University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Off the record: reimagining unrecorded histories

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Off the record: reimagining unrecorded histories

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OFF THE RECORD:
REIMAGINING UNRECORDED HISTORIES

by

Clarissa Aviva Kerner

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL FOR
COMMUNICATION AND JOURNALISM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM (ARTS)

August 2020

Copyright 2020 Clarissa Aviva Kerner
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is the result of many voices who were essential to shaping this vision and I
would like to say thank you. First, to Sasha Anawalt, who was not only my thesis chair and
mentor, but made it possible for me to enroll in this program. Mary Sweeney, who I’m so
grateful to have worked with throughout the entire year and has been a source of continuous
guidance. I was fortunate enough to study with Tim Page during his last semester teaching and
am thankful to have him as one of my readers. Lastly, the other professors I’ve had the
opportunity to learn from, including Andrew Campbell, Amelia Jones, and Alan Mittelstaedt.

iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
Part 1: The Things You Can’t Erase: Remembering Through Storytelling 5
Part 2: Simpson’s Art: Where Dreams Memory and Decaying Food Meet 8
Part 3: Kang Seung Lee: Maybe the Plants Remember 13
Conclusion 18
Bibliography 20

iv
LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Clarissa Kerner family photograph. Calexico, CA, 1994. 1

v
ABSTRACT

This is an exploration of memory – the types of memories that exist outside of
conventional archive storytelling and the way that art can function as a metaphorical tool for
reimagining this unrecorded history. These stories have often been neglected, dismissed, and
forgotten but they have found alternative ways to survive.
The discussion centers predominantly around art, but considers memory from a range of
perspectives, including an interview with Dr. Liza Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist. The essays are
centered on two Los Angeles based artists and their work. The first, Sylvia Salazar Simpson has
made art throughout her career that uses organic materials, like rotting food, to evoke sensory
experiences that connect to lost memories. The second, Kang Seung Lee reflects on alternative
ways of accessing the past, particularly queer history, by transforming old photographs, plants,
and other objects, into new forms and spaces.
These interviews took place between the end of 2019 and the start of 2020. Together,
this work is the beginning of what hopefully will develop into a larger project in the future.

1
INTRODUCTION

Figure 1. Clarissa Kerner family photograph. Calexico, CA, 1994.

In one of my family photographs I’m about to cross the street, holding my mother and
grandmother’s hands. It’s 1994. Both of them are in complementary baggy tracksuits. I’m in a
long-sleeve red dress that matches a red parked car in the distance and the red writing on my
mother's sweatshirt that reads: YOSEMITE.

We’re in the desert. Lincoln Street, in Calexico, California, a border town only a few miles away
from the Mexico–United States checkpoint.

None of us acknowledges the camera. My mother and grandmother are watching for oncoming
cars. My head is tilted forward, eyes directed toward my shoes.

When I look at this photograph, my mind wanders to what’s outside of the frame. My
grandmother's house is across the street from where we’re standing. The backyard, under the
canopy, is where I have my first memory.

I was three years old, playing with my cousin. He was holding a wooden baseball bat and hadn’t
realized I was standing behind him. He pulled it back to swing. No one ever thinks the wind up
2
before swinging could be dangerous, but I was little, and he must have pulled it back hard and
the angle must have been perfect. I remember my mom came out of the house. She saw me and
started to run. I screamed. Blood poured from my soft cheek. What had he done? My
grandmother yelled. The answer: he made a hole.

When I got older, it surprised me to know I had been only three. I remember too many details –
like the view from the trunk window, my grandmother hovering over my cousin as we pulled
away, crossing over the border into Mexico to get to the hospital, the doctors holding me down
to administer a shot, the crowded room with other patients, the staircase I could see from my
hospital bed, my mother sitting behind my head. Sometimes I think I remember these images
because of the scar. The dimple that formed – six stitches later – after the hole was sealed.

But even some of these memories, which I can picture with such clarity, aren’t quite accurate. I
know for a fact that the nearest hospital was not in Mexico and we never crossed the border. As a
kid we used to cross the US–Mexico border often, so it’s very possible some memories have
overlapped. We traveled for things like family weddings or my uncle’s dentist office. I have one
singular image of many similar nights – vendors going from car to car selling flowers and other
goods for hours while we waited in line.

