• Women's Studies Review
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.73-109
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• 2010

The cultural pluralism on which more and more emphasis is put in the globalized cultural environment, takes local identity as a crucial index for the cultural exchange on the global level, but at the same time it results in transforming individual regions/places into a homogeneous space, as it forces the local identity itself to fit into the standardized global perspective. In this context I focus on two art projects that are related to 'Dongducheon', a town that houses the U. S. Second Infantry Division. These projects attract specific attention due to the fact that Dongducheon is a significant place with very 'thick' cultural identity: it reveals that modernization in Korea took place in intersection of nationalism, patriarchy and gender/sexuality postcolonial (military) culture. With these two Dongducheon related art projects (Donglyung Kim) and (Eunyoung Jeong) as excellent examples of site-specific art practice, this paper asks what it means to keep the historicity of disappearing local space/place in the global era. And how is it possible to 'represent' an extremely gendered/sexualized place like Dongducheon. This should be examined from a postcolonial feminist perspective. Since emancipation from Japanese occupation Dongducheon has been an island or an outside space in the nation-state Korea. This becomes more complicated, as now mostly women from the Philippines or former Soviet countries are working in the nightclubs in Doungducheon. and are feminist activist experiments to make the place with its residents to be seen and heard in proper a way of mourning, recognition and communication. shows the 'new' kijich'on women as those who are daring to be on an 'Odyssey' for a better life as they run everyday life in Dongducheon, working in clubs, doing laundry, bearing children, going to mass; tries to help them to be heard and felt, while it gathers sounds on the street or at mass and shows the doors or narrow alleys which lead to the their rooms. It aims to mourn the dead kijich'on women and to represent the precarious life of the present migrant kijich'on women, as it shows no faces.