New Town Ghost
2005 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
Minouk Lim
New Town Ghost (2005) is one of Lim’s trio of large-scale video installations. (The other two are S. O. S—Adoptive Dissensus [2009] and The Weight of Hands [2010].) The series grew out of her interest in capturing lost memories and the collective unconscious in rapidly globalizing cities such as Seoul. New Town Ghost documents a young female activist who is standing aggressively on a truck, rapping slam poetry through a megaphone to the rhythm of a nearby drummer. The two performers are from the Yeongdeungpo district, which has been drastically transformed by development from an industrial zone into a “new town” full of giant department stores and mega-brands. Yeongdeungpo is symbolic of many transformations witnessed by a young generation of Koreans. For Lim it is a dystopian place where the idea of a better future is simply delusional. The poem, talking about the new malls, the skyscrapers derides not only neoliberalism but also the indifferent citizens who have apparently sold their souls to it.
Loss, grief, trauma, death, and memory are consistent themes that Minouk Lim addresses through her sculptures, installations, performances, and videos. Lim’s provocative body of work is a response to and reconciliation of traumatic historical events in Korea from the late 1940s to the present day, including the undocumented massacres that occurred during the Korean War of the late 1940s and 50s, the protest for workers rights in the 1970s during the economic expansion of South Korea, and the ever-present fear of nuclear obliteration that clouds the entire Korean peninsula. For Lim, the collective experience is personal and her research confronts forgotten pasts and unlawful persecutions and in many instances, involves direct contact and establishing meaningful relationships with victims of torture, wrongfully accused North Korean spies, and civil rights organization employees.
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