Abstract Korean artist Jeamin Cha's video Nameless Syndrome (2022) is based on the stories of Korean women who couldn't receive proper diagnoses for their symptoms. Rather than presenting these stories as a striking exposé, the video work shows a disjunctive aesthetics, assembling seemingly unrelated stories and visual footage, highlighting a double sense of failure—of the patients’ experience and of medicine's lack of self-critique regarding its neoliberal ideals, racism, and sexism. Nameless Syndrome juxtaposes visual footage of Korean women undergoing medical procedures with narration based predominantly on Western and white references. Wary of the fact that black-and-white judgment-making can entail the risk of reinforcing medically abstracted body image and discourse, this video doesn't so much grant an easy conclusion as it excites its audience's curiosity and doubts. Undercurrent to the endeavor is the idea that the more abstract the perception of medicine becomes, the less light is shed on its persevering sexism and racism, the inequitable power dynamic between doctors and patients, and the effort to make accessible representations of the problems. The article reads the cognitive challenge that Nameless Syndrome poses as a unique form of resistance aligned with the aesthetic and discursive strategy of escape central to queer-of-color critique and postcolonial scholars’ caution against the often-uncontested Euro-American centrism in critical thought.
Soyi Kim (Fri,) studied this question.