Some of my memories are also connected to what my mother has told me.

She was born in El Chicural, on a tiny farm in the mountains of Durango. It’s a place she recalls
with such pleasure, every fruit and grain come alive when she remembers. Her family moved to
the border when she was young: first Mexicali and then Calexico when her family crossed over.
Most of her childhood memories happened between these border towns. I’ve heard stories over
the years mostly from her and my aunt. They’ve told me about the unpaved street they lived on
that would turn to mud when it rained. Or how people would cross over into California to shop
for the day with some kind of special passport that to me doesn’t sound real but they assure me it
was. Some friends and neighbors would even bring them back ice cream – strawberry, vanilla and
chocolate all mixed together in a square carton. I only met my grandfather once, but I’ve heard
3
stories and know he was the reason my family was able to immigrate. He worked in the Bracero
Program, which brought young farm workers from Mexico to work in, and for some, eventually
move to the States.

Over time these memories have mixed with what I remember too – the family stories that have
been passed down, but also the larger collective history tied to the land. All of the fragments
combine in my memory bank, sometimes even blurring with my own experiences. I never visited
my mother’s childhood home, and when I picture her growing up, I tend to imagine her in my
grandmother’s house – the house with my first memory.

All of these stories aren’t recorded in conventional ways. They are off the record. They exist in
bodies, in food, in soil. These memories do not speak in archives. We tend to disregard
unrecorded memories, not always acknowledging their persistent presence over time. But they
are essential. What is documented in historical narratives is never the whole story.

The work included in this series is about art that contemplates these alternate forms of
remembering. My investigation looks at memory through different lenses, starting with scientific
memory research and moving toward intangible, often more metaphorical, ways of connecting to
the past.

The first story, “The Things you Can’t Erase: Remembering Through Storytelling,” is an audio
piece that looks at the connection between memory and art from a scientific perspective. I
interviewed Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist, to offer insight into how memory functions
on a cognitive level. She explained how storytelling is a powerful vehicle for bringing up not only
the facts of what happened, but the emotions we experienced in the past.

The second piece, “Simpson’s Art: Where Dreams, Memory & Decaying Food Meet,” is an
interview with the artist Sylvia Salazar Simpson, whose work considers how memory is evoked
through food, especially the smells associated with it. Simpson’s work is being re-remembered
4
through exhibitions like Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 that took place at the
Hammer Museum in 2017-2018.

The final text is a profile of the multidisciplinary artist, Kang Seung Lee. His work reimagines
past events and people through graphite drawings, found objects, and most recently, plants and
gardens. Lee considers how memory can live through other forms besides archives.

Together, these pieces are the start of a conversation – asking us to contemplate how and why we
remember.

5
PART 1:
The Things You Can’t Erase: Remembering Through Storytelling

00:00:00 – HOST INTRODUCTION: Clarissa Kerner
I’m sitting with Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh in her office. We’re tucked away in the Brain and
Creativity Institute at USC where she works as a cognitive neuroscientist.

00:00:09 – INTERVIEW: Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
So, I mean, can you think about what your earliest memory is?
Clarissa Kerner: I was three years old and I was playing with my cousin and he was playing on a
baseball bat and accidentally hit me, and I ended up having surgery on my cheek.
Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh: Oh my God.
Clarissa Kerner: It was really, it was traumatic and painful.

00:00:30 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
She has me share this story to explain how emotions and memories are connected. And that
emotions are how we internalize what happens to us. Our most powerful memories tend to come
from feelings, especially, really strong ones like fear. Basically, when painful things happen, we
tend to remember them.

00:00:48 – INTERVIEW: Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
So, it makes sense that that would be one of your earliest memories because it was so emotional
for you. So, if you actually ask people what their earliest memory is, it's always, always going to
be something that's very emotional for them.

00:01:00 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
We have all of our memories living inside of us. Some are more easily available than others. One
way we access those memories is through storytelling. Aziz-Zadeh says that when you actually
relive these memories, by telling someone or by reimagining, it triggers a part of your brain as if
it’s being reenacted. So, your brain feels like it’s happening again.

