Beyond Borders and Biology: Lisa Myeong-Joo’s Self-Portrait of a Circle (2016)

Abstract

Performance allows me to feel something that I know in my body, that is for me. As ambiguous as that is at least I know it's real. Performance means reclaiming my body back after being adopted or being told different ways of being or what to do or fitting in with my adopted family or the society that I live in now.-Lisa Myeong-Joo 1The artist Lisa Myeong-Joo was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1988 and was subsequently adopted by a family in Sydney, Australia, in 1989. 2 She returned to South Korea in 2016 for a residency at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, where she created her series Self-Portrait of a Circle. This essay analyzes Lisa Myeong-Joo's performative use of her own body to suggest a conscious unbelonging to place in three components of this series: a video work, a performance piece presented at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea in Changdong, and a series of five photographs taken in the streets around the residency site. In these three components of her series, Lisa Myeong-Joo embodies what the art historian Eun Jung Park, in her writing on Korean adoptee artists, has described as "risky subjectivity." 3 Park argues that the "sense of self and empowerment [found] in the past" is made risky for adoptees