Kim Soon-ak was referred to by countless names throughout her life: As we can guess from her multiple names, her life was full of twists and turns we didn’t know or didn’t want to know about.  

Written by Paek Sun-haeng, Team Manager, The Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, an affiliate organization of the Daegu Citizen Forum for Halmuni

The first “art teacher” of the “Comfort Women” survivors who live in the House of Sharing. I met and listened to the story of artist Kyung-Shin Lee, the author of “Flowers Unbloomed,” which contains the behind story of the painting class she conducted for five years from 1993.

Kim Soom’s novel  “One Left”(Hyundae Munhak) is a work that announces a new turning point in the era of testimony. worldview formed ahead of these final moments, and can it present us with meaningful realistic possibilities not only in literary terms but also social and historical ones?

The author – an ethnomusicologist – invites us to listen to “Comfort Women” survivors’ songs as a way to understand their lives and to remember them.

Similar to what the researchers considered in the fourth collection of testimonies, the line placement and long pauses in Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poems would be the mimesis for the testifiers’ persistent pain, long silence, faltering, and hesitation that are manifested through poetic deviation.

The documentary film , directed by Cecilia Kang, a second-generation Argentine of Korean descent, follows the journey of the protagonist, Melanie Chong, as she confronts and grows increasingly aware of the issue of the Japanese military “Comfort women.”

This is where the validity of the questions posed by this tangible AI interactive testimony content to the viewer lies: bringing up issues again about what to ask, not what to listen to. That’s because asking well must be accompanied by the constant consideration of the questioner. This, of course, would be to restore asking within the process of listening, not a reconversion or return to asking. 

More than 10 years after the publication of the picture book “Flower Granny,” which tells the story of Sim Dalyeon, a victim of the Japanese Military “Comfort Women,” author Kwon Yoon-duk released “Yong, Maeng Ho,” the main character of the Vietnam War veteran. What is the story left by the author who has pointed out violence in Korean history through her works?