Women should write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes. Women must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word ‘silence’ and the one that aims at impossibility, but suddenly stops at the word ‘impossible’ and writes the word ‘end’.     - Hélène Cixous, Catherine Clément <The Newly Born Woman>

Who owns the body of women?
 

          According to <The Gaze> by John Berger, who left us not so long ago, images- those which are displayed by visual media and what we see in them are all sexual in nature, and are placed within social power relations. In <Ways of Seeing>, Berger stated that ‘men act and women appear’. How many male artists have painted and sculpted the female bodies? These female bodies lying under the eyes of male artists were reinterpreted according to the individual artists’ interests. Even when a new genre was created, art needed a female body – as seen in Camillo Negro’s <The Neuropathological> movie series of the early 20th century. The eyes of female patients are often obscured in the movie. The blindfold represents a fetish about the relationship of conquest and obedience - the sexual desires of men. It also shows that the female body is subject to control. Women in the screen cannot see themselves with their own eyes. Neither can they see the eyes of those who are watching them. Their bodies are not entirely theirs. The blindfolded woman is deprived of the opportunity to recognize the world with her own eyes as she lies on the examination bed. I turn my head and look at myself in the mirror.

          As seen in the Polish black-clad protest against the abortion ban which began in December 2015, or the massive female march on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017, women were walking and shouting: ‘my body, my choice!’ The freedom of female bodies is still threatened where a confrontation exists between the Eastern Europe and the West, and Ideology is collapsing. Then what about us? In December 2016, in South Korea, ‘The Republic of Korea Childbirth Guidance’, which released the number of women in her reproductive ages by region, was publicized as a measure to cope with low fertility rates- a noteworthy event in consideration that the president of South Korea is herself female. Moreover, the revised Mother and Child Health Act amendment, which was announced before the “guidance”, stated that abortion is as an ‘immoral medical practice’, not the choice of women. There is nowhere for women to exercise their rights to terminate pregnancy as the authority over their own bodies. Thus, we are yet to entirely regain ownership over our bodies.

Feminine writing, feminine painting

          In 1975, <L’ARC>, a quarterly magazine based on the theme of <Simone de Beauvoir and the struggle of women (Simone de Beauvoir et la lutte des femmes>, published an article by Hélène Cixous, entitled <The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la Méduse)>. Cixous’ writings have since been translated throughout the world and have had a profound impact on the feminist movement. Forty years have passed, but her writings are still sharp. Cixous, who was at the forefront of the radical feminist movement, coined the term ‘feminine writing (L’ecriture feminine)’ with Luce Irigaray.

          Cixous and Irigaray who claimed to regain ‘women’ from the male language and use the words of the female body- more precisely the overflowing of words from two lips in continuous contact, resembling female genitals have been accused of ‘biologically limiting femininity’. The intense rejection towards Cixous’ writing was perhaps natural. Writing was the domain of men with reason and authority. In history, only a few select women were able to write their stories. In this world, women may write and tell their stories, but the world does not actually listen to their stories. Despite the rejection, ‘feminine writing’ has become a way for women who have been dominated by the penis-centred language to regain their identity regarding gender, and own their bodies. The ‘new woman’, who has transformed from the unknown territory beyond the eyes of men who had judged them, has managed to cross boundaries by writing her own stories. They had many stories. As their bodies have lived the histories in which they were forced to be silenced, the resulting stories get pushed into the world like endless waves.

          In the tradition of philosophy, with the beliefs that the world of ideas, truths and reality can be approached through spirit and soul, the human body has been pushed out of the objects of thought. As the transcendence of reason and God was reorganized into the images of men, women were pushed out of line with their bodies. Even in exile, the body of a woman that goes through menstruation, pregnancy, and childbirth was either treated contemptuously or distorted as the goddess of primitive myths. In the process of objectification, the body of a woman was incapable of being the subject or having its own language- unlike men who were considered the measures of the world. Women were pushed into the dark abject, where the symbolism of the Dark Continent, the penis, dominated by ambiguity and uncontrollable emotions, had to be suppressed to defend their world. Women have a lot of stories because they have faced the whole system in the history with their bodies and lived through them. Through a perceived body, a consciousness that has not been separated from the body, women have lived in the real world. The stories which they are writing are born in a new female body.

