참상을 기록하는 이미지와 구성적 기억: ‘위안부’ 기억과 영상 매체의 변화를 중심으로 = Configuring Memory of Atrocity: Media Transformations in the Remembrance of Japanese Military ‘Comfort Women’

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study examines the evolving practices of memory transmission related to Japanese military ‘comfort women.’ Amid the rapid aging and passing of survivors, documentaries addressing this issue have shifted from a testimonial-centered mode of the 1990s to diverse aesthetic forms since the mid-2010s. These works incorporate diasporic perspectives and media hybridity, reconstructing memory through sensuous, performative, and ethically charged modes of engagement. Soo-nam Park’s Silence (2017), Moon-chil Park’s Softer (2022), and Cecilia Kang’s A Boat Departed from Me Taking Me Away (2023) exemplify this shift, as they disrupt fixed victim narratives and reconfigure memory through tactile imagery, polyphonic narration, and the performativity of transnational subjectivity.
This shift can be theoretically framed through Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s notion of minor transnationalism. These frameworks critique the limitations of nationalist memory paradigms and highlight how memory operates as a hybrid structure—constantly reassembled across diverse sociocultural contexts. Within this context, hybridity functions not as a mere stylistic gesture but as a critical condition that enables memory to emerge as a sensorial and open-ended structure of historical engagement.
Furthermore, the study analyzes the interactive testimony project Eternal Testimony (2018–), which employs artificial intelligence technologies to construct memory within a network of nonhuman actants such as databases, algorithms, and interfaces. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the study conceptualizes memory not as a static entity but as a dynamic event continuously reconfigured through relational entanglements between human and nonhuman agents.
In conclusion, this research demonstrates that the transmission of memory is expanding beyond the preservation of survivor testimony toward a multimodal, communal, and future-oriented practice. However, such technological mediation must remain ethically vigilant to ensure that it does not dilute the integrity of testimony or historical truth. The study emphasizes the importance of ethically sustaining the voices of the past while simultaneously exploring new sensory and discursive conditions through which memory may continue to be reimagined and reconstructed.