Volume 11, Issue 1/2, 2021
To Us To-Day
Ran Ma
Pages 145-153
Soyoung Kim’s Exile Trilogy
Retro toward an Affective Archive
Looking at Soyoung Kim’s Exile Trilogy (2014–2017), three documentaries centering on ethnic Koreans in Central Asia (formerly USSR) and specifically the use of archival footages and soundtracks in Sound of Nomad, Arirang (2016), this article considers Kim’s works an organic contribution to the image archive of/about/by the global Korean diaspora while seeking to interrogate the politics of “retro” by turning to what Catherine Russell has approached as “archiveology.” Foregrounding the representation of the transgenerational divas from the “Arirang Ensemble” of the Koryo Theater in Almaty, Kazakhstan, this piece highlights how the divas’ personal stories reconstructed via images, oral accounts, sound recordings, and so forth need to be grasped as an assemblage of affective flows that has complicated the teleological narrative about the Korean diaspora and problematized the Soviet state’s ideocultural representations of the Koryo people.