[CoAR] - [Gina Kim] The Silence of a Dead Life Speaks Only Through ‘Silence’

Published November 20th, 2023 - Source

By Byun Hae-bin, Film Critic (limbohb@ccoart.com)

COMFORTLESS Trilogy — BLOODLESS, TEARLESS, COMFORTLESS

In Bloodless (2017), night falls in an instant. The streets empty out; the occasional passerby vanishes, and the urban landscape collapses inward—narrowing from alleys into suffocating interiors. Someone appears in a space where no one should be. As the film progresses, its spaces grow increasingly constricted, leading not only into enclosed rooms, but ultimately toward the irreversible stillness of death—marked by the stark image of blood spreading across the floor.

This progression is not merely a descent into emotional discomfort or the oppressive aftermath of a violent, solitary death. For viewers compelled to follow the trace of a life that should not have to haunt in order to be seen—a life once fully lived in a place designed to be unlivable—what unfolds is not just a narrative, but a spatial condition. A haunted density emerges: a compression of spectral presences, each demanding visibility in spaces long engineered to erase them. Bloodless does not simply evoke ghosts—it constructs the geography in which they insist on appearing.

This overloading matters precisely because it misaligns with the surface of what is perceived. In Gina Kim’s ‘U.S. military comfort women’ trilogy—Bloodless (2017), Tearless (2021), and Comfortless (2023)—space is emptied to the extreme. Whether it is the room in Dongducheon where a woman was murdered by a U.S. soldier, the detention center that confined women under suspicion of disease, or the fabricated enclave of American Town, deliberately constructed by the South Korean state to serve the U.S. Air Force, each site functions less as backdrop and more as a charged void. Within these voids, ghostly figures hover—not with theatrical menace, but with a muted, irreversible exhaustion.

These apparitions do not announce themselves with spectacle; they do not seek recognition through horror. Instead, they exceed even the perceptual frame of danger. They drift through space with bodies dulled by repetition and ruin—numb, persistent, and alone in their pain. They are not metaphors, not visual proxies for anonymous suffering. They are reminders of historical fact: they lived, they endured, and they did so in places that offered no home, no inscription of belonging. Their presence, quiet and absolute, insists on a reckoning—not only with the violence that ended their lives, but with the systems that rendered them invisible while they were still alive.

Living Spaces, Immersion as Excavation

The moment a being draws attention is often when it is dying, or wearing the face of ruin. Alongside this, attempts to reach the underside of such violence tend to morph into another form of violence sustained by the same system. The VR (Virtual Reality)-based trilogy thus reflects Gina Kim’s ethical considerations. The three works shown in “YOUR SILENCE IS A MIRROR – Gina Kim VR Trilogy” grapple with the impossibility of touching such pain and the limits of uniform representation. These films do not remain within the stable distance granted by the act of “seeing,” but rather prioritize the viewer’s active entry into these environments. Not via a flat screen, but through a body that comes into contact with a virtual space—a body that registers reactions and sensations. The VR trilogy guides viewers not simply to “see,” but to experience and inhabit an immersive space. Yet the realness and embodied experience Kim seeks cannot be achieved through technology alone. Despite possessing the diligence and nimbleness to survey the entire 360-degree landscape, viewers still miss what happens in blind spots beyond their field of vision. Or, constrained by the inability to use close-ups and cuts, they find themselves stuck in an angle within a wide space, facing a specific image only in flattened form—a contradiction inescapable within this spatial design.

