— Park Kyong Ju’s Work and the Politics of Affect
Lee Seo-jun (Aesthetic Critic and Philosopher, 2026)
Park Kyong Ju’s work persistently slips away from several familiar categories preferred by the contemporary art world: socially engaged art, research-based practice, community art, feminist practice, migration narrative, postcolonial discourse. Each of these labels is partially correct, yet none fully accounts for the singularity of her practice. The reason is simple. Park’s work does not merely address migrants, women, workers, or the socially marginalized as themes. Rather, it asks, over a long duration and with unusual consistency: Who is able to speak? Who is made audible? Why do certain bodies disappear the moment they enter the public scene? How far can art alter the conditions of that erasure? For this reason, Park’s work is better understood not as an art of representing others, but as an art of reorganizing the very conditions under which voices are socially arranged. 1)
In this sense, Park’s work stands closer to an understanding of affect as social arrangement and evental force than to an understanding of affect as the expression of emotion. Affect is often reduced to the vocabulary of sadness, anger, mourning, or empathy. Yet what matters more in Park’s work is not who feels sad, but what enables some bodies to speak while rendering others mute. Affect, here, is not an interior psychological state. It is a current of force produced through the contact of bodies, languages, institutions, spaces, artistic practices, and political movements. 2) This is why Park’s work does not stop at representing another’s suffering. It constructs the very scene in which that suffering becomes socially perceptible, translatable, contestable, and politically consequential.
A representative example is Migrant Workers’ Music Project. In this project, Park does not exhibit migrant workers as objects of pity. Rather, she creates a form through which migrant workers can sing their own songs in their own voices. What matters here is not speaking on behalf of the marginalized, but organizing the conditions under which voices already possessed by them can become socially audible. Music is not ornament; it is a mode of appearance. Performance is not representation; it is a redistribution of the right to speak. Migrant workers emerge not as protected victims, but as agents bearing their own rhythm, language, and social presence. It is precisely in scenes such as this that Park’s work reveals its affinity with an evental rather than merely representational understanding of affect.
This tendency becomes even more radical in Migrant Worker’s Election Campaign Performance. That work took the form of a social performance staged in public space, presenting the campaign of a fictional migrant candidate. Its core was not the delivery of a message about migrants, but the production, however temporary, of a situation in which a migrant figure appeared as a political subject within the public sphere. The fact that some citizens mistook the campaign for a real election campaign, or responded that they might vote for a migrant politician in the future, is crucial. It means the work did not simply offer a moral lesson about the humanity of migrants. It disturbed the very sensory framework of political community. Park’s work does not explain feelings; it destabilizes situations. The spectator does not remain a benevolent subject empathizing with migrant suffering, but is instead confronted with the limits of his or her own political imagination. Affect, in this case, is not the language of contemplation, but the force that momentarily bends the rules of public space. 3)
This line of inquiry expands at a more structural level in the Salad Theatre Project. Founded in 2009, Salad Theatre was established to create a channel through which immigrants could gain a social voice through culture and the arts, and it has reached over 100,000 audience members through regular performances, national touring, and free arts workshops.4) Yet the importance of Salad Theatre lies not simply in being a theatre company in which migrants appear on stage. In its early phase, migrant participation began largely through acting roles. Over time, however, Park steadily expanded the range of roles assumed by migrant members into nearly every part of theatrical production: sound and lighting operation, costume making and design, administration, stage management, assistant direction, choreography, composition, video direction, and eventually directing itself. In this respect, Salad did not merely increase the amount of participation. It transformed the structure of who organizes, decides, and bears responsibility for performance-making. The presentation document describes one of Salad’s operating principles as the “participation of minimum number of Korean artists” and states that married immigrant women, migrant workers, and refugees take on not only acting roles but also the various roles necessary to create a performance. 5)
From the perspective of affect theory, this is not simply an expansion of emotional representation. It is a redistribution of bodies, skills, labor, authority, and technical responsibility; that is, a reorganization of the conditions under which the theatrical apparatus operates. If one follows Brian Massumi in understanding affect as a matter of intensity and condition prior to already named emotion, then Salad Theatre is not primarily a place where “migrant feelings” are displayed, but a place where the structure of cultural production itself is rearranged.6) In that sense, the stage ceases to function as a mirror of society and becomes instead a testing ground for the redistribution of social roles.