6
00:01:17 – INTERVIEW: Dr. Lisa Aziz-Zadeh
And so, it actually feels, oftentimes when someone tells you something that happened to them,
they'll start crying right? Or they'll, it's like they actually re-live it and they start to bring those
same centers of the brain on as when they actually experienced it. So, it becomes very real.

00:01:34 – AMBI: Scene music from Paris, Texas
1

00:01:41 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
Artists are aware of the power of memory and use it to move us in explicit or subtle ways. There’s
one scene in director Wim Wenders’s movie Paris, Texas. The main character, Travis, finds his
ex-partner, Jane. They separated from each other in a painful way that ripped their family apart.
Finding her is his way of facing his painful memory.

00:01:55 – AMBI: Paris, Texas
2

I can’t even hardly remember what happened. It’s like a gap. But it left me alone in a way I
haven’t gotten over. And right now, I’m afraid.

00:02:10 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
When he finds Jane, she’s working as a girl in a peep booth. Clients come to look at her through
a one-sided mirror and talk to her through a phone. Travis pays to come in as a customer. She
doesn’t recognize his voice and since it’s a one-sided mirror she can’t see him. Travis tells her a
story about two people who used to be in love and how it all falls apart. We understand that the
story is about Travis and Jane but it’s hard to tell if the story is true or made up.

00:02:38 – AMBI: Paris, Texas
3

They didn’t much care about anything else because all they wanted to do was be with each other.
They were always together. Sounds like they were very happy.

1
Paris, Texas, directed by Wim Wenders (1984; Berlin: Road Movies Produktion; Paris: Argos Films), The
Criterion Collection, Kanopy.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid.
7

00:02:52 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
But still, little by little her memory starts to come back.

00:02:58 – AMBI: Paris, Texas
4

Excuse me sir – but were you in to visit me the other day? I don’t mean to pry. (Long pause) No.
Oh. I thought I recognized your voice for a minute.

00:03:15 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
What becomes clear is that the details of the story are not the most important part. It’s the
emotion from the experience that Jane can connect to in the story, because that’s how we
internalize our memories. Jane finally remembers Travis and when she does, she is overcome
with her emotions.

00:03:34 – AMBI: Paris, Texas
5

Travis.

00:03:37 – HOST: Clarissa Kerner
By retelling their lost past as a reimagined fable, it becomes a way for them to learn something.
Even if they can’t change what happened, by re-creating their history in the present moment,
they’re able to make new decisions for the future of their son. Memory is more than the facts of
what happened. When we retell the past through either real or imagined stories, we can not only
access these memories, but all of the feelings filter through us. And at times, this can be a way to
teach us what we need to do in our life.

4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
8
PART 2:
Simpson’s Art: Where Dreams, Memory & Decaying Food
Meet

Sylvia Salazar Simpson dips a spoon into a simmering pot of beans and in one continuous
gesture pulls it out and lets a few drops of the liquid drip inside of her palm. She’s doing this as if
she’s done it a million times because she has. With her tongue, she sucks the drop clean from her
hand. She likes the taste and turns off the stove. The beans are done.

Next to Simpson, where she’s preparing lunch in her Los Angeles apartment, is a freshly grilled
pile of sweet plantains. On the counter behind her is a batch of bright crimson jamaica. In her
living room/studio, resting on the fireplace mantle, is a rotting squash, so decayed that it’s
indistinguishable from the equally gray and green lemon close by. Most of the shelves, walls and
windows are covered with decaying produce, dying flowers, cactus paddles, and even a cockroach
she found belly-up on her doorstep.

“My granddaughter isn't even allowed in here. She might get some rare disease,” Simpson says.
She shakes her head laughing and clarifies, “She won’t get some rare disease.”

For over 50 years, Simpson, who is now 80, with her art installations, photography and books,
has utilized perishable materials, placing them alongside other types of objects to fashion spaces
that turn ordinary life into imaginary worlds, where things we perceive to be separate come
together: sustenance and decay, sensuality and grotesqueness, Mexico and the United States, the
visible and the invisible. She explores these intersections by bringing visceral responses up to the
surface.

