[KMDb] - Cinematic VR: A voluntary exile into the pain of others
Published April 4th, 2025 - Source
By Gina Kim (Professor at UCLA, Director)
Gina Kim (Professor at UCLA, Director)
Gina Kim is an award-winning filmmaker and professor at UCLA, acclaimed for her transnational, genre-defying works that foreground female agency. Her feature films include Never Forever, the first co-production between the United States and South Korea, starring Vera Farmiga, and Final Recipe, starring Michelle Yeoh. Her recent VR trilogy on U.S. military camptown women pushes the boundaries of cinematic form, offering a haunting meditation on identity, power, and the ethics of representation.
All forms of art contemplate how to empathize with the pain of others. To truly feel the pain of others, voluntary exile is necessary. One must be willing to leave the comfort and safety of one’s own world, and enter into the discomfort where another’s suffering resides. In Han Kang's We Do Not Part, the protagonist's journey, battling to find and rescue a bird, was so painful that I could not read it all at once. She falls, unconscious, into the snow, and upon barely making it to a house, faces the lifeless bird. Each sentence was so suffocating that I had to close the book repeatedly, only to open it again, inching through the pain. In Grace Cho's Tastes Like War, the pain of the author’s own mother, who once lived as a U.S. military comfort woman and eventually died of schizophrenia, is similarly overwhelming. Like someone in a trance, she leaves home and wanders the forest searching for wild mushrooms and blackberries. Her actions, even after putting the book down, make the walls and windows of my room seem unfamiliar. Literature, through such profound immersion, is a wondrous art that builds a world in the consciousness of the reader.
What, then, of cinema? As a spatial as well as temporal art, cinema has devised numerous strategies—editing, music, mise-en-scène—to create immersion and emotional resonance. A protagonist’s sorrow is delivered to us through close-ups of tear-streaked faces, and if that fails, by the mournful strains of a violin. While film often appears to be a powerful medium for inducing empathy, that empathy is frequently fleeting, superficial, and ultimately complicit in objectifying the suffering subject. A line exists between the object in front of the camera and the subject behind it. No matter how absorbed the viewer becomes, this invisible line cannot be crossed. It insulates us, separating our physical and psychological space from that of the world onscreen. It is this line that has allowed cinema to so openly turn the pain of others—through sex, violence, or even “poverty porn”—into consumable entertainment. Few media in human history have done this so thoroughly, so publicly.
Worse still are the politics of power embedded in the act of image-making itself. The high cost of live-action production has historically placed the camera in the hands of the powerful. Citizens of the First World, men, those with capital—these are the ones who have stood behind the camera, wielding authorship and control. Meanwhile, the colonized, the impoverished, women, those without capital—these are the bodies relegated to the other side of the lens, reduced to silent subjects. In this schema, the director—who commands both frame and gaze—has been granted a godlike authority. The voice we think we hear from the screen may, in truth, be the voice of power disguised as the voice of the subject. What we imagine to be empathy may in fact be the consumption—and exploitation—of pain.
360 Virtual reality, however, disrupts these established formulas. The boundary between the front and back of the camera collapses. Unlike traditional cinema, in which the viewer looks into a framed world from an external vantage point, VR invites the viewer inside a 360-degree environment. This marks the spatial realization of what was earlier described as voluntary exile. (Footnote 1) Simply being thrown into such a world undermines one of the foundational psychological mechanisms of 2D cinema: voyeurism.
More importantly, this exile operates on an ontological level. In virtual reality, the viewer—the subject of the gaze—loses their body. (Footnote 2) The gaze remains lucid, but the physical body capable of responding to what unfolds disappears. This is not merely disorienting—it is terrifying, akin to the paralysis of a waking nightmare. In this state—stripped of agency, disembodied, and vulnerable—the presence of the suffering other resonates on an entirely different register. It evokes emotions that are far more acute than the passive responses elicited by the objectification of suffering in conventional media. A polar bear losing its habitat, appearing on a flat TV screen, may have become a familiar image, even a cliché. But what if the polar bear were clinging to the melting iceberg beneath our feet—seen not on a distant screen, but through the intimacy of a VR headset? Could we remain indifferent?
Stills from Tearless (Left) and Comfortless (Right)
One might argue that the world seen through VR isn’t real—so what cause is there for such a visceral response? Yet, for the brain, the distinction between real and virtual is inconsequential. Information received through the optic nerve translates into identical electrical signals, regardless of origin. Even when we consciously remind ourselves that what we see is not real, the affect—the emotional and sensory impressions we experience—shakes us to the core. In this immersive environment, where the viewer has no body and no physical separation from the image, the viewer and the subject come to occupy the same ontological dimension. Herein lies the potential for a new schema of empathy, one that transcends objectification.