Salad Theatre’s dramaturgical method is equally important. The presentation explains that Salad produces works introducing the culture and realities of Asian immigrants by using its migrant-member network to research diverse Asian cultures and by basing scripts on close investigation of actual events; it further notes that the participation of migrant parties on stage gives the performances a greater sense of realism. 7) To this one must add the artist’s own explanation: Park wrote almost all of the company’s scripts herself because, within the condition of Korean-language theatre, she wanted to depict the discrimination and problems of cultural diversity actually occurring in Korean society not from a white gaze, but from the perspective of yellow people. The scripts, moreover, were not abstractions. They were transformations of ideas drawn from Park’s long-term close reporting as founder, representative, and journalist for Salad TV and Migrant Workers Broadcasting Station. The theatre, then, is not a place where a pre-existing message is illustrated. It is a site where journalism, research, contact, translation, and shared time condense into form.
At this point, Salad TV must be read on the same continuum as Salad Theatre. Although it would have been far easier to operate in English alone, Salad TV did not converge into English as a single lingua franca. According to the artist’s explanation, it was run through a multilingual editorial structure in which Nepali, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Russian, Chinese, Thai, and other language sections were each handled by migrant editors from the corresponding linguistic communities. Public reports also support this picture: articles on Salad TV describe it as a multilingual migrant media platform and note that it operated in Korean, English, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Nepali, and Mongolian, while emphasizing that migrant workers preferred their mother tongues and needed an independent media space free from the prejudices of mainstream Korean media. 8) This was not a mere translation service. It was a fundamental redistribution of who gets to speak migration, and in what language. Rather than consolidating linguistic difference into one central idiom, Salad TV allowed the realities and issues of different communities to appear in their own rhythms, vocabularies, and public contexts. For that reason, Salad TV functioned as an alternative media infrastructure that refused to flatten “the migrant issue” into a universal victim narrative and instead preserved the different tensions, urgencies, and problematics carried by each linguistic sphere. If Salad Theatre transformed the infrastructure of performance, Salad TV transformed the infrastructure of articulation.
Another essential point is Park’s deliberate focus on Asian migrant members. This choice was not accidental. It was a means of foregrounding the problem of racism and class hierarchy among yellow people within Korean society. Here Park’s work departs from a conventional postcolonial scheme. Her problematic cannot be sufficiently described through the opposition between West and non-West, or white and nonwhite. Rather, her work addresses hierarchies internal to East Asia, exclusions within Korean society, and subtle forms of discrimination operating within apparently similar racialized categories. Public interviews support this reading. In a YTN interview, Park remarks: “We are the yellow race. The problem of discrimination that occurs when a person of color enters a yellow society is on a slightly different level from the discrimination that occurs in a white country.9) ” In that sense, Salad Theatre does not simply repeat postcolonial discourse. It renders visible an affective structure of migration in East Asia that conventional postcolonial vocabularies often fail to explain.
This is why Park’s work stands in a productive tension with the looser forms of postcolonial rhetoric often circulating in the art world. Her work is certainly sensitive to the residues of coloniality, the hierarchy of borders, cultural exclusion, and institutional violence. Yet it does not quickly dissolve those issues into a generalized theoretical language of the postcolonial. Instead, it exposes the intra-Asian migrations, inter-Asian relationships, and overlapping positions of victimhood and complicity that such discourse often leaves underdeveloped. This tension is crystallized in Park’s own reflection that while in Germany she had understood the lives of Korean miners and nurses largely from the standpoint of victimhood, after returning to Korea and encountering the reality of migrant women and migrant workers, she came to realize that “I had no choice but to be already a perpetrator.” Her work, then, is not the art of sympathizing with the other from a secure distance. It is the art of recognizing one’s own entanglement in violent structures and attempting to unsettle them from within.
This helps explain why long-term research is so central to Park’s practice. In her work, research is not an auxiliary procedure for collecting information. It is a way of bringing the formation of relationships, the accumulation of time, and the transformation of arrangements into the body of the work itself. Lan’s Diary Project demonstrates this most clearly. The project does not consume the death of a Vietnamese migrant woman as a one-time denunciatory narrative. Park describes it as a research project, explaining that she approached a language she could not understand almost like an archaeologist in order to reconstruct the final days of a dead woman’s life. What matters here is not the perfect recovery of truth, but the question of how much time, labor, and sensory attention are required to read again a life that society has too easily passed over. Rather than merely appealing to emotion through death, the project interrogates the social organization of memory and record. It does not simply show suffering. It asks why that suffering was unreadable, who had to translate it, and why that translation was so belated.
