Na Mira’s Trance-Like Encounters with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 245, ‘Wordplay’

Lara Mimosa Montes As I reflect on your work, I’m thinking about translation, names, origins. Maybe one way for us to meet might be for me to attempt a hybrid translation of your name, Na Mira. If I translated this through the veils of our other tongues, Spanish and Korean, into English, it would mean: ‘To be lost, look’.

Na Mira Rihanna’s song ‘What’s My Name’ [2010] played on the radio just as I read this. The name comes from my mother, Nayop – cut in two by the US immigration office, becoming Na in 1977. The Korean word for ‘I’ is also na.

I grew up between countries. I wasn’t allowed to speak my first language at school in the US, and it had been outlawed during colonial rule by Japan, where I learned the English and Hiragana alphabets. In Hong Kong, I was prelingual; in Korea, I started to lose the letters. I also remember being taught a book of puns, with an illustration of a crowned man who turns into a dripping cloud: The king rains. I like sic jokes.

LMM I know we also share an interest in the poetics of [Korean American writer and artist] Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the way she embraces the fragment while also juxtaposing word and image to subvert colonialist approaches to narrative. How has your engagement with her work informed your artistic practice across different media?

NM Cha was killed while working on the film White Dust from Mongolia in 1982, the same year that I was born. Semiotics and structural film were her tools; displacement and war’s memory was the project. I began treating Cha’s archives as a score. Her dictation and my recitation now torque across time. When I first performed a scene from her film script, a Korean radio station suddenly started broadcasting through my guitar amp. I took it as direction to re-imagine what White Dust from Mongolia could be. I entered into a trance, closing my eyes so I could meet Cha in a cinema, where we took turns projecting images for the film. There is no teddy bear in Cha’s shot list for White Dust but, after she showed it to me on the screen, I went looking for one. The first bear I found was on a website advertised by a man gifting it to a woman. Obviously, I had to set the bear on fire. It was only after filming this burning ritual that I found Cha’s proposal to turn White Dust into a book. It is the only place where she describes why the main character in the film loses her ability to speak: Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt signed the treaty legalizing the Japanese occupation of Korea.

In the trance, Cha and I leave each other messages on my cinema’s marquee. My own words are often as mysterious to me as hers. In my series of film installations, ‘Dust’ [2022–ongoing], the transcript of our conversation only becomes legible in mirrors that disintegrate the edges of the room. Shamans use mirrors to see spirits. Starting in the Ming Dynasty, anamorphic paintings used mirrors and oblique angles to depict sex and, eventually, death. I also look towards a limit event in my work.

LMM Now, I see your name inverted, as though in a mirror: ‘I who look and sees myself, lost.’ Your film installation TETRAPHOBIA [2022], which is part of the same series, deals with similar references but, as in a dream, there’s distortion, condensation and scrambling. Text, sometimes reversed, flickers in tandem with audio dictation. [In the press release for your exhibition ‘Tetraphobia’ at Company Gallery, New York], you describe the set-up of the different images in relation to one another as faces of an ‘unfolded cube’. I end up feeling enmeshed in the meeting of the familiar and the otherworldly through these experiences of the tesseract.

NM Early on, I saw Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even [1915–23]. Duchamp tried to find a fourth dimension through the piece, but this only really materialized when the pane of glass it was made from shattered. Life lives in death’s house. Kim Hyesoon writes on shamanism and feminine poetics in Princess Abandoned [2012], translated by Don Mee Choi: ‘I break and break apart the darkness I have entered […] fracturing the space of the real.’

The lens is just a Western rationalization of infinity into the single-point perspective of renaissance painting. The dream of the audience can enter the screen.

LMM When I visited ‘contrapunctual’, your solo show at Midway Contemporary Art [Minneapolis] in 2022, the red lighting of the room in contrast with the anachronistic use of segmented and unedited fragments of black and white 16mm film intensified the sensation of being inside a fantasy where the viewer could, as the character in your film, enter the screen. How has your relationship to images evolved since then?

NM The work emerges from the wrong place at the wrong time. I trained for years with the improvisational dancer Simone Forti, so I’m drawn to the phenomenology of encounter. Translating this to moving images is a way of denaturalizing their production, tuning into the materiality of the signal and the animism of the cinematic apparatus.

When I learned red is the first colour that disappears from vision, I began projecting my films directly onto red walls and red light, following the edge of perception. Now, I’m making a landscape film of the wall that encloses the army base in the Itaewon military and nightlife district in Seoul. Originally built by Japan in 1906, then taken over by the US in 1945, the Yongsan [Dragon Hill] Garrison is currently becoming occupied by the Korean government. The wall forms a barrier at the heart of the city, in and around which a red-light district was institutionally operated. People kept telling me this story about a taxi driver who took a filmmaker through Gwangju during the Democratic Student Uprisings against Korea’s military dictatorship in 1980. So, I hailed a cab to trace the wall. I recorded the length with a Hi8 camcorder, produced in 1989 – the last year of analogue video and the last year I lived in Itaewon. I had been having a recurring dream of filming in a spiral. As the taxi accelerated around the perimeter and the image blurred out, I understood the dream sensation as an inverted panopticon. In Haunting the Korean Diaspora [2008], Grace M. Cho describes an ‘assemblage of eyes that are distributed across bodies and generations’ as perhaps the only means by which ‘haunted histories can be seen’.

After applying for security clearances and permits, I was finally granted access to enter Dragon Hill. At the gates, both my video camera and my 16mm camera were taken from me. I could only bring a mobile phone. What I saw inside alone on a field of dead grass was a giant inflatable rabbit.

Days later, I attended a pansori performance based on ancient shamanic music, the theme of the Gwangju Biennale, for which I am making the film. Sugungga, one of the five remaining pansori stories, is about a dragon who lures a rabbit into his kingdom. The dragon wants to eat the rabbit’s liver, but the rabbit escapes by saying her body is empty.

LMM Can you give us a preview into the thinking behind this project?

NM Shamanism, 무/Mu, also means nothing, death and dance, trans­literated from the Chinese character 巫.

The same figure on both sides of a wall. Double negative. Abandoned Princess / Western Princess. Theatre of War. Hologram. Hinge.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 245 with the headline ‘Sic Jokes’

Na Mira will be contributing to the 15th Gwangju Biennale, ‘PANSORI, A Soundscape of the 21st Century’, on view from 7 September to 1 December 

_{Main image: Na Mira, ‘Subrosa’, 2023, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and © MOCA Tucson, 2023; photograph: Maya Hawk}