          I would like to start the story of Younghee Lee’s work at this very point where Cixous stated: ‘I release a new woman from an old woman’ through feminine writing.

          Younghee Lee regains our and her body through feminine painting. Lee has long been working on the ground, and the fragments of time buried underneath. Having worked with materials which are commonly familiar in a woman’s life, such as natural dyed fabrics and chaff, in 2011 she undertook a project in which she intentionally took closer looks at the objects that inspired her.

          Each week, Lee recorded photographs of how the ground of a rice paddy near her workshop changed throughout the year, and the process of watering and growing of rice. Lee also participated in nude drawing atelier and drew hundreds of them. Moreover, she made a series of installation work entitled <Crack> by making the changes in the ground and the body of a woman with the chaff and braided yarn. Although the world did not allow conspicuousness or the forming of grand ideas and narratives, Lee constantly observed and worked in likeness to living a day to day life.
 

          When the walls and floor of the <Crack: 12> exhibition space was filled with the pieces that Lee had spent 12 months’ time on, she must have felt that the swallowed language had once again bubbled up inside her throat. The action of painting a woman’s body entails blowing it off with a new imaginary system. In the process, the artist opens up ‘youngheelee’. When Lee wrote her name in English, the repetition of spelling centred around ‘L’ caused the crack-like imagery. She now takes this new ‘youngheelee’ out of the crack and writes down the story of a woman together with it.

The newly born woman
 

          In this exhibition, the artist used two spaces – the underground and the first floor. There was a video work entitled <251_Ellipsis> playing on the most prominent wall in first floor. Above the three large frames, the video work flows into differnet scenes. The artist has devoted these three video canvases to the space of points that make up the symbol ellipsis. The silence here represents the place of words that go around the mouth and disappears as they get swallowed back into the body. The ‘words of other individuals’ enter in this empty space. Among the roles that the artist has to perform, Lee disappears while stammering the words like a child with cognitive disabilities.

          Meanwhile, there is a world full of life energy across the world where Lee is about to disappear. The bodies of a woman painted in black and green float around like the water that flows. In this body, power arises. It rises from the ground, rolls, and shakes. In the underground of the exhibition hall, a part of the installation series called <Crack, 2011>, which has the form of a woman lying on the ground - made of chaff and braided yarn – was exhibited alongside the painting. The body of a woman, raised up from the imaginary world of the former world, is now transformed into various images and forms, and the body of a reborn woman and the landscape of a new world are being unfolded.
Lee has mentioned several times that she watched the last scene of <Antichrist> by Lars von Trier with a great impression, where the women from underground float wiggling about. If the male director looked at the body of the woman, portrayed as something dark and ominous, like the witchcraft of a witch with fearful eyes, Lee looked at it as a ‘newly born’ woman. If the feminine text was written, it would fit the predictions of the drinking water, which would be lifted like a volcano by the old hard shells of the masculine fighters. The body and story of a woman that have been deprived of language under the old interpretation and half of the world lost imagination, return to us with energy that is condensed beyond fear, evil, worship and exclusion. Now, the artist and ‘youngheelee’ are freed from the things that have been holding themselves up by creating and moving their bodies, and exist as complete subjects in themselves. The images of life and death created by free women’s bodies coexist organically without being confronted in the exhibition space. In order to remember this whole world that Lee created as being a creator herself, she makes the book and ponders over memories throughout the process. The book on one side of the showroom creates another story with variations of the artist’s world.

          There is more than one story of women. Just like a woman’s body. The story of Younghee Lee, who communicates with the world of infinite and fluid complexity, transcends from the smallest form of the book, through the wall-filled drawings and images, it overturns meaning in all directions and returns to us.

          In the process of translating Younghee Lee’s long-term theme ‘teum (틈)’ into English, I thought that it would be most appropriate if it was translated as ‘crack’ since the chaff works resemble the cracked earth. However, when I looked back, the ‘crack’ that Lee referred to was actually the world that could not be translated into a single word. Thus, it had to be rather translated into ‘crack’ that referred to the gap in which another life sprang up, or ‘between’ where the dark land and the world stood. Anyway, naming this world is not important. The important thing is what Lee, and what we have found in this world. A new woman awaits us in this world, who is not ashamed of the desire to sing, write, be brave to talk, in other words, the desire to create something new, like the face of a beautiful Medusa that men have not looked at due to fear. Entirely, without any deficiency.