Simpson explains that when someone walks into a room she wants them to say “Yes!” and “Oh,
this is a mess,” and then maybe, “Why did she do this?” Her vibrant appearance reflects this
confident attitude. She is draped in a multi-colored dress that wraps around her neck, revealing
her shoulders and back. Her lips are carefully outlined to enhance the color and her eye-lids are
painted with dark blue liner that matches her nails.
9

Simpson was born in 1939 in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She grew up in Mexico City from the time
she was eight years old, until she got married at 25 and moved to Los Angeles with her husband.
She studied at Otis College and then at the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts) in the
early 1970’s, with her mentor and friend Allan Kaprow. Vaughn Rachel, Allan Kaprow's wife at
the time, was a close friend of Simpsons and influenced her to go to Cal Arts.

During this period, Simpson made a series of 18 stunning black-and-white self-portraits. She
assembled and wove her hair with different kinds of food – corn, octopus, tortillas, radishes, pigs
feet, dates, apples, pineapple, grapes, tripe, lettuce, watermelon, mushrooms, cilantro, macaroni,
bananas, cheese, and carrots. In each image she stares into a mirror, standing so close that it
obscures her face entirely. The food, interlaced into her hair, is the focal point – and even though
you can comprehend that it’s food, the shapes take on an otherworldly quality.

Simpson’s artwork, including this photo-series, was showed at Radical Women: Latin American
Art, 1960-1985, at the Hammer Museum in 2017-2018, as a part of Pacific Standard Time:
Latin American & Latino Art in LA. The exhibition showed the work of 120 women, some
who are well known but many who haven’t necessarily been recognized for their work.

Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, who co-curated Radical Women, first learned about Simpson through the
magazine, Artes Visuales, when she was organizing the exhibition. The editor, Carla Stellweg,
told her: “They call her the Hannah Wilkes of Los Angeles.” But despite Simpson's reputation
among certain groups, she is not widely known.

“Sylvia has basically been completely erased from the history of art in Los Angeles. [She] told me
at some point all of these super conceptual artists who were her peers decided to produce works
for the market and she didn’t,” says Fajardo-Hill. “[This is] her moment to be recuperated.”

Simpson’s Antes-Después (Before-After) (1981), a series of four color photographs, was also in the
exhibition. The framed piece rests on stacks of books in her bedroom. In these images, she looks
10
at the camera head-on. Her hair is covered in plant material and a clump of live worms cascades
down her face.

Working with organic materials comes from Simpson’s attention to her senses. Especially her
nose. It’s her compass.

“I smell when I walk down the street and when I step on the grass, I smell. The perception of
reality that comes through my nose is very important to me,” she says.

She is particularly fascinated by places where good and bad smells meet. This stems from her
day-to-day life from activities like riding the bus. “I love to walk into a place where it smells.
Even when it's disagreeable smell. When it's agreeable with disagreeable, it's even better,” she
says. This pleasure is something Simpson translates into her art, by working with foods that
hold various smells. And when she allows them to perish, there’s the potential for new and
oftentimes unsettling odors to emerge.

For Simpson, smell and the senses, more generally, are a portal to memory. And it’s directly tied
to her personal memories with food. She recalls her childhood in Mexico, going to a Sunday
market in Chiapas with her father and the smell of cilantro consuming the air. She ate
voraciously, trying all of the different foods in the market. But later, when they returned to
Mexico City, she became ill. For many years after that, she wasn’t able to eat cilantro. She
connected the smell too much with the experience.

But it wasn’t all bad. In the hospital the doctors would give her different kinds of candy to make
sure she was eating.

“I remember that, you know. Loving the sweet and remembering the jungle.”

The objects in Simpson’s apartment tell her story. Personal items, like a pair of apple-green
shorts she just bought. “You put them on with black stockings,” she says laying them out on her
11
bed. Then momentarily, she disappears into the hallway to find photos she took after the house
she was living in burned down in the 1993 Malibu fires.

Instead, to her delight, she comes across a series of photographs she hasn’t seen in years. They
are from a show called Tortilla Curtain (1991) that was installed in an airplane hanger in El
Centro, on the border of California and Mexico.

