Kyuri Jeon + Maggie Wong
Date of Conversation
10.28.2024
Transcript (excerpt)
Maggie: From what I hear from family is that the city has just totally encapsulated the old village. There's not really much to go back to, but my dad grew up speaking Toisanese, which is like a rural dialect. It has a Southern twang equivalent flavor to it. The only people who really speak Toisanese, or who are, Toisanese are in diaspora. I was looking up videos around how to learn it. It's like YouTubers in Australia. I'm like, "I can learn this dying language from this person with an Australian accent."
My grandfather came a bunch of times and ended up in LA. That's where my grandmother then came and met him in LA. Once he started up a business. Classic story of like they owned a Chinese laundry. My dad and his three siblings grew up in the back of that laundry for forever. That story is so ingrained into my head.
Kuyri: Was that your bedtime story?
Maggie: Kind of. I don't know, I think my dad was always a little bit, "Be grateful for what you have." He would use his own personal narrative as a way of trying to raise awareness for me, politically too.
Kuyri: It is engraved and then it passed down. How does it influence our own lived experience today?
I think for me was my grandparent, grandmother telling me her story of migration from north to south, that was my bedtime story. As a child, I listened so many times of her version of telling war story. When you think about it, it's dehuman. Grandfather was from North, but he applied for South Korean soldier, so he was fighting for the south.
My grandmother had to find him during the Korean War holding my aunt who was a year old. Because it's a secret boat to cross the border, people asked my grandmother to medicate the baby and then she didn't because it all damaged her. Thankfully my aunt didn't cry during the boat ride, so they were able to survive, and that was my bedtime story. That's horrifying, but certainly, that was traumatic for her. Then she's repeating again and again.
In my piece, Born, Unborn, and Born Again, part two where towards the end there's all archive images with the Whitehorse woman speaking from past to the present. Then that whole scene was inspired by that story and was dedicated to her. When you think about war it's not a single narrative. It's not single timeline. It's not about liberation. It's another kind of relentless and endless legacies of imperialism and another form of dictatorship.
I'm surprised that we really share the same traumatic stories that our parents passed down to us.
Bios
Kyuri Jeon is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York. Jeon works with video, essay, drawing, and installation to explore time, vision, and its implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions ongoing transnational discussions about identity, feminism, decolonization, and cultural translation. Jeon’s work has been featured internationally at MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Mimosa House, London; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Glasgow; Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta; Women Make Waves, Taipei; and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul. She is a recipient of a Contemporary Visual Art Award at AHL-T&W Foundation and an award winner at the Asian Shorts Competition at Seoul International Women’s Film Festival. Jeon holds BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University.
Maggie Wong is a visual artist and educator who uses multidisciplinary art practice to explore political inheritance, memory, and play. Maggie’s work builds meaning like a stack of toy blocks, assembling and falling into a relational history rather than fixed narratives in media that include printmaking, sculpture, and installation. This approach acknowledges the impossibility of articulating an entire cultural or political inheritance, embracing Angela Davis's idea that "legacies of past struggles are not static." Wong is based in Boston, MA, and holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has presented work across the U.S., including The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Temple Contemporary, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has been written about in ArtForum and Sixty Inches from Center. Yale University Press, Viral Ecologies, The Seen, and the Journal of Art Practice have published her writing.