Standing with Myanmar: The Limits and Possibilities of South Korean Art Activism

Abstract

Since the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, South Korean artists and exhibit makers have tapped into the power of art activism to support the Burmese struggle for democracy. This essay pays special attention to two of the earliest exhibitions held in Gwangju, a southwestern hub in the peninsula that since May 1980 has been widely been known as a site of civil resistance. With a focus on each show's narrative and audience engagement in relation to the historic meaning of Gwangju, this essay considers the limits of transnational solidarity imagined through art activism, revealing solidarities that reinforce either the nation-state as primary in defining political subjectivity or the universalist humanism at their core. Although these shows allow the empathic positioning of artists to a certain degree, their activism does not necessarily provide meaningful means of building south-south partnership.

Since the military coup in Myanmar on February 1, 2021, South Korean artists and culture workers have organized online and off-line exhibitions in support of the Burmese struggle for democracy. Received as a well-timed response to a critical moment in Myanmar under the military junta, these exhibitions have foregrounded the links between the practice of art and the urgencies of the world.¹ Notably, the earliest expressions of artistic solidarity sprang from the city of Gwangju instead of the country's better-resourced cities, such as Seoul. A southwestern hub in the peninsula, Gwangju has been widely known as a site of civil resistance since May 1980, when a military crackdown took place against antidictatorship protests. This crackdown ultimately came to be known as May 18, or the Gwangju Democratization Movement. During South Korea's democratic transition in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, Gwangju was officially recognized as the nation's “sacred space of democratization” through a series of institutional monumentalizations. This institutionalization included the promotion of Gwangju as a “city of peace and human rights,” with an acute emphasis on the legacy of the community's peaceful organization and solidarity that has been called the “May spirit” (owŏlchŏngsin).²

In this essay, I pay attention to the two earliest grassroots exhibitions held in Gwangju that claim to continue and revive the “May spirit” for transnational solidarity: Myanmar 2021, Gwangju 1980 (May Hall, March 16–22, 2021) and Raise Three Fingers for Democracy in Myanmar (Gallery Podonamu, May 12–June 12, 2021). Featuring a range of drawings, paintings, and photographs, the former appears to have been the earliest expression of solidarity from Korean artists in pursuit of social justice for Myanmar. As its title suggests, this exhibition foregrounds a perceived similarity in the historical experience of the oppressed in both societies under military rule. Inspired by the shared experience of oppression, this collective showcase of forty-two artists condemns the Tatmadaw's coup and extends support to the Burmese. The latter exhibition hosts an off-line display of approximately 250 artworks that feature the three-finger salute as a powerful symbol of freedom, justice, and democracy. Presenting artworks submitted through an online platform, Raise Three Fingers taps into the potential of protest art that uses digital media to reach new audiences and galvanize global discontent. While making a less explicit connection to Gwangju, it particularly seeks to promote the voices of Myanmar-based creators and those across the world who support their cause.

Both events were produced to raise awareness of the military coup in Myanmar and foster a sense of transnational solidarity in Korean viewers. This type of transborder art activism is not new; artists in collaboration across borders have increasingly highlighted global struggles against economic divides, ecological crises, and the rise of authoritarianism, among other causes. These contemporary solidarity movements have fueled discussion of the nonlinear yet rich historical connections that artists across the world have created and sustained in the past.³ Many of these connections have been associated with transnational and transregional revolutionary projects focused on decolonization in the so-called global south during the Cold War.⁴ However, identifying traces of South Korean solidarity actions is far from easy. This difficulty comes at least in part from the country's fraught history. Decades of Cold War segregation of the country under US hegemony largely prevented South Koreans from sharing radical strategies and visions of an alternative future with other postcolonial agents. As Kuan-Hsing Chen notes, the still-dominant anticommunist and pro-American structure imposed upon the country fundamentally “depoliticized” and “postponed” projects that would foster south-south relations.⁵ Worse yet, South Korea's recent economic development has permitted Koreans to consider themselves more advanced than those in the south, especially those in Southeast Asia and South Asia. South Korea's conventional imagination of the southern operates under hierarchies of gender, race, and class that situate the country's darker-skinned neighbors as underdeveloped and inferior others.⁶ Notwithstanding South Korea's long subjugation to unequal global power relations—colonized by Japan and heavily influenced by the United States—the nation selectively celebrates its remarkable success over political and economic disenfranchisement without disrupting these hierarchies.

