Thread & Needle
- Kyuri Jeon
- 2021 Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander Artists Support Grant
The anti-communist slogans which prisoners of war had tattooed on their arms, July 18, 1952. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
MFA alum Kyuri Jeon will produce Thread & Needle a short film that explores how structural violence lingers on collective bodies through the lenses of tattoos. She has spent the past year researching the history of tattoos in South Korea, mainly focusing on the periods before and after the Korean War where it significantly represents trans-national and government control of one’s body as an object of discipline and normalization. Drawing from the fact that contemporary Korean tattoos were developed and introduced to the public by the U.S. Army camps during the 1980s and the largest U.S. overseas military base, Camp Humphreys, is stationed in South Korea. This project is rooted in the relentless and continuing legacies of U.S. imperialism, but explores its entanglement with enforced national identity, fascist dictatorship, and contempt and desire for Western capitalism.