This is closely related to the next point. The “immersion” Kim attempts with this trilogy is not merely about creating environmental conditions. It demands that we accept the limitations and impossibilities of immersion itself. Within this ethical framing, the space the viewer can inhabit is born. While watching the films, we may try to follow the slow, weary steps of a ghost—yet we always fall behind or lose sight altogether (BLOODLESS, TEARLESS). Kim’s ghosts lead us in only to vanish, offering no intimacy. They appear, disappear, and die—without cognitive dissonance, without detouring through backstory, without revealing inner life. One might infer that when immense anger and grief build up without release, they eventually condense into something that can’t take on any expressive form. Therefore, the ghosts, with their unfeeling faces, do not plead for help or wait for salvation. As such, we—the viewers of the present—find ourselves helpless while someone dies nearby (BLOODLESS, TEARLESS), unable to open doors that lead to danger, or break down the walls that confine them (BLOODLESS, TEARLESS, COMFORTLESS). All we can do is wander through these vividly rendered scenes of past trauma—either doing nothing or becoming ghosts ourselves, wandering from corner to corner in their place.

Gina Kim, through her VR films, brings the viewer to the maximum threshold of agency and participatory positioning—only to then make them realize, at the very peak of cognitive readiness and desire to act, that in fact, nothing can be done. This gap in immersion signifies something important: that such immobility itself is part of the process of restoring truths that did exist. The sense of reality each film offers originates from a specific kind of distance—one that does not distort the facts it depicts. 

In conveying the fact that the U.S. military comfort women are (or were) there, Gina Kim does not attempt to offer resolution or answers. Though the films begin from questions that the state has ignored or dismissed, they do not propose responses. Rather than responding through images to the multitude of questions that might arise from the actual events, the films compel the viewer to take ownership of those questions and confront them on their own. For example, in the final scene of BLOODLESS, we are “inside” an old, filthy room. We must gradually come to accept that we cannot leave this room, nor can we lock the door. Soon, we witness—at length—blood seeping from a pile of blankets. To emphasize: we are not merely facing this on a screen, but coexisting with the unfolding death within that space. The only thing that allows us to sense the passage of time is the process of blood slowly expanding across the floor, in a room where no signs of life remain. The blunt instruments and contaminated objects that retain their brutal form, lingering quietly in the present, evoke a sense of horror and sorrow through their raw naturalness. What is replayed here is the “spiritual death” that recurs still today. These are the elements that compose the landscape of this place.

To make viewers experience those very hours in 1992, during which the actual victim died—not by guessing what she may have felt, nor by explaining it as though it were known, but by allowing each viewer to feel a specific bodily awareness inside the space, and to put that into their own words. That act of articulation then becomes a memory in the viewer’s own experience. When Gina Kim describes the detention center as evoking an “instinctive feeling that something should not have happened,” she is referring to her own bodily sensation upon entering the space. If that was how her body responded, then perhaps these films are not merely captured scenes recorded by the camera, but rather tasks assigned by that same “instinct.” The film becomes a space meant to capture the liveliness of embodied sensation and reaction. By opening up a space the body can enter, the non-material nature of pain, once intangible, takes form—and comes to be accepted as something real. 

When Existence Exists Without Voice or Body

On another front, the images in the trilogy desperately stir the imagination. TEARLESS overlays spectral visuals onto what might otherwise be dismissed as merely an abandoned present-day site (the detention center for those deemed unfit). Within this space, previously empty, appear ghostlike traces—meager meals, figures lying under blankets, makeshift medical tools likely used for treating venereal disease, and stains of blood. These silent objects simply emerge without declaration, yet the faint impressions they invoke sometimes evoke an awareness as vivid and tactile as precise language and skin.

The ghost that once led us wordlessly through place in BLOODLESS now speaks without a body in TEARLESS. The space fills with the residue of violence; the ghost disappears. Yet here, the film arrives at a rooftop edge, in the middle of heavy rain pouring into a collapsed interior, and offers only the sound of a ghost’s sobbing or breath holding back emotion. Then, the viewer inevitably senses, instinctively, that someone once leapt from that rooftop to escape. To weep to the point of disappearance—what could that mean, except that I myself am now inside that space, sensing it on behalf of those bodiless figures? At times, one might even feel that the weeping, which only stimulates sound, is coming from the VR headset wearer themselves. Standing inside the real location, peering into a place with no outside, the viewer slips into the illusion: “I am the one crying.” Such fictive convergence is not purely subjective—after all, death (or states akin to it) can only be felt through silence. Up to COMFORTLESS, Gina Kim maintains a stance of rendering the real presences who cannot easily speak or be spoken through, using silence rather than character-based expression. Put differently: perhaps the women of the past, once invisible to the gaze of the present, can only be encountered as the invisible ghosts of the now. A reciprocal movement between past and present meant to break concealment; an equivalence between reappearance and revival. Thus, the mirror in Gina Kim’s cinema does not reflect the ghost as an object to fear—but instead illuminates how all humans, in some deep place, wish to avoid terrifying truths. 