In the installation, she hung tortillas, chicken feet and candy from the ceiling with ropes. Mixed
with flowers and other types of materials, like cracked eggs on the floor, she made an immersive
space for visitors. Even through photos, you can easily imagine how your senses would be
saturated walking through the space, seeing so much raw meat next to you and exposed egg yolk
by your feet. The documentation is its own art. In one photo of Simpson’s face hovering close to
a pointy chicken foot, the scene is alive, you can almost smell it.

Sifting through Simpson’s stories in her apartment is like this – a continuous process. She’ll
point to an object in a photo and then pulls the real-life version out of a jar nearby. It’s as if her
art is held together in one cohesive montage made up of her past, present and future.

Simpson recalls the exhibition, LA Women Narrations (1978), where she covered a nude man and
woman in peanut butter, dead fish, and pomegranate seeds, with cotton candy on their heads.
They posed like the Etruscan Cerveteri sarcophagus: a terracotta statue of a dead married couple
laying on their sides. In Simpson’s piece, the couple was wheeled around throughout the galleries
by actors pretending to be morgue attendants. According to Simpson, it was controversial. She
explains that she was explicitly asked to cover their genitals because there would be alcohol
served at the opening of the exhibition, and “it wasn't just my opening, it was an opening for
several other women.”

Simpson’s solution was to make covers out of gauze, peanut butter and flowers. But the gauze
kept falling off. “So what I finally did. I said, ‘get the fucking gauze out of here’ and threw it out
12
and then just did flowers.” Simpson says the curator vowed never to work with her again because
she didn’t consider Simpson’s work art.

“There's some people that can be insulting. Some people that consider what I do a lesser form of
amusement,” she says, referring to how some people over the years have responded to her work.
But her serious tone quickly turns into a soft chuckle.

Ultimately, she appears unfazed and continues to make her art. Her imagination is active as she
fantasizes about new worlds she wants to experience. Some of these are simple, but coming from
her, they all sound extraordinary.

Her eyes are brimming with joy as she shares her fantasy about jackfruit.

“One of my best friends lives in Puebla in Mexico, and they have jackfruits at his mother's house
that grow from one side of the kitchen door all the way down to the other. Can you imagine? I
just want to go see that. Must be beautiful. Can you imagine?”

13
PART 3:
Kang Seung Lee’s Art: Maybe The Plants Remember

The story goes that when Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978 in San Francisco, some of his
belongings went to his roommate. One of the things the roommate inherited was a cactus. This
roommate made cuttings from the cactus, which were then passed from hand to hand. Friends
made more cuttings, passed them on to other friends and so on until today. It’s hard to know
how many people have a cutting from this original plant.

“There’s one in a special collection at UCLA,” Kang Seung Lee tells me. We’re in his Boyle
Heights studio, sipping a freshly brewed pot of tea. Lee’s demeanor is composed. He’s dressed in
a checkered forest-green sweater, collared shirt and round glasses, and when he speaks, every
word sounds deliberate. He points behind me toward a floor-to-ceiling graphite drawing he’s
made of a potted cactus. It depicts his friend Julie’s “Harvey cactus,” which is a direct descendant
from the “UCLA Harvey.”

Cactuses have a lot in common with archives. They are made for preservation. Both their
succulent stems and pokey spikes are designed for the conservation of water. Even though we
understand that plants hold liquid, we tend not to think about them as conservers of memory –
as vessels connected to the past and headed toward a future, maybe even beyond a person’s
lifetime.

Lee makes it easy to consider alternate ways of thinking about memory and connection.
Especially when imagining, if not directly facing, moments of uncertainty and loss.

When I first meet him, the coronavirus is already spreading. But we haven’t started to practice
social distancing and quarantining. Still, it’s the first thing we talk about. Lee’s perspective is
observational and realistic. A few of Lee’s exhibitions have been postponed, but when I speak to
him in early March, he’s more concerned for his friends who are performance artists – working
with projects that are challenging to reschedule. One friend, who works as a drag queen in South
14
Korea, has canceled all of his shows and won’t have work for the first half of this year. We try to
imagine what is to come, with the lack of testing and resources and all of the ways it’s going to
get worse.

Ultimately, Lee’s approach is, as he says, “acceptance of the reality.”