It is this contradiction that unfolds, albeit to different degrees, in the solidarity exhibitions that Korean artists and curators organized in response to injustice in Myanmar. I argue that these acts of solidarity can reinforce the nation-state as primary in defining political subjecthood, on the one hand, and cosmopolitan imaginations of political identity without concern for asymmetrical relations of power, on the other. While these effects are likely unintended, it is important to eschew the dangerous type of solidarity that troubles the empathic positioning of artists and ultimately impedes south-south partnerships.⁷

In what follows, I analyze the specific modes of solidarity that emerge and misfire in each show's curation, or in its construction of narrative and its audience engagement. Practically, this scope is predicated upon the difficulty of engaging the large number of artworks—and their variety regarding format and style—that are displayed in each case. Conceptually, my focus on curation is meant to defy the tendency in art museums to believe that art, by virtue of its power, will activate a unique response in the attentive visitor. The effect of an individual piece on a viewer arises, however, in large part because of its role as a selected example of a larger story or message that the exhibit makers wish to deliver. Although a single artwork could do the job, in the context of two collaborative shows, a focus on curation can generate richer insight into the way the cultural production of solidarity influences art's producers as well as its audiences. In examining each curation, I demonstrate how solidarity takes shape in particular relations between Gwangju-South Korea and Myanmar and what participants do to create networks of solidarity that might reach broad audiences. Doing so can help us prioritize the complex workings of solidarity actions over the exhibit makers’ stated aims. The goal is ultimately to call for self-reflective and generative actions of transnational solidarity that arise from an imagination of a common space in which to become allies in a common struggle.

Myanmar 2021, Gwangju 1980

The Myanmar 2021, Gwangju 1980 show celebrates art as a form of immediate political expression in an unjust world. This celebration has its roots in the participants’ longtime political instrumentalization of art in the service of democratizing their country. Ranging from banner, mural, and woodblock painting to comics, their work does not simply express a radical tendency within institutionalized art; its significance lies rather in the creation of a new collective assemblage of production, distribution, and audience networks embedded in political struggle. Starting in the 1980s, the so-called minjung artists actively organized themselves to attend to the marginalization of minjung—a Korean term for the people—by the dominant forces of society. Seeing these people as agents of historical change, the artists succeeded in bringing their aesthetic practice closer to nationwide and community-based protests and other forms of political action.⁸ Their art movement did not end with the country's democratic transition; whether they continued to identify themselves as minjung artists or not, they carried on with a commitment to actualizing the proper role that art should play in forging new social relations and visions.⁹ While their ways of politicizing art have varied, their memory of the military rule, and particularly of the Gwangju Uprising, ties them together.¹⁰ Not all of the artists involved in this show directly experienced the uprising, but a shared belief in the uprising as a critical milestone of democratization provides a basis for their collaboration.

Holding the exhibition in Gwangju was thus a way of drawing on the historical meaning of the city as a site of democratic struggle. Notably, the artists held their opening not at the gallery but at the Mangwol-dong Cemetery and the 5.18 Memorial Park; the former was the burial site for most victims of state violence until the liberal-leaning government built the latter as the nation's commemorative space (fig. 1).¹¹ Relying on the symbolic power of these two places, the artists introduced some of their work and read a statement to proclaim their support for Myanmar. The statement declares, “Our own past taught us the brutality of military dictatorship. We still remember the atrocities committed by the military power, including corruption and crimes against humanity. Just like the atrocities carried out by the South Korean military junta in Gwangju of May 1980, the Tatmadaw has been killing the innocent Burmese in 2021.”¹² It is the resonance in the two states’ oppression of their citizens that convinced the artists to put “today's Myanmar” and “yesterday's Gwangju” together. Drawn by the similarities between the military regimes’ abuses of power and the defiance of the citizens, the artists collectively call for attention to what they view as a “crisis of democracy in Asia.” Following this group performance, they put protest art on view at May Hall, a grassroots cultural center located in an old downtown district that was a main site of the 1980 struggle.