This same orientation appears in the fact that Park’s work never fixes the marginalized as moral images. Much socially engaged art succeeds in making suffering visible, yet at the same time freezes the vulnerable into permanent positions of victimhood or protectability. Park has long avoided precisely that trap. In Migrant Workers’ Music Project, migrant workers sing in their own voices. In Migrant Worker’s Election Campaign Performance, the migrant appears as a political subject. In Salad Theatre, migrant participants assume responsibility for the entire field of theatrical production. In Salad TV, they become editors who interpret and circulate reality in their own languages. The marginalized, here, are not represented objects. They are agents who alter the forms of cultural production and the relations that sustain public life. Park’s work therefore belongs less to the politics of advocacy than to the politics of co-production, and less to the ethics of representation than to the ethics of relation.
In this sense, Park’s work is not unrelated to a politics of emotion, but neither does it remain there. As Sara Ahmed has shown, emotions are not merely private psychological states; they shape the surfaces of individual and collective bodies and organize public attachments.10) Yet Park’s work pushes beyond the registration of emotional intensity toward the question of how emotion crosses into event, structure, and institutional critique. Showing pain is not enough. What matters is how that pain is spoken, to whom it becomes audible, what kind of public it forms, and what institutional questions it opens. For this reason, Park’s work touches the terrain of emotional politics while insisting on moving it toward arrangement, infrastructure, and social form.
This is also evident in the fact that Salad Theatre was structured as a social enterprise. The presentation document points to human-rights issues in the arts sector affecting migrant artists, including the absence of contracts, lack of medical support, nonpayment of wages, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. It further states that Salad sought to eliminate wage discrimination between Korean and migrant participants, subscribed to industrial accident insurance, and continued to run workshops that supported the skill development of migrant members. It also provided free cultural arts education and regular opportunities to view performances in culturally deprived areas.11) This is not an understanding of art as mere symbolic expression. Culture here is not a matter of taste but of rights; art is not simply a matter of spectatorship but of access, labor, and institutional support. Park’s work does not loudly sloganize decoloniality, yet it often targets the structures of coloniality more sharply than many works that do. What it targets is not declaration but operation, not symbolism but infrastructure.
Of course, such a reading of affect is not the only possible one. As Ruth Leys has argued, many affect theorists draw too rigid a line between affect and emotion, and the distinction itself may not always hold.12) This objection matters. But precisely for that reason Park’s work is all the more compelling. It does not insist on the distinction at the level of pure theory alone. It demonstrates, in lived practice, how articulation, performance, labor, rights, language, and publicness are altered when the conditions of social appearance are changed. Her work is not simply an example to which theory is applied. It is a case that compels theory itself to reflect on what it can see, and what it misses.
Ultimately, the specificity of Park Kyong Ju’s work lies not in speaking for the marginalized, but in organizing the conditions under which voices society has refused to hear can in fact become audible. In the music project, she rewrites the form of articulation. In the election performance, the form of political appearance. In Salad TV, the form of multilingual public discourse. In Salad Theatre, the form of role distribution and cultural production. In Lan’s Diary, the form of memory and record. In her interventions around artistic labor and cultural rights, the form of access and institutional recognition. For this reason, Park’s work privileges transformed arrangements over the representation of emotion, reorganized relations over declarations of empathy, and the structure of the event over the morality of representation. That is precisely why it cannot be easily absorbed into fashionable critical vocabularies—and why it matters all the more.
Park’s work does not reduce art to the illustration of social problems. Nor does it confine art within the sealed sphere of autonomous form. Instead, it moves across form and reality, aesthetics and politics, sensation and institution, testing whether art can still rearrange the social. If affect is not merely the name for emotion but the name for movement, then Park Kyong Ju’s work may be called one of the most persistent artistic practices of organizing that movement. 13)
- “The central idea of my ‘voice sculpture’ is the voice of the socially underprivileged”; “the voices of the socially underprivileged are articulated well on the social stage.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, presentation for the Global Cities and Socially Engaged Arts Initiative, Centre for Socially Engaged Theatre (C-SET), 2025, p. 2. PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju.
- Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995). Massumi argues that there is “no correspondence or conformity” between quality and intensity, and treats affect as a dimension of intensity and condition irreducible to already named emotion.
- Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008). Thrift presents non-representational theory as “an experimental rather than a representational approach,” emphasizing practice, event, and the affective constitution of political space.
- “Social theater was established in 2009 to provide a channel for immigrants living in Korea to have a voice in society through culture and art”; “We have met 100,000 audiences so far.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, 2025, p. 3. PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju.
- “The operating principle of Salad; Participation of minimum number of Korean artists”; “Married immigrant women, migrant workers, and refugees are not just actors, but take on various roles necessary to create a performance.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, 2025, p. 10. PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju. The more detailed list of expanded roles within Salad Theatre is based on the artist’s own explanation.
- Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995); Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Part III, Definition 3: “By affect I understand affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished…” The Spinozist line is important here because it frames affect not as a named feeling but as a change in capacity, relation, and force.
- “Produce performing arts creations that introduce the culture and reality of Asian immigrants”; “Based on a script written by closely investigating actual events”; “The participation of immigrant parties on stage gives the performance a greater sense of realism.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, 2025, p. 6. PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju.
- “The central idea of my ‘voice sculpture’ is the voice of the socially underprivileged”; “ensuring that the voices of the socially underprivileged are articulated well on the social stage.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, 2025, p. 2. PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju. Public reports further support this framework. In “Salad TV Offering Bowl of Multiculturalism,” Park is quoted as saying, “I first thought of making a Korean Web site, but the migrants preferred their mother tongue,” and the article states that Salad TV was provided in eight languages: Korean, English, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian, Nepali, and Mongolian. In “Korean media has prejudice against migrant workers,” Park explains that migrant workers “desperately need their mother tongue” and argues for “an independent media that has a correct view of migrant workers.” These sources support reading Salad TV not as a simple translation service but as an alternative media infrastructure designed to let migrant voices appear within distinct linguistic public spheres. See Park Kyong Ju, “Salad TV Offering Bowl of Multiculturalism,” and “Korean media has prejudice against migrant workers,” artist website archive.
- The tension with a conventional postcolonial framework is supported not only by the artist’s explanation but also by public interviews. In “Park Kyong-ju, CEO of Korea’s first multicultural theater company,” Park states: “We are the yellow race. The problem of discrimination that occurs when a person of color enters a yellow society is on a slightly different level from the discrimination that occurs in a white country.” This helps substantiate the reading that Park’s work complicates a simplified white/nonwhite binary by focusing instead on racialization and hierarchy within Asian social space. See also “A social theater that speaks of multiculturalism through art,” which situates Salad as a social theater emerging from migrant-issue media practice. The more specific curatorial intention of composing the troupe around Asian members in order to foreground racism and class hierarchy among Asians remains based on the artist’s own explanation.
- Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), where Ahmed writes that “emotions work to shape the ‘surfaces’ of individual and collective bodies.” Ahmed’s point is crucial for understanding emotion as a social and political force rather than a private interiority.
- “There are human rights issues due to discrimination in the arts sector, such as failure to write contracts and failure to support medical expenses. Nonpayment of wages, sexual harassment, sexual violence, etc., are happening to immigrant artists”; “No wage discrimination between Korean and immigrant participants. Subscribed to industrial accident insurance”; “Salad continued to conduct performing arts workshops and supported immigrant members to develop their skills”; “Salad provided free cultural arts education”; “Equal opportunities to participate in performances as actors, staff, and production staff.” Park Kyong Ju, Multicultural Theatre and the Diversification of Cultural Production Entities, p. 11–14. 2025, PDF courtesy of Park Kyong Ju.
- Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry37, no. 3 (2011). Leys argues that many affect theorists sharply distinguish affect from emotion, while also questioning whether that distinction can ultimately be sustained.
- For a broader overview of Park Kyong Ju’s projects, archives, and related materials, see the artist’s website: Park Kyong Ju, http://www.parkkyongju.com.
Copyright Notice
© Park Kyong Ju / Lee Seo-jun. All rights reserved.
This document is protected by copyright law. Unauthorized reproduction, distribution, transmission, sharing, sale, adaptation, or online circulation is prohibited without prior permission.
Any quotation from this document must include full attribution to the author, title, and source, and is permitted for non-commercial purposes only.
Commercial use and redistribution require prior written consent.