Abstract
This article examines Kate-hers RHEE's Noh-Chim (Missing) and Deann Borshay Liem's In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, two films that employ the missing as a key motif to understand their personal adoption misinformation. In our close observation of these works, the article sees the missing as both a method and framework with which to imagine a vision of repair amid the debris of violence in the transnational adoption practice and archives. Both RHEE and Liem's experimental engagement with the search—the search for the missing—uncovers intercalated dimensions of archival violence—biopolitical, administrative, and rhetorical. Via artistic expression, each work disrupts the nationalistic and naturalistic narrative of search and reunion and offers speculative analytics via which to imagine the connections and visions from the missing. Drawing upon their brilliant aesthetic analysis of the missing, this article extrapolates the unexpected, ephemeral, encounter, entanglement, and empathy as a new horizon for ethics and politics of repair in transnational adoption practice.
