What the artists Kyungmook Kim, Inhwan Oh, and Ahram Jeong have in common is not the subject matter of their works but their tendency to deal with Korean society’s cultural issues in the perspective the Other, especially feminist and queer perspectives. These perspectives are manifested in their constant artistic efforts that visualize cultural issues long avoided by Korean society. This could be considered as a sort of alarm that minorities emit to the mainstream society. ‘Crisis’ has become a common word in Korean society, and it holds two main sources, politics and economy, such as national division, democratization, industrialization, and economic crisis. In other words, it is a common reality for Korean society to seek growth and development that can overcome economic and political crisis. Such process simultaneously gives justification to an overlook to the major cultural issues, for instance feminism, LGBTQ, immigration, patriarchy, and collectivism. The mainstream society’s ignoring these issues by claiming their preoccupation with overcoming the burdens of economic and political crisis constantly otherizes the voices of queer and feminism. The voice of the Other is indeed the one true alarm that signals cultural crisis to Korean society.
In order to reenact the tension caused by the routinized occurrence of events, Kyungmook Kim’s Sound Walk combines the viewpoint of surveillance cameras to the sounds of everyday life. With this the artist questions the crisis inherent in our daily lives and its authenticity and reality. Inhwan Oh’s My Blind Spot-Interview reveals individual identity that cannot be homogenized by showing one’s endeavor to find personal space even in the army life, a definite case of collectivism. In Ahram Jeong’s Performance Minimum I, female participants record and share a pose they take while reaching to a state of exhaustion. Through it, Ahram Jeong makes visible the state of women in the burnout society and simultaneously transforms the experience into one in which women can band together. The works of Kyungmook Kim, Inhwan Oh, and Ahram Jeong hence are a ‘real’ alarm as they visualize cultural issues of Korean society from the position of the Other.