One might view this collective response as an exemplary expression of solidarity. True, a sense of solidarity can emerge in collaboration and interaction between multiple artists while preparing and staging the exhibit; working toward the same objective strengthens their bond and is likely to fuel other actions to cocreate a space of protest art. The show's emphasis on the “shared” experience of military rule can also ignite meaningful connections among Korean viewers who might not have previously participated in solidarity movements. Because this exhibition soon traveled to other cities such as Seoul, its message could reach a broader audience outside Gwangju.¹³

What concerns me, however, is how, to what extent, and for whom this show is an instrument for transnational solidarity, as the exhibition makers wish. Transnational solidarity generally refers to connections that tie people together across national borders. Crucial to these connections is an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of both those who aid and those who receive aid. However, transborder affinities and alliances often work in a way that reproduces the nation-state as primary in defining political subjecthood. This normalization often obscures unequal power relations that are invented and maintained by the colonial foundations of the world. As Judith Butler points out, this mode of solidarity on national levels enacts paternalism by normalizing the divide of who belongs to the group, who expresses solidarity, and who is imagined as receiving this solidarity.¹⁴ When solidarity takes shape in this particular power relation, it operates within an ideological system that slots the world into the nation's hierarchy based on not just economic status (developing versus developed, more industrialized versus less industrialized) but also political status (authoritarian versus democratic). The artists’ solidarity statement mirrors this hierarchical view of the world in which South Korea is believed to have reached the “stage” of political and economic stability that would be desirable for Myanmar.

Seen from this perspective, the show's narrative is steeped in this developmentalist and vertical vision of the world that significantly undermines the artists’ promise of “unending support for the victory of the democratic movement in Myanmar,” as their statement says. Upon entering the exhibit, viewers see several artworks placed at the center of the room. It is not difficult to notice in these works that the artists selectively feature a few representatives of the Burmese: peasants fighting with their bare hands, young girls and boys helplessly exposed to the military's brutality. One of the spotlighted works is a banner painting that features three people, shoulder to shoulder, marching over the dead bodies of the soldiers (fig. 2). Coproduced by Hong Sŏngmin and Chŏn Chŏngho, the banner resonates with the minjung art aesthetic of the woodblock print due to its usage of agrarian folk motifs and its visual intensity. In the 1980s, minjung artists used the woodblock print to document the people's resistance against state violence; its simple black-and-white graphics were often intended for reproduction in pamphlets and books to publicize the struggle. What Hong and Chŏn reproduce in their work here is less the power of documentation than the rustic and humble aesthetic of the woodblock. Reproducing an engraving style in ink painting, they portray the fervor of the protesters who prevail over the blackened skulls and bones of soldiers. The Burmese phrase “Overthrow the Military Junta” at the top adds a specific context to these icons. While its lateralness captures the eyes of viewers who sympathize with the protesters, its rendition of protesters overlaps with the overly saturated stereotypical image of Myanmar (and other Southeast Asian countries) as an unindustrialized military state.

This hierarchical and nationalistic worldview hardly allows participants to make better sense of the synchronicity between two disparate events that the exhibit makers intend to stress. On one level, it neglects the long, resilient Burmese struggle against repressive regimes. During the nearly fifty years of military rule between 1962 and 2010, antiregime protests sprang up in every decade in urban areas throughout the country. Despite violent crackdowns, thousands of grassroots activists and their supporters staged sit-ins, protests, and boycotts that cohered under a nationwide prodemocracy movement. Moreover, the country's liberalization in the past decade has brought unprecedented political rights and economic opportunities to a large body of the population.¹⁵ Compared to the pre-2010 military dictatorship, under a largely civilian-run system, the majority of people in Myanmar have reveled in freedom of expression and assembly, the right to vote and to political participation, increasing business and education opportunities, and unrestricted internet access. The 2021 coup, to them, meant regressing to a dark past where none of these rights existed—and turning their lives upside down. In the Korean artists’ portrayal of these people, however, neither the rich history of prodemocratic struggle nor the recent expansion of civil society in Myanmar is made visible by this vertical optic of seeing the world.

On another level, the exhibition's flattening of Gwangju makes it more difficult to provide an identifiable transnational space for critique and debate that might facilitate a south-south perspective. While singling out a resemblance between two events, the exhibit makers bring specific tropes to the fore: young adults covered in blood, heavily armed soldiers beating protesters, and the overwhelming presence of military power. One of the largest paintings displayed at the center conveys the show's message by including the literal phrase in red at the top: “Myanmar is Gwangju 1980” (fig. 3). What adds visual intensity to this piece is the divide between two spaces: color in the depiction of the bloody face of a young man wrapped in a Korean national flag and two blackened Myanmar soldiers holding guns. Certain stylistic differences between two figures are also notable. The creator, Hong Sŏngmin, renders the soldiers as more abstract and flattened, while vividly portraying the Korean man's face in color. This striking illustration raises a question: Why is the emphasis placed on the victim of Korean state violence, with his expression drawn in detail, when the subject—the designated receiver of solidarity—is Burmese? In Hong's defense, one might see this work as intended to remind the Korean viewers of the military's crime against humanity in Gwangju rather than the persistent recurrence of such crimes in the present. Still, it is problematic that South Korea's “undemocratic” past is positioned as equivalent to Myanmar's present in its composition. Here the naturalized schematic of successive time (the temporal logic of then and now) works to conceal the complexities of Gwangju and Myanmar. This visual language strongly resonates with the collective's statement in which the participants project themselves as “champions” of democracy whose hard effort successfully protected the country from autocracy in the past; they set the “victorious” struggle of the Gwangju people as an example for the Burmese to follow.