Lee is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reimagines marginalized, but especially queer,
histories. “I’m trying to address the absence of something,” he says. These absences are the
ghosts of lost memories, reimagined through Lee’s touch in the form of a drawing, an
installation, or even a plant. His art pushes us to not only remember specific people, events and
stories that have been erased, but to reflect on the mechanism of documentation and its limits.
More than anything, Lee encourages us to consider forms of remembering that go beyond
photographs and language.

Lee’s work often starts with an individual or event. His series, Untitled (TKC) from 2019, is
based on a group of self-portrait photographs taken by Tseng Kwong Chi, an artist who died of
AIDS in 1990. In the original images, Tseng poses in a Zhongshan (Mao) suit in front of
various global tourist spots, such as the Statue of Liberty, Disneyland, and the Golden Gate
Bridge. Lee redrew each photograph with graphite. The landscape is kept intact to match the
photograph, but the body in each image is silhouetted like it's in the process of appearing or
disappearing. It has no identifiable features. It could be anyone, asking us to consider the
individual as a metaphor for something more universal. The realistic photographs transform into
reimagined drawings made with soft and blurry strokes. In this sense, the images are no longer
static and lost in the past but give the feeling of being in motion – a conversation beyond a
particular time.

Lee’s solo-exhibition Garden (2018), at ONE and J. Gallery in Seoul, was an installation about
erased queer history through the memory of two gay rights activists, who also died in the 1990s
from AIDS-related issues: the British director Derek Jarman – the better-known of the two –
and Joon-soo Oh, a poet and writer from South Korea.
15

“I wanted to create something that connects different places and addresses how all these people
are connected through the disease and the trauma,” he says. “That it's not just one place, one
person's story. We're all connected.”

The exhibition was a reimagined garden made up of materials from Jarman and Oh’s lives. Lee
was invited by Jarman’s last lover to visit Jarman’s cottage in Dungeness, England, where he
collected material and documented the garden that Jarman tended during his life. For Oh, Lee
found objects in Seoul. The materials included archival documents, such as letters and
photographs, but also elements from nature, like pebbles. Everything was reformed through
Lee’s hands. He reproduced Jarman’s and Oh’s portraits as ephemeral-looking graphite images.
And the soil Lee collected from both Dungeness and Seoul was used to create ceramic vases. In
the exhibition, the vases held flowers, mostly weeds, that his friend would bring in.

When Lee starts to describe the cyclical pattern of gardening, he stresses that there’s something
magical about how the same plants Jarman planted in 1989 are still flowering in 2020. “They’re
the same plants you know? But they’re also not the same plants.” What it comes down to is this:
even when memories seem forgotten and undocumented in the conventional ways we are
accustomed to, maybe they’re remembered in other ways. Lee reflectively proposes other
possibilities. “Maybe the plants remember.”

Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1978. When I ask about his childhood, he begins with
the year he turned 13, the year he realized he was gay. In a pre-social media era, living in a
conservative country dominated by Christian doctrine, Lee didn’t have peers or role models to
look toward. The first (and only) gay celebrity in South Korea, actor Hong Seok-cheon, came
out publicly in 2000, which immediately ended his acting career.

Toward the end of high school, Lee sought out a community. He read about an LGBTQ
activists group, Chingusai, and showed up at their office. Because he was underage, they steered
16
him toward a student-led gay and lesbian group. It consisted of about five people and he became
the youngest member.

When he realized the press might write about a project that he was producing with the student
group, he told his parents he was gay. “My mom was like, ‘I'm so fucking ashamed of you’ and
‘you can’t be here’ or something like that,” he says, shaking his head at the memory.

To get far away, Lee enrolled in an exchange program in Melbourne, Australia for college. From
then on, he says, “basically I was out all the time.” After staying in Melbourne for a period after
graduating, he moved between places for work including Europe, Mexico City, back to South
Korea for periods, and ultimately, Los Angeles in 2013 to attend the California Institute of the
Arts.

