Are there ways to see beyond the eye? John Berger famously exposed the multiple layers of ideological filters that shape our “ways of seeing” in his 1972 television series and book of that same title. Considered groundbreaking in its critique of conventional Eurocentric aesthetics, the criticism itself confirmed the argument it advanced that the historical context and sociopolitical systems of their time are embedded in works of art. So, too, did Ways of Seeing emerge in the context of the global 1960s at a time of heightened anti-imperialist and feminist movements, showing how the dominant mode of European oil painting from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century derived from the emergence of the slave trade, racial capitalism, and the male (colonial) gaze. Each article in this issue of positions likewise asks what the conditions of seeing are, not strictly limited to sight but in all the ways that truths can be realized and enacted. They collectively address the capacity of different methods and mediums to adequately represent the full breadth of reality from the mundane to the profane through photojournalism, film, animation, visual art, literature, and ethnography. Whether through the speculative visions of transnational adoptees and feminist artists or critical framings of militarisms and disasters, these articles challenge us to look beyond simplistic narratives of success and failure and instead see the structures of inequity and injustice that such narratives sustain.
The issue begins with “The Cultural Politics of Asian Life in Carl Mydans's Photojournalism of Tule Lake and Yosu-Sunchon.” Jeehyun Lim examines representations of US militarism at two key moments during and after World War II: the Tule Lake Japanese internment camp in 1944 and the Yosu-Sunchon rebellion in South Korea in 1948. By showing “endurable life” for the Japanese Americans in US military custody, American violence became the precondition for the very possibility of Asian life. By contrast, despite the US military government in South Korea that created the conditions for the Korean War, violence in Korea was attributed to the “savage” locals sustaining a “liminal life,” thereby turning a blind eye to US complicity in the counterinsurgency campaigns. Revealing how photojournalism through popular magazines such as Life constructed the conditions of seeing, Lim demonstrates how such images domesticated US militarism to obscure the full scope of US violence in Asia while simultaneously framing it as a force for life and governance. Figuring US military presence as “civilized” against the “savage” violence of Asian subjects, banal magazine pages served to normalize US empire.
The conditions of seeing are further dissected in “Archive of the Missing: Speculative Visions and the Terms of Social Repair in Transnational Adoption.” Given the lack of documentation—or, worse, fabrications—in so many cases of Korean transnational adoption, Hosu Kim and Yeong Ran Kim explore the concept of “missingness” in the works of adoptee artists kate-hers RHEE and Deann Borshay Liem. Through a careful reading of RHEE's Noh-Chim (Missing) and Liem's In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, they argue that these works reveal the “archival violence” embedded in adoption practices as the very condition for the “orphan production mechanism,” whereby crucial information about adoptee identities is made inaccessible or erased precisely to render them adoptable. This erasure produces a pervasive sense of missingness, not just literally in terms of absent records but, more significantly, in the lack of social recognition and belonging. Rather than seeing this as a “loss,” however, the article underscores how the two works shift the dominant narrative of transnational adoption from a focus on search and reunion to an exploration of the missing itself. Given that chances of finding birth families remain dismally low at 2 to 5 percent, this speculative approach opens renewed possibilities for social repair, whereby the layers of historical and structural gaps lead to political reckoning and collective action. By foregrounding speculative vision as a method to center the missing, the authors challenge traditional frameworks of legal redress and invite us to rethink the work of repair to “accumulate a different kind of archive of the missing, which paradoxically can include missingness itself as a basis for new social bonds with important political potential.”
