Temporal & Spatial Ecologies of Perceptible Violence | Gina Kim’s Bloodless, Tearless & Comfortless

The Moynihan Institutes' East Asia Program welcomes Jinah Kim from California State University, Northridge.

In this presentation, Jinah Kim explores Gina Kim’s VR films—Bloodless, Tearless, and Comfortless—as a form of aesthetic intervention into our perception of military violence, particularly in the context of the U.S. military Comfort Women system on the Korean peninsula.

Using sensory immersion and minimalist aesthetics, Gina Kim's VR works invite us into ghostly spaces where violence is not witnessed but felt, that is, the temporal and spatial ecologies of perceptible violence. Critiquing news media and journalistic accounts that have focused on explicit, graphic images that dehumanizes violence, Gina Kim’s VR draws on the sensory, in particular aurality, to amplify the ways that the hidden violence of war and ongoing militarism shapes the everyday.

This talk situates Kim’s work within a broader context where artists, activists, as well as the state, are turning to media technologies, such as VR and AI, to narrate histories of violence, positioning them as crucial tools in the ongoing battle over commemoration. Within this milieu Gina Kim’s works highlight the everyday felt violence that resonate across the trans-Pacific, offering new ways to think about memory, representation, and collective responsibility.

This event is co-sponsored by the Newhouse School of Public Communications.

Jinah Kim is Professor and Chair in Communication Studies and a faculty affiliate in Asian and Asian-American Studies at California State University, Northridge. Her scholarship and teaching focus on aesthetics, embodiment, and memory, asking how literature, performance, and visual culture may intervene in state regulation of memory surrounding histories of violence. She is the author of 'Postcolonial Grief and the Afterlives of the Pacific Wars in the Americas' (Duke University Press, 2019). She is working on two book projects, 'Against Forgetting: Transpacific Redress for the Comfort Women and Detours: Decolonial Guide to Korea'. She is a core member of the “Ending the Korean War Teaching Collective” and on the editorial board of 'Verge: Studies in Global Asia, American Quarterly', and the 'Modern Language Association'.