After many years of living in Los Angeles, Lee made a series of images, Untitled (la revolución es
la solución) (2017). It’s based on the LA riots that broke out in 1992 over the judicial response to
racial violence in the city, specifically tied to the cases of Rodney King and Latasha Harlins.
Lee’s project focuses on the way the dissemination of certain types of images created narratives
about the riots and how this had lasting effects. The work consists of graphite drawings made
from public photos, with special attention to Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old unarmed African
American girl who was killed by Soon Ja Du, a Korean American woman. Du, who thought
Harlins was stealing a bottle of orange juice from her store, Empire Liquor Market and Deli,
shot the teenager in the back of her head.

Within a few weeks of the killing, the Korea Times released a statement on behalf of the Korean
American Community leaders, including the Korean Federation of Los Angeles and the Korean
Chamber of Commerce: “Korean American and African American communities have worked
together many years to promote mutual understanding between the two groups… We are very
17
concerned that this incident may cause detrimental blows to the positive efforts between the two
communities.”
6

But Du received no jail time and was released with community hours and a fine of $500 dollars.

The tension between the African American and Korean American communities grew. Lee says
that within the Korean American community in Los Angeles, this killing is something “you're
not supposed to talk about.”

Lee received some criticism for this work, with some viewers questioning whether or not Lee can
narrate these histories as someone from outside the community. “Some people believe that you
can only speak for what you have experienced,” he says.

At the end of last year, Lee’s work brought him back to Seoul. Together with Jin Kwon, Lee
curated the exhibition QueerArch, a show that reimagined erased Korean queer history. It was the
culmination of a research project at Korea Queer Archive, an archive comprised of donated
material, mostly publications and films. The exhibition was made with a group of young artists
who worked together to mine this material and put together work that rewrites these stories. The
final project shows, through the inclusion of these many voices from multiple generations, a
larger collective memory.

Whether using a public archive, or a garden, Lee’s work expands traditional notions of memory –
what it means to experience loss and what it means to remember. For Lee the process is bigger
than how we typically think. It’s mysterious. Maybe even hopeful. “I wanted to believe that all
these erased or unspoken histories are somehow carried on,” he says. “That there is actually a
possibility of other beings remembering us, you know, telling and carrying on the stories.”

6
Korean Federation of Los Angeles, Korean Chamber of Commerce and Korean American Grocers Association of
Southern California, “Statement of Korean American community leaders on the death of Latasha Harlins,” Korea
Times Monthly English Ed., March 27, 1991.

18
CONCLUSION

In the essay, “Going Home Again and Again and Again. Coffee Memories, Peasant Food and
the Vodou Some of Us Do,” anthropologist and performance artist, Gina Athena Ulysse
discusses Haitian Diaspora through her own memories with food. She offers her reflections as
“alter(ed)narratives” to provide a nuanced perspective, in response to the country’s commonly
depicted “damning and totalizing” history
7
”. These alter(ed)narratives do not follow archival
linear storytelling. Instead, they center on bodily senses. Her attention to the senses can, as she
explains, give specificity to the past, because senses, while it might sound contradictory, are in
fact not universal – such that every smell, touch, taste, image, sound, can transport each of us to
moments, tied to exact bodies and places.
8

When I feel the scar on my cheek it is specific: the wooden bat, my grandmother’s house, the
Calexico-Mexicali checkpoint, all of the way back to my mother’s childhood.

It is this kind of specificity that gives alternative memories power. Not only for the individual,
but how they shape collective memory – as portals into unacknowledged moments. The
articulation of these memories has the potential to create larger changes in society. Linguist,
philosopher George Lakoff thinks that much of cultural change emerges from the introduction
of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones, because the people who get to impose
their metaphors on the culture get to define what we consider to be true.
9
New metaphors push
us to reimagine history, change what we remember, and even alter our perspective moving
forward.

Of course, this process cannot exclusively replace the old with the new, but engage in a
continuous, often messy relationship with the past – one that is less restorative and more

7
Gina Athena Ulysse, “Going Home Again and Again and Again. Coffee Memories, Peasant Food and the Vodou
Some of Us Do,” in Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora, ed. Regine O. Jackson (New York: Routledge, 2011), 265-
66.
8
Ibid.
9
George Lakoff, Metaphors we live by (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 145-160.
19
reflective, and involves many, often disparate, voices. We’re asked to question what we know,
and dwell in the unseen cracks.
10

The artists I’ve interviewed here practice this kind of process. The work is non-linear and
explores the present and future through the reimagination of the lost past. With time, my goal is
to write about other artists who attempt a similar feat – little by little, considering new tools for
remembering history and rewriting the narratives that shape our day-to-day lives.

