Republic of Korea

History Has Failed Us, but No Matter. Who canonised the formation of history and whose bodies are yet to be written about as part of that history? What would come to us if we revisited the solid strata of East Asian myths around the region’s modernisation and nationalistic history through a critical lens of gender diversity? These are the questions addressed by the exhibition History Has Failed Us, but No Matter *, with new works by three women artists — siren eun young jung, Hwayeon Nam, and Jane Jin Kaisen — on display at the Korea Pavilion. Critically revisiting and unfolding heterogeneous narratives of the past century’s history of East Asian modernisation, the exhibition stages the veiled, the forgotten, the abandoned, the condemned, and the unvoiced in the spotlight.

* The exhibition title was borrowed from the first sentence, “History has failed us, but no matter”, of the novel Pachinko, with the generous permission of its author, Min Jin Lee.