Yet why can't Myanmar 2021 be analogized to Gwangju 2021? Hong's work is one example that fails to provoke a different kind of question, a question that might help us address an ongoing struggle for justice in Gwangju that exceeds the time of the original event. Notwithstanding the institutionalization of May 18 as a “democratic movement,” the historical event refuses to be pinned down to a singular meaning; this complexity is reflected in the different terms in use to name the event, such as “uprising,” “massacre,” or simply “5.18.”¹⁶ An official investigation has revealed that 166 were killed, 54 disappeared, 376 died from injuries and traumas, and 3,139 were injured: however, even numbers cannot do justice to its complexity. May 18 was indeed an atrocity committed by military leaders who tactically used violence—arrests, tortures, and mass killings—to legitimate their ascendance to power. But it was also a collective, community-based revolt against the absurdity of a military that lashed out against its own citizens. Most of the citizens took up arms to protect themselves and those in their community; they did not see themselves as political activists but rather responded to the sheer brutality of the military oppression in front of their eyes and ears. In another act of violence, the perpetrators framed and criminalized these citizens as “rioters.” This frame was operative in the official investigation into the massacre in the 1980s and even today works to distort the memories of survivors and witnesses. It is this second act of violence, not to mention the unrealized reparative justice, that urgently demands space from which to articulate new meanings of Gwangju as an ongoing event and set new courses of action.¹⁷ Despite multiple struggles for justice in the present moment, the show conveniently shores up the official narrative of Gwangju as a finished event. And in doing so, it prevents viewers from reckoning with the unending struggles against “past” injustice that are being reanimated at this moment of writing.

The exhibition's didacticism also seems to work against the possibility of making a mutually connected community or building a mutually dependent solidarity with protesters in Myanmar. The exhibition's voice is forcefully shaped by the overwhelming image of a homogeneous, male-bodied nation. In most of its works, women are depicted as victims of violence, while men are featured as active and fearless agents of resistance. For instance, Chu Hong's drawing foregrounds a trooper's violence toward a pregnant woman. Depicted as a faceless, dark male body, the soldier strikes at the woman, who is expressing dissent by raising three fingers. With the phrase “Stop! Violence!” at the top, Chu's piece may offer an intuitive critique of an act of unjustifiable violence. Yet her depiction of the Burmese woman as a powerless victim of violence ignores many women's active organization of anticoup movement across the nation. Moreover, the visual composition of many works privileges a man as a powerful agent who is authorized to represent the nation. This masculine imagery of a national body buttresses the dominant way political movements have been viewed in South Korea and Myanmar. While a series of recent books and forums has shifted the focus of the uprising to women and revealed the various roles they played, the historiography of Gwangju has long centered on the male participants—especially student activists who were later dubbed “martyrs” in official history.¹⁸ It is this male-centered historiography that has tokenized women's participation as supplementary and even repressed the voices of women who were abused by the military. In Myanmar, despite the persistent rhetoric of “national unity” promoted by the prodemocratic forces, women's participation has been less recognized than men's. However, women have been taking up their role in the revolution in a variety of ways from antijunta strikes and marches to armed resistance; they have challenged the representation of the prodemocratic movement that have long featured militant, radical male bodies, expanding the definition of who is authorized to be an active agent of resistance.¹⁹

While the artists’ immediate intentions might be to realize the ethos of extending empathy to the Burmese, it remains obscure why they tend to decontextualize the struggle of those to whom they want to speak, and with what they call “solidarity.” The participants’ effort to remember and document prodemocratic struggle was defiant and meaningful in a larger context that catalyzed their art activism back in the 1980s. But in drawing on that context to stand with Myanmar today, they inadvertently replicate the nationalist and hierarchical perspective that essentially limits their solidarity. In their expression of solidarity, the Burmese protesters, as the recipients of their actions, are required to live up to an ideal to enter the “league” of democracy. Simultaneously, this projection conceals the democracy-in-crisis in postauthoritarian South Korea today. Subscribing to the illusion of living in a more “advanced” society than their counterparts under the military power, the artists evince scarcely any self-reflective or dialogical relation to the authoritarian legacies that continue to manipulate the complex meanings of Gwangju. Despite their timely organization, the solidarity of this exhibit is shaped by conventions of liberal democracy and north-south hierarchies.

Raise Three Fingers

Raise Three Fingers opened at Gallery Podonamu (meaning “grapevine”) in May 2021 as anticoup protests continued to blossom across Myanmar, despite the military junta's brutal oppression. Like the Myanmar 2021, Gwangju 1980 show, Raise Three Fingers celebrates the value of aesthetic expression in imagining solidarity, but under different terms. The former cultivates a dialogue about the organizing function of art activism and its potential in fostering transnational affinities. The latter amplifies the capacity of digital protest art and its online community to make the creation and circulation of artworks much more accessible. This capacity was realized almost immediately after the coup by three artist collectives that launched an online platform through which anyone in the world could submit their protest art: Art for Freedom Myanmar, Latt Thone Chaung, and the Professional Cartoonists’ Organization.²⁰ Calling upon the global art community to stand in solidarity with Myanmar, these groups have collected and displayed a variety of creative protest signs, digital art, graffiti, and memes to document and defy what was happening in Myanmar. Collaborating with the collectives, Korean exhibit makers at Podonamu have turned this extant online collection into an in-person display as a solidarity action.

As the show's title indicates, an extensive collection of artworks features the three-finger salute. First seen in the book and film The Hunger Games, the three-finger salute has been taken up by activists in countries across Southeast Asia as a symbol of resistance against authoritarian governments that refuse to respect their citizens’ basic rights. In Suzanne Collins's dystopian world, the three-finger salute is an icon of solidarity with and respect for others, but it has acquired a potent meaning of defiance against an oppressive regime in recent political movements.²¹ The earliest articulation of this meaning appeared in Thai protesters’ active usage of the three-finger salute as a rejection of the May 2014 military coup. The Thai junta's ban of the symbol—and the subsequent criminalization of those raising three fingers in public—did not put a stop to these protesters’ appropriation of the symbol as a tool to disrupt the status quo.²² Since then, this adaptation has frequently reemerged across Southeast Asia, and perhaps most intensely during the early phase of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar.²³ In all cases, the symbol has been effectively separated from its mass cultural source and reclaimed by prodemocracy protesters who resist the existing power structures and exert a collective identity in pursuit of change. Resting on this newly constructed meaning of the three-finger salute, both the online collection and its display in the gallery promote two key functions of digital protest art. First, digital protest art is used to reclaim the agency of Burmese citizens, especially those who are often identified as belonging to Generation Z. Over recent years, these citizens have expanded their communication capacities, acquired skills within a range of online communities, used new media platforms and practices to find their voices, and gained greater access to the means of media production and distribution.²⁴ In response to their unhesitating mobilization of the anticoup movement, the military quickly proposed a new cybersecurity law that forced internet providers to prevent or remove content deemed to “cause hatred [and] destroy unity and tranquility.”²⁵ Against the authority's wishes, its decision accelerated the creative production of digital protest art, emboldening creators to make more easily spreadable images in smaller-byte and lower-density formats. Despite the junta's criminalization of creative dissent, creators have actively documented the protest scenes and shared their work to keep local protesters engaged.²⁶ Here art becomes the property of the people rather than of any singular artist, in that any viewer can download and use an image without obtaining the author's permission or paying royalties. Second, this production and dissemination of digital art contributes to building a vital transborder community among artists and online users in support of the anticoup movement. The Burmese creators have made images that are able to quickly travel outside their country; as these images spread, diaspora and non-Burmese artists and supporters upload, download, and reupload them on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Through their active participation on these platforms, they have played a critical role in raising global awareness of the ongoing protest. In doing so, these participants have maximized the ability of digital protest art to capture and spread ideas too complex and emotionally charged for words.²⁷ Circulated with phrases such as #whatshappeninginmyanmar and #fightwithart across online platforms, digital protest art facilitates networks that foster transnational ties among participants.

