Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come ed. by Lee Chonghwa (review)

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• Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come ed. by Lee Chonghwa
• Christine L. Marran

Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics, and Art to Come edited by Lee Chonghwa. Translation edited by Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. 222 pp.

The essays, artwork, and moving images that comprise Still Hear the Wound: Toward an Asia, Politics and Art to Come express the legacies and shadows of colonial violence in East Asia through aesthetics, bodily images, and a decolonial vision depicting "an Asia yet to come." The "wound" in the title stands for the trans-generational ruptures experienced by women, laborers, and islanders under the Japanese empire. These wounds have yet to heal in the wake of colonial violence and a postwar discursive history that seeks to erase these transgressions and relations formed as a result of these wounds. As one of the editors of the volume, renowned scholar of Asian studies Brett de Bary puts it, the wound expresses past violences, but it also expresses a form of bodily experience and vulnerability. In this volume, the wound is portrayed through a range of material including prose, poetry, photographs, and moving images (attached to the inside cover is a DVD). The essays and artist interviews in particular illustrate how art forms, with their manifold images of bodily experience, can disrupt discursive histories produced by the nation-state. The volume's contributors confront Japan's "fraught contestation over its twentieth-century [End Page 587] national history" (xxxii). At the same time, they express new forms of connection and solidarity outside of the frame of the nation-state.

The curious structure of this volume brings together four prefaces and seven chapters. Most of the contributions were originally published in a Japanese volume. They have been expertly translated, with the help of multiple collaborators, by scholars Rebecca Jennison and Brett de Bary, who each wrote an informative preface describing how this volume came to be. The prefaces are essential to understanding the extent of community-building and artist-driven activism that preceded this volume. Prior to the book project, participants had formed an active working group, referred to throughout the book as the "Asia, Politics, Art" project, to address the "pedagogical narratives deployed by the Japanese nation-state, whose assimilative ideology produces and reproduces the unity of the nation by erasing difference" (xxxviii). Meetings in Okinawa and Tokyo, along with other dialogues, led to the Japanese book, Zanshō no oto: 'Ajia, seiji, āto' no mirai e, edited by philosopher and poet Lee Chonghwa. She gathered together Zainichi Korean, Okinawan, and South Korean academics as well as artists whose installations and collaborations have unfolded "on the backstages of East Asian politics and history." The essays and art of this volume feature conversations and confrontations that mourn the past, explore self-identity, and disrupt state discourse.

Each chapter is considerably different from the next, but together they produce a sense of how relations of solidarity can be built through art and bodily expression. For example, the third preface features Lee Chonghwa's poetry inspired by poems of Kim Sowol, which is followed by a dialogue with composer Takahashi Yūji on sound and mourning. The question of how to find a way forward while remembering those perished under Japanese colonialism is raised. The dialogue concludes with Lee: "We create art that is a response, and in that sense we might call it a ritual. That's what I'm feeling. And perhaps, that is what I would call 'Asia'" [lxix]. The role of sound in creating connections continues with a chapter by literature scholar Shinjō Ikuo on the music of Takahashi. As Shinjō puts it, "We might say that through Takahashi's music, the Asia, Politics, Art project was able to clearly ascertain its own ideal as an attempt to link the political, social, sexual, economic, ethnic, and racial … divisions that we live in Asia today, within a space-time of collaborative artwork" [8]. Invoking Lee's "politics of supplication," Shinjō emphasizes the need to recall those we have not known and "face the difficulty of reliving those times" [8]. Literature scholar...