Lisa Claypool likewise explores the productive potential of gaps in “China's Feminist Gap: Edges, Nearness, and Distance in Women's Arts.” Conceptualizing the gap as liminal “in-between space” generative of feminist activist art precisely because of its movement across boundaries to think beyond normative binaries, Claypool finds inspiration in the works of three contemporary artists: Bovey Lee, _ao_ao_ing, and Yin Xiuzhen. They experiment with spatial gaps—both physical and conceptual—to critique conventional gender norms and challenge the boundaries between the personal and the political. Such experimentations represent for Claypool the emergence of C-fem, or “made-in-China-feminisms,” in the context of state censorship and repression. Given such constraints, Claypool adopts a hermeneutic approach to interpret these artists’ “publicness” as a “commitment to open-ended engagement from a public that comes into being and is changed in relation to the work of art.” The feminist gap becomes an ethics of collective vision, calling on readers to pay attention to “how we see the questions.” Rather than taking comfort in “expected values, static political positions, and the ideology of clarity,” the feminist artworks examined here demand “acceptance of unpredictable blindnesses, the perpetual motion of making up a political life as one goes along, and the ambiguity and tension to form that is produced by work in the feminist gap.”
Gaps, this time in the form of oversights, are also central to “The Last Korean Animation: Wonderful Days and the Aesthetics of Global Monopoly Capitalism” by Zachary Samuel Gottesman. Despite being South Korea's most expensive animation project to date, Wonderful Days (2003) was a commercial failure, recouping only a fraction of its production costs. Combining 2-D, 3-D, and miniature techniques for a “multi-type layer animation,” the film's emphasis on technique, however, took the place of narrative; as Gottesman effectively shows, style took over substance. The aesthetic mimicry and mishmash of Japanese anime and Disney cliché left incoherent the narrative subtext on the significance of Korean social movements and mass uprisings. Rather than treating “success” and “failure” as independent variables, Gottesman therefore situates the flop of Wonderful Days within global capitalist-imperial relations, indicative of South Korea's predicaments as outsourced labor for US and Japanese productions that perpetuate its dependency. By evaluating the film not strictly in terms of box office numbers but in its aesthetic form, we are reminded once again of the importance of the content in the form.
From gaps and flops, the last two contributions turn to catastrophes and pandemics. In “Heterogenesis and the Affective Economies of Catastrophes,” Peng Hai pushes back against the hegemony of nationalist narratives in China that tend to co-opt experiences of disasters into tales of national resilience. Through a close reading of Yang Xianhui's Tales of Dingxi Orphanage (2007) and Shi Shuqing's Earth Shaking (2020) in their treatment of the 1960 famines and the 1920 Haiyuan earthquake, respectively, Hai attends to the disruptive forces of calamities to create “unimagined communities.” Employing the Deleuzian concept of heterogenesis, Hai argues that these works generate “radical particularism” through their attention to the material and affective dimensions of catastrophes rather than dwelling on populist sentimentalism that homogenizes experiences of suffering. This methodological approach is essential in revealing how literature can likewise “rescue history from the nation” by underscoring the pluralities and local specificities that resist totalizing discourses of cohesion and unity. Contrasting the hegemonic xenophilia of the “imagined community” through which the Other is absorbed into a homogeneous “us,” Hai dares “to produce xenophobia on behalf of the Other,” to shift the focus from national narratives of triumph to particular contingencies.
Finally, Gertrud Hüwelmeier shares her preliminary field note observations on the impact of the pandemic in “Face Masks for the Ancestors: Everyday Life and Death during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Urban Hanoi.” Detailing how urbanites adapted to government-imposed restrictions during the fourth wave of the pandemic in the summer of 2021, she shows the oft-contradictory reactions to state regulations in Vietnam that were as common worldwide. Bridging life and death in locally specific ways, however, Hüwelmeier attends to popular ritual practices, sharing how the living sought to protect the dead from the virus, too, through symbolic acts such as burning paper votives in the form of face masks, vaccines, and syringes. Grounded in Hüwelmeier's long-standing relationships with her interlocutors, she draws upon a form of digital ethnography-from-a-distance to explore the tensions in state regulations, socialist information infrastructures, and resident survival strategies in navigating the pandemic's challenges that affected not only the living but also the symbolic afterlife.
