In Memoriam Gwangju: Transnational Memoryscapes of Gwangju and Buenos Aires in the Works of Han Kang and Im Heung-Soon

Currently acclaimed as the first Asian female author who won the Nobel Prize in literature, Korean writer Han Kang has persistently struggled with memoryscapes and traumascapes. Han’s collection of poems Winter Beyond the Mirror delineates the poetic “I”’s experiences of visiting Argentina and describes how she senses the interconnectedness between Gwangju and Buenos Aires. Korean artist-filmmaker Im Heung-soon’s recent film Good Light, Good Air addresses the same issue, and actually Im and Han have shared a mutual concern about it since Han’s novel Human Acts. This essay defines Winter Beyond the Mirror and Good Light, Good Air, coupled with Im’s group-guided workshop with young students from Gwangju and Bueno Aires, as a translocal project of counter/cultural mapping that contributes to the idea of a transnational memoryscape. This study reframes Han and Im’s collaboration in terms of “virtual transnationalism” in order to describe the conjunction of transnationalism and virtuality in their practices. This study then argues that immersive affective experiences enabled by the digital technology of VR usher not only the participants but also the spectators into the networks of transnational and transgenerational remembrance. Therefore, it assesses Im’s tele-workshop project as an eloquent case of (digital) cultural mapping in light of artistic practices and their pro-social potential for the pedagogy.