In its in-person showcase of once-digital images, Podonamu's Raise Three Fingers specifically calls on the South Korean visitors to express their solidarity with Myanmar. This solidarity, according to the curator, can keep “the May spirit of Gwangju alive.”²⁸ They provide no further description of the “May spirit,” which has been largely understood as the driving force behind the Gwangju residents’ resistance against the martial law troops, a force centered on collective organizing and community-centered care. Although the exhibit's agenda lies in realizing these values, the paucity of this phrase resists the replication of an established narrative or symbol of the uprising. Still, when these artworks are made into objects in the exhibition space in Gwangju, they nonetheless interact with and resonate within the space. Gwangju's location infuses these prints with meaning, while their presence in a location also lends meaning to that particular site. Held in a small, traditional house, the gallery space's ordinariness allows visitors to approach the displayed objects more easily than those in a museum. Located in a residential district that is some distance away from the uprising's major historic sites, this nonconventional art space adds little explicit association with the uprising into the show's context. Instead, it becomes a temporary house outside Myanmar for the artworks that were originally created to resist censorship and dictatorial internet shutdowns (fig. 4). This becoming necessitates dialogical relations among everyone involved in this process: the creators’ act of documenting an event on the ground and of uploading its outcomes online; the online users’ act of bearing witness to the moment on the ground and sharing these images as the creators’ testimony; the exhibit makers’ act of carving out a space for a different audience, especially those in Gwangju, who might not have heard of the testimony. In this light, the showcase embodies what it promises—“May spirit”—through the action of working with the collective for justice and caring for a community across borders.

The show's curation accentuates the organized action of individual creators who express their dissent through art. One sees this orientation first and foremost in the exhibit's leaflet, which promotes a cocreated work by eleven Burmese artists (fig. 5). Two days after the coup, these artists began to live stream their production on Facebook in an attempt to spark wider attention. During the streaming, they filled the white digital canvas with three-finger salutes in various sizes and colors. Their simultaneous coproduction yields a depiction of a harmonious struggle without sacrificing each artist's aesthetic style. Precisely due to its intense visual composition with a variety of details and techniques, this wave of big and small hands has a striking presence. It also departs from traditional protest art in Myanmar that pivots on well-known prodemocratic leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi. Instead of glorifying the “national” body of the people in opposition to the state power, the image captures the ethos of the movement, in which all these different hands—people from all walks of life—participate in disobedience. The creators use simultaneous collaboration and streaming as an active expression of dissent, which makes their work distinct from conventional protest art that rarely opens its entire production process to the public or lets the viewers witness the act of its creation.

With the emphasis on both the collective power of ordinary dissidents and the symbolic power of the three-finger salute, the show's curation gives prominence to women's participation in the movement—an accurate reflection, given that than 60 percent of the protesters are women. Special credit, however, should also be given to the curator's selection of women-centered images as a corrective to the prevalent imagination of public space and political movements, which, as I noted earlier, privileges male citizens.²⁹ Women protesters are portrayed as savvy and vigorous, using every possible resource to fight against the junta: occupying the road, spreading information to the community, and making noise by banging pots, pans, and other utensils. One such image illustrates a woman's creative defiance by highlighting the use of hanging htamein (women's sarongs) to keep protest zones intact from police and soldiers (fig. 6). From the early days of the protest, women weaponized a misogynist belief held by their society that walking under these articles of women's clothing can weaken a man's power. In this piece, which does not accessorize or romanticize their participation, the creator foregrounds the vital role of women in the collective movement. Ultimately, the show points out that the movement's agenda is complex and introduces a new vision of the political: the protesters are opposing not only the military dictatorship but also femicide, rape, and all forms of inequality for women. The curator includes feminist voices that defines the military junta as a patriarchal machine that has long perpetuated misogyny in Burmese society. For instance, the exhibit includes artworks that demand an end to violence against women. Among six videos, displayed on iPads, that document the nationwide protests, one also reminds the viewer that women protesters have confronted continuous sexual violence, harassment, and abuse from the junta. It amplifies the voices of women fighting not simply for a unified democratic nation but also for a just society for themselves and their sisters.³⁰