The ghost in COMFORTLESS roams through present-day Gunsan’s American Town—through its salons, restaurants, karaoke bars, and living quarters—marking coordinates as it moves. These sites alone already foreshadow what we might expect. But Gina Kim goes further, asking the ghost to actively do something, and the ghost momentarily shows us what once happened in that space. As previously mentioned, BLOODLESS and TEARLESS convey systemic oppression and violence through the locations alone—via the materiality of things other than women’s bodies: the sound of heels on pavement at night, torn clothing, disgusting trash and ambient noise, or rain as a metaphor for weeping. These elements could exist across other times and places, and therefore function as indices for real-world problems. This is possible because the ghost is bound to the place—because, in Kim’s world, place precedes existence and defines the being within it. To exist in a precarious space is to become precarious oneself. Precarity, after all, often carries a strange allure that draws the eye. In COMFORTLESS, however, the ghost both manifests visibly and disrupts that allure by surrounding herself with the dangerous, ominous, and repulsive—like the shouting and cursing of drunk U.S. soldiers—which become an overwhelming external noise. In doing so, the ghost interrupts the very mechanics of how fascination operates, shaking the ground of what had become a paralyzed space. Time splits between past and present. A life once dead begins to move.

Then, at the end of the ghost’s path—after passing through the red-light district—it suddenly becomes clear: what once seemed like a trail of haunting was in fact someone’s pattern of daily life. In the morning light of COMFORTLESS, after the night has lifted, we see laundry hanging in the narrow alleys. Undergarments hung out in the open, fluttering idly in the breeze. A mundane, sparse order that stands in contrast to the gaudy, dangerous costumes of night. A kind of routine carved out inside an abnormal system. A reminder that this was not just a place where someone died—but where someone lived. Still, after three films and three locations, what remains is not a moral lesson but a confrontation with what has been lost. For the first and final time, the ghost turns directly toward the viewer and asks, “Who are you?” A question that carries much within it. Why are you here? What did you encounter? What kind of being have you become? Perhaps these are questions meant to be asked to the ghost—but she doesn’t wait for an answer. Her form dissolves into particles. The film lifts the vanishing, dissolving sensations of place up into real time. And so, we leave the experience having lost at least one thing. If not more, then at the very least, we come away with a new sensation of loss, and must return to reality carrying it. 

Gina Kim reveals the issue of drift—arising from the relationship between body and emotion—as the figure of silence in works such as Gina Kim’s Video Diary (2002) and In Front of Her House (2003), tracing how that silence opens a path toward desire (Never Forever, 2007). If, at the edge of combative desire, the character’s loneliness pierces the surface of a blocked life, then vagrancy here takes on the form of a kind of tour—excavating the old, the historical, the spatial, the remembered, and the entangled, like artifacts (Faces of Seoul, 2009). Therefore, the emptiness felt in the streets of the trilogy—where desire is cut off—does not originate from any liberating sense of abandonment or nostalgia. Instead, it comes from the uncanny fact that the smudges and fragments of an indeterminate past remain intact, preserved within those places. This fact invites viewers to confront the history that has refused to restore the presence of the ghost. A certain force—undispersed by the power of time, equally applied to all—still lingers. And it is in sensing that force that the desolate landscapes are unearthed and made visible.

—By Byun Hae-bin, Film Critic (limbohb@ccoart.com)