforced "purification" imposed upon the female body. A popular folk etymology holds that the contemporary Korean slur hwanyangyeon derives from the word hwanhyangnyo, though this remains linguistically contested.

The work calls this history into the present. The artists developed a gymnastic routine designed to release and liberate the body from the social pressures and norms imposed on women — translating structural oppression into a series of physical gestures of relief and resistance. This video was broadcast on the public electronic screenboard along Hongjechon, the very site where the hwanhyangnyo were once made to wash away their past. By appropriating the format of public advertisement as a form of propaganda, the work quietly inserts a question about the social position of women into the fabric of everyday urban life.

The project is generously supported by Seoul Art Space HONGEAUN and screening supported by Seodaemun Cityhall.

Artist/ Hanna Noh, Mijung Lee. Gymnastic Guide/ Whajung Kang. Filming Staff/ Hyerin Kim.