It should be noted that the exhibit makers have added two activities to encourage more concrete expressions of solidarity from the visitors. One activity invites them to write a message or draw their own three-finger salute on a card to hang in the exhibition. Charged affectively with aspirations for a more just world, a collection of notes illuminates how the viewers take up this kinetic and accessible way to attach themselves to the historical crisis that surrounds them. Some pray for peace in Myanmar, while others call for a more fundamental change: “It is time to realize transnational solidarity”; “We all have the right to live in peace” (fig. 7). Although this activity might yield only a momentary connection, these noncurated voices are a testament to the show's potential impact in generating cross-border alliances. Visitors are also urged to support the Burmese protesters more directly. The artworks were made available for purchase, and all proceeds from the sales went to Mutual Aid Myanmar, a nonprofit collective of activists, scholars, and policymakers working to support the anticoup movement in Myanmar. At least thirty-three viewers responded to this invitation; though the total amount of the donations (equivalent to US$1,971) would not have made a dramatic difference to those in the struggle, it was undoubtedly of use to the Burmese citizens and their communities affected by the military crackdown and the pandemic. While their participation might have been a temporary embodiment of reciprocity and compassion, it cannot be dismissed that these viewers chose to practice these values during their time at the exhibition.

In the name of the “May spirit,” the exhibit makers attempt to enact solidarity by working with the three organizations behind the online platform and Mutual Aid Myanmar and addressing their needs. In this enactment, the relation between Burmese protesters and Koreans is less hierarchically imagined than it is by the earlier exhibition. As the curator's statement describes it, “The three-finger salute reminds us [exhibitors and viewers] of the fundamental ethics of social living. In front of it, we must decide how we will participate in it; it asks us to determine whether to obey the hegemonic power and its oppression that harms our peaceful coexistence in the world.” Rather than build upon the monumentalized meaning of Gwangju, they ask themselves and visitors to recognize what disrupts “our peaceful coexistence”—including Burmese—in the world. In their invitation, the nationalistic frame of solidarity is not strongly applied, as it positions the viewers and the curator themselves as global citizens who are connected to those who raise three fingers to fight for democracy. If the earlier exhibit reduces the Burmese to recipients of artistic solidarity from an established democratic country, Raise Three Fingers puts Burmese and South Koreans on a more level plane.

Even so, asymmetrical relations of power and privilege remain unnoticed in this more progressively universalist form of solidarity action. In fact, the exhibition's stress on “coexistence” overlaps with many extant calls for a cosmopolitan, humanist notion of solidarity that often appears as an ethical response to global crisis. As Jessica Stites Mor comments, this type of solidarity is typically modeled on “the notion of a social contract of duties and responsibilities, rights and freedoms encoded in the language of global citizenship.”³¹ Through networks of political solidarity, the transnational struggle for the protection of human rights has forcefully articulated the imperative of expanding a more universal social contract to those who are disadvantaged and marginalized, especially in many souths. As a result, the conception of a global collective responsibility has spread across these networks, with an acknowledgment of the interconnectedness of the world—or in this show's case, “our coexistence [curator, viewers, Burmese protesters and their supporters] in the world.” Still, the exhibition leaves the privilege of those who aid—organizers of collaborative platforms in the West, Korean curators as well as donors—unquestioned. While this form of solidarity demarcates that “we” are interconnected to one another, this acknowledgment alone does not necessarily yield a new imagination of solidarity as a partnership, with benefits extending in both directions. Similarly, the exhibit makers’ emphasis on the “May spirit” as an embodiment of collective power lacks signficant means to reckon with the violence and oppression that have been disproportionately inflicted on those in the souths—the very condition of injustice and inequality that could have helped the curators and visitors reframe solidarity as a partnership. The embodiment of the May spirit can lose the potential for deep connection if South Korean viewers and exhibitors fail to acknowledge the shared struggle against “the hegemonic power and its oppression,” or even their unwitting contribution to maintaining this oppression. After all, the emergence of a political community based on radical equality requires more than recognition of the need to promote the coexistence of all subjects in the world.

Conclusion

Although timely and well-intended, the two Korean exhibitions face limitations in treating the Burmese and Koreans in solidarity, as equal subjects in the world's souths. I have argued that these shows replicate north-led relations with the south, but in slightly different ways. In Myanmar 2021, Gwangju 1980, artists reinforce a universalist logic of progress when they position themselves as brothers and sisters in an aspiring north. The participants might stand for the Burmese people as objects of solidarity at a distance, but not as coexisting subjects of solidarity in proximity. This limited notion of solidarity relies on paternalistic assumptions about the “recipients” of solidarity and thus obstructs more reciprocal relationships of exchange. Meanwhile, Raise Three Fingers locates exhibit makers and viewers in South Korea as global citizens who are obligated to respond to those who lack access to the protections of more universal rights and freedoms. This imagination could be a sign of hope in a society that notoriously dehumanizes a large body of immigrants from Southeast Asia as cheap, disposable labor. Its effect is nevertheless diminished when participants subscribe to a cosmopolitan notion of justice and peace without actively noticing their privilege to naturalize such a notion. Beyond the exhibition's immediate and material ends, it does little to generate new interpretations of solidarity as an iterative and generative partnership.