It was precisely this quality of virtual reality—the collapsing of spatial, psychological, and ethical distance—that served as the catalyst for the making of the Comfortless Trilogy. To recount the story of a South Korean camp town woman who was brutally murdered by a U.S. soldier in 1992 required more than traditional 2D cinema. To represent her death through a format that might again objectify the victim—now under the guise of empathy—was ethically untenable. What does it mean to remember the loneliness of a woman who bled to death over several hours in a single-room tenement in Dongducheon? How do we carry forward the unspeakable violence of that moment, not as a footnote in a forgotten history, but as a living event reawakened each time a viewer enters the world? These unresolved questions compelled the creation of Bloodless, (Footnote 3) and later drove the eight-year process of completing the entire Comfortless Trilogy in virtual reality.
Bloodless, Tearless, Comfortless Posters
Many critics have approached the Comfort Women VR Trilogy through the lens of metaphor and historical symbolism, often focusing on the ghost as narrator. These are valid readings. And yet, they do not touch the core. The heart of the trilogy is not about "seeing" the ghost who speaks from within spaces of trauma. Rather, the essence lies in the audience—the moment we, the viewers, lose our bodies. It is not an experience of ghost-seeing, but of ghost-becoming. And this transformation is only made possible through the ontological exile that VR uniquely enables.
The moment the audience becomes aware of this transformation arrives without warning. In Bloodless, the first work in the trilogy, the viewer begins as an idle observer, taking in the textures of the military camp town with a detached curiosity. Then, something shifts. At the periphery of one’s vision, a woman appears—not just any passerby, not a sex worker, not a soldier. There is something in her presence that draws our gaze. We begin to follow her with our eyes. And yet, she remains elusive, leaving behind only the sound of footsteps. Eventually, within the narrow alleyways, she approaches us directly. Just as we expect to finally behold her, something unexpected happens: in an alleyway too narrow for two bodies to pass, she walks straight through us. If she is a ghost, then so too have we already become one.
Stills from Bloodless
In Tearless (Footnote 4), the second work of the trilogy, the subject no longer merely meets our gaze. The viewer becomes her vocal cords, her breath, her embodied voice. We wander through the ruins of the battlefield hospital, tracing the daily lives of women once detained there. Without warning, we find ourselves standing at the edge of the rooftop, the place where she ended her life. Neither her body nor ours is visible, but her ragged breath does not come from beside us—it resounds from within, somewhere between our ears. Her breathing ceases. Night falls upon the mountains and sky. Down the corridor, her weeping begins—quiet at first, then rising into a cry, into sobs, into grief. And again, we realize: the voice does not echo from outside. It breaks open from within.
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In the ontological space of virtual reality, where subject and viewer occupy the same plane, the subject is no longer an object to be observed. On the contrary, the subject may now look back. This reversal is brought to its fullest expression in Comfortless (Footnote 5), the final installment of the trilogy. There, the dynamic between seer and seen is mediated through the symbolic use of mirrors. In every room of American Town, Inc—a military prostitution complex built around the U.S. Air Force Base in Gunsan—mirrors appear, emphasizing the hyper-voyeuristic nature of the space. Yet when the viewer gazes into these mirrors, their own reflection is absent. The viewers have no body. Night falls, and with it comes the resurgence of her presence, along with the sounds of the town in its heyday. And now, in the mirror where the viewer should be, she appears instead. In her stead, we see a woman—once a military comfort woman—carrying out the rituals of another night of labor. As dawn breaks and she steps out into the yard, the viewer sees her collecting laundry. But then something disquieting happens: she sees the viewer. And she approaches. And she asks a question to the viewer. At this moment—when the subject recognizes the viewer, when the one who is seen becomes the one who sees—the viewer undergoes a reversal of being. A moment of inversion. The ultimate exile.
The fundamental limitation of 2D cinema—its tendency to objectify—finds, in the medium of virtual reality, an unexpected and symbolic answer. It is in this context that the term experience, often used to describe the act of viewing VR works, becomes richly ironic. For it is precisely through the loss of one’s body that one comes to embody the pain of the other. The viewer, having relinquished their physicality and become a ghost—an incorporeal soul—can no longer remain within the safety of their familiar world. The viewer is exiled. But once one has lost the physical boundary of the self, one can become anything. Not only another person, but also any object or element of the world. The potential for becoming—of merging into the other—opens beyond the human. In a world where only vision and consciousness remain, I may become you, a tree, a cat, a rock, a wave, the Earth. And what if I do not merely witness the polar bear perched precariously on a melting iceberg, but become that polar bear? No longer just spatially displaced, but ontologically transformed? What if I were the narrator of We Do Not Part, setting out alone into the snowstorm in search of a bird? What if I too collapsed in the blizzard, only to rise again and continue, unable to abandon the fragile creature? Or more devastating still: what if I were the bird—locked in a cold, dark cage, unaware that anyone was coming, slowly growing cold? This is the visceral power of virtual reality. It renders the pain of others not as spectacle, but as an exile of being—a spatial and ontological displacement so complete that it unsettles the very notion of self. (Footnote 6)
And yet, the most critical point remains this: the world that matters is not the virtual one. What matters is the real world to which we return after removing the VR headset. In that virtual world, you became them. You saw, heard, and felt their pain. But you could do nothing. Now that the gear is off, you have a voice. You have a body. Now, what will you do with them?