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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Rarely are personal life stories, art, film, spoken word, and history combined in public exhibition. Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War” (SPP) is an exception. It weaves these elements into a multi-media, interactive experience that lifts the silence shrouding the Korean War, a pivotal event in Korean, United States, and KoreanAmerican history. A public space of memory, the exhibit explores the human experience of the Korean conflict and its hidden but enduring personal and family legacies, and underscores the urgency to end over a half century of national division. For everyone, it evokes reflection about the United States' role in the war, empathy for survivors, and recognition of our common interest in acting for peace. SPP embodies memories I collected from 3 generations of Korean Americans as part of a unique oral history project. SPP's conception, design, and implementation are products of an interdisciplinary collective of artists, a filmmaker, a historian, and myself, a psychologist. It is comprised of installation art, interactive art, film, archival photographs, historical markers, and oral history excerpts. SPP is currently on tour most recently showing in Seoul, Korea (link) and Seattle, WA. This article summarizes the aims of the exhibit, the process of creating it, and its reception as a unique experiment in restoring collective memory of the Korean War and reclaiming public voice.
1. Belying the hotly contested nature of this conflict, the “Korean War” is variously referred to by some in the United States as the U.S.-Korean War, by the United Nations as the Korea “Police Action,” by the Republic of Korea (South Korea) as the “6.25” war, by the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as the “Fatherland Liberation War,” and by the People's Republic of China as the “War to Resist American and Aid North Korea.” The term “Korean War” is used throughout this article.
2. See C. Blair, The Forgotten War: America in Korea, 1950-1953. New York: Times Books, 1987; S. Levine, Some Reflections on the Korean War. In P. West & J. Suh (Eds.), Remembering the Forgotten War: The Korean War through Literature and Art (pp. 3-11). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001.
3. L. Lowe, Immigrant Acts. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996, p. 27. Similarly, with reference to World War II, T. Fujitani, G. White, & L. Yoneyama coin the term “perilous memories” as recollections of marginalized survivors that “could subvert dominant historical readings (i.e. master narratives)…of the major warring powers.” These memories must be suppressed or silenced to preserve official accounts of the past. Perilous Memories: The Asia-Pacific War(s). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 2-3. See also D. Nagata, Legacy of Injustice. New York: Plenum Press, 1993 for the effects of silenced trauma on the attitudes and willingness to speak out against racial injustice of the children of Japanese American WWII internees. In the late 1970s these internees began to testify to their incarcerations and precipitated a broad redress and reparations movement culminating in the Japanese Redress Act (HR 442) in 1988. Referencing Asian Americans more generally.
4. See Y. Danieli (Ed.) International Handbook of the Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. New York: Plenum Press, 1998 for an excellent collection of writings about the implications of silence for the children of trauma survivors.
5. For a lengthier discussion of multiple factors colluding to silence talk about the Korean War, see R. Liem, Silencing Historical Trauma: The Politics and Psychology of Memory and Voice, Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 13(2), 2007, 153-174.
6. For further discussion of art as testimony, see K. MacLear, Beclouded Visions: Hiroshima-Nagasaki and the Art of Witness. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. The Healing Through Remembering Project designed to foster reconciliation between conflicted parties in Northern Ireland shares many of the objectives and elements with the Still Present Past exhibit. See R. McClelland, The Report of the Healing through Remembering Project, June 2002.
7. For more discussion of the Korean War oral history project, see R. Liem History, Trauma and Identity: The Legacy of the Korean War for Korean Americans, Amerasia Journal, 29, 2003-2004, 111-129 and R. Liem, “So I've Gone Around in Circles…”: Living the Korean War, Amerasia Journal, 31, 2005, 157-178.
8. The exhibit collective includes artists Yul-san Liem, Injoo Whang, and Ji-Young Yoo, documentary filmmaker Deann Borshay Liem, historian Ji-Yeon Yuh, language consultant, Seung-Hee Jeon, web designer/technical consultant, Young Sul, and project director, Ramsay Liem. Other participants include spoken-word artists Grace M. Cho, Hosu Kim, and Hyun Lee and their artistic director, Carolina McNeely, and contributing artists Erica Cho, Sukjong Hong, and Yong Soon Min. Wol-san Liem prepared a study guide for high school teachers and students.
9. Two examples from text written by visitors on hundreds of puzzle pieces are:
“My father told me a story. He used to steal apples and eat them at night knowing there could be worms in them. That's how he got his protein. This is a post-war story but it tells me the hunger lasted for a long time even after the war.”
“For those of the United States who caused the trauma, I apologize.” (U.S. Korean War Veteran)
10. One example of a message left by visitors is:
“I need to heal myself from my fragmented/wounded self. I need to get beyond:
Abandonment
Adoption
Abandonment again,
And abandoned again.“
More than 120,000 children from Korea have been adopted in the U.S. since the Korean War.
11. Still Present Pasts premiered on January 29, 2005 at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center in Cambridge, MA. Since then it has shown at Wellesley College, the Queens Museum of Art in the Bronx, Pro Arts in Oakland, CA, LA Artcore in Los Angeles, and Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. The exhibit also appeared at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea and opened at the Wing Luke Asian Museum in Seattle, WA, December 13, 2008. For more information, see this link. For an exhibit catalogue or to inquire about bringing the exhibit to your university or community, contact the author at [email protected].
12. For sample coverage of Still Present Pasts, see R. Kim, “The Past in the Present.” Koream 17:3 (2006) 32-34; M. Abbe, “An Unresolved War.” Star Tribune 27 April 2007; B. Payton, “Artists Remember the ‘Forgotten War’.” Oakland Tribune 3 March 3 2006: Metro Section 1, 4.
13. Psychological research on cognition and memory demonstrates that the encoding of experiences associated with high arousal and strong negative emotions implicates regions of the brain responsible for sensory processing rather than higher order conceptual processing. (See E. Kensinger & D. Schacter, Remembering the Specific Visual Details of Presented Objects: Neuroimaging Evidence for the Effects of Emotion, Neuropsychologia, 62, 2007, 2951-2962.) Exhibit elements that evoke intense, negative emotion are, therefore, likely to be especially effective in stimulating recall of events that bear a resemblance to these artful images.
14. See K. MacLear, ibid, pp. 187-188.
15. This quote from M. Gómez-Barris references the cultural politics of Chilean artist Guillermo Nuñez's art and testimony, which the author analyses in light of the persistence of traumatic memory. See M. Gómez-Barris, Chile's Tortured Legacies: Guillermo Nunez's Art Practice, p. 2. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, Montreal Convention Center, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, 2006.
16. See G. Cho, Performing an Ethics of Entanglement in Still Present Pasts: Korean Americans and the “Forgotten War,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 16, 2006, 303-317, p. 315.
17. See B. Cumings, North Korea: Another Country. New York: The New Press, 2004.
18. The Still Present Pasts collective expresses its gratitude to the oral history participants for sharing their life stories and for their willingness to help create the exhibit. We thank: Soam Chang, Suntae Chun, Helen KyungSook Daniels, Eungie Joo, Helen Sunhee Kim, Kyung Hui Lee, Min Yong Lee, Orson Moon, Andrew Park, Kee Park, Song J. Park, and Won Yop Kim.
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