My criticism is not intended to deny the virtue and commitment of participants who invigorate protest art as a medium of transnational solidarity in trying times. It is rather meant to reveal the complicities of art activism as a tool that has normalized certain modes of ordering time and space: a tool that, despite its possibilities, has served not only to exploit and marginalize others in the souths but also to bar divergent forms of south-south relations from flourishing.

In the fervent hope for more new and sustainable alliances that have yet to be imagined, I am ending this essay with an invitation. To my knowledge, no South Korean artist has yet critiqued the country's long exploitation of natural and human resources in Southeast Asia; there has been little discussion of ongoing prodemocratic struggles in many of the Southeast Asian countries such as Thailand that are visited by Koreans as popular vacation spots. In a rare occasion that might help initiate south-south relations, a group of Korean activists and Burmese residents launched a series of protests against POSCO, a South Korean conglomerate, and its investment in a major offshore natural gas project that provides Tatmadaw with an important source of revenue.³² Founded in 1972 by Park Tae-joon, a close collaborator of Park Chung Hee, POSCO has become the country's leading steelmaking company and played a decisive role in the regime's export-driven economic plan and its implementation under Park's rule. It is this kind of extractive development by authoritarian power and its supporters that has catapulted the nation to its status as an economic powerhouse in Asia. Protesters have been calling on five South Korean companies, including POSCO, to cut their ties with Myanmar's junta, but no organized action of artistic solidarity has yet appeared. This absence pushes me to ask the participants in the two exhibitions: What does it mean to act in solidarity without identifying patterns in their complicated relationships to the hierarchies of power that structure their lives and those of their neighbors? And from here, what should be done to reframe solidarity that is not bound by north-led relations but allows us to repair forward, to act from a place of radical equality?

These are difficult questions to answer. But they are necessary if we are not to replicate the nationalist and universalist worldviews that reinforce a particular type of transnational solidarity. Even if it is difficult to completely disengage from these frames, it is still crucial to unlearn them before acting upon the impulse to stand in solidarity with others. This unlearning, according to the artist and theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, is “essential in order to emphasize the degree of our implication in institutionalized imperial violence” that includes (but is not limited to)

Standing in solidarity with others demands a process of identifying and disentangling the power imbalances that arise in these forms of violence that determine what we know and do not know. Without this process, we cannot reckon honestly with our own share in the oppression and suffering of others. What can also facilitate this reckoning is treating care not simply as empathy or our presumed capacity to speak for those who suffer, but as, in Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s words, an everyday practice that “requires a form of knowledge and curiosity regarding the situated needs of an ‘other’ that only becomes possible through being in relations that inevitably transform the entangled beings.”³⁴ Far from a moral disposition and a contract, care is a “practical everyday commitment”—that is, a mode of “thinking with” and “living with.”³⁵ This practice changes our relationship to others whom we believe we are thinking about or thinking for. It can activate new capacities of art through the imagination of a different mode of thinking, but it requires audacity to exit permanently from the positions we are assigned to—or believed we are assigned to. It is precisely from this audacity to stop reproducing the effects of asymmetrical forms of solidarity that radical expressions of transborder alliance can emerge.

Acknowledgments

The seeds for this essay were sown during my research trip to Gwangju in early 2022. I acknowledge the generous support of South Korean curators and artists of the two exhibits, especially Chŏng Hyŏnju and Hong Sŏngmin. I am grateful for all members of the “Reading Justice” group organized by Tyrell Haberkorn. Being active during February 2022 in response to the military junta's oppression of the Burmese and the burgeoning nationwide protest, this group offered a generative space for thinking with concerned scholars and activists across the world. I also thank all participants in “Technologies of Protest in East Asia: Movement, Mobilization, Revolution,” a forum at the 2023 MLA convention, where an earlier version of this essay was presented. Finally, I appreciate the two anonymous reviewers and editors at Critical Times for their helpful comments and suggestions.

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Works Cited