10
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 45.

20
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality.
Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.

Anzaldúa, Gloria; Moraga, Cherríe. This bridge called my back: writings by radical women of
color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.

Aziz-Zadeh, Dr. Lisa. Cognitive Neuroscientist and Professor in the Brain and Creativity
Institute at the University of Southern California. In-Person interview. November 25,
2019.

Maron, Bianca. Graduate Student at University of Southern California, In-person interview.
November 14, 2019.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion.
New York: A. Van der Marck Editions, 1986.

Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia. Curator. In-person interview. December 9, 2019.

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lived: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.
Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Jaikumar, Priya. Professor in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California. In-
person interview. November 6, 2019.

Kaplan, Dr. Jonas. Cognitive Neuroscientist and Professor in the Brain and Creativity Institute
at the University of Southern California, Lecture, September 12, 2019.

Korean Federation of Los Angeles, Korean Chamber of Commerce and Korean American
Grocers Association of Southern California, “Statement of Korean American community
leaders on the death of Latasha Harlins,” Korea Times Monthly English Ed., March 27,
1991.

Lakoff, George.; Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Mitchell, Timothy. “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order.” Grasping the World: The Idea
of the Museum, ed. Claire Farago and Donald Preziosi. London: Ashgate, 2004.

Oguibe, Olu. “In the Heart of Darkness,” Third Text, Issue 23, Volume 7 (1993).

21
Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985. Hammer Museum: UCLA; DelMonico Books,
Prestel: Munich, London, New York; Getty Foundation, 2017.
-Fajardo-Hill, Cecilia. “The Invisibility of Latin American Women Artists: Problematizing
Art Historical Practices.”

Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, Digital Archive. Hammer Museum.
https://hammer.ucla.edu/radical-women.

Simpson, Sylvia Salazar. Artist. In-person interview. October 26, 2019.

Simpson, Sylvia Salazar. Artist. Website. https://www.sylviasalazarsimpson.com.

Starzmann, Maria Theresia; Roby, John R. Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and
Forgetting. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2016.

Ulysse, Gina Athena. “Going Home Again and Again and Again. Coffee Memories, Peasant
Food and the Vodou Some of Us Do.” Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora, edited by
Regine O. Jackson. New York: Routledge, 2011.

Wenders, Wim, dir. Paris, Texas. 1984; Berlin: Road Movies Produktion; Paris: Argos
Films. The Criterion Collection. Kanopy.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This is an exploration of memory—the types of memories that exist outside of conventional archive storytelling and the way that art can function as a metaphorical tool for reimagining this unrecorded history. These stories have often been neglected, dismissed, and forgotten but they have found alternative ways to survive. The discussion centers predominantly around art, but considers memory from a range of perspectives, including an interview with Dr. Liza Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist. The essays are centered on two Los Angeles based artists and their work. The first, Sylvia Salazar Simpson has made art throughout her career that uses organic materials, like rotting food, to evoke sensory experiences that connect to lost memories. The second, Kang Seung Lee reflects on alternative ways of accessing the past, particularly queer history, by transforming old photographs, plants, and other objects, into new forms and spaces. These interviews took place between the end of 2019 and the start of 2020. Together, this work is the beginning of what hopefully will develop into a larger project in the future.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kerner, Clarissa Aviva (author)

Core Title Off the record: reimagining unrecorded histories

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Publication Date 07/26/2020

Defense Date 07/23/2020

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag art,Kang Seung Lee,memory,OAI-PMH Harvest,Sylvia Salazar Simpson,unrecorded history

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Anawalt, Sasha (committee chair), Page, Tim (committee member), Sweeney, Mary (committee member)

Creator Email ckerner@usc.edu,clarissakerner@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-344285

Unique identifier UC11663934

Identifier etd-KernerClar-8769.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-344285 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-KernerClar-8769.pdf

Dmrecord 344285

Document Type Thesis

Rights Kerner, Clarissa Aviva

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA