Embodying Psychoanalytic Healing in Korean Diasporic Identity

This article focuses on Defining Moments (1992), a series of six photographs by the Korean American artist Yong Soon Min. The work visualizes historical trauma as embedded within the Korean American experience, and David L. Eng and Shinhee Han’s psychoanalytic theories of racial melancholia and racial dissociation are applied to the series to uncover and unpack the complexity of the immigration process as relating to identity formation. The analysis finds that the photographic series describes the reparation of the multiple sense of self that results from a diasporic experience, and the reinstatement of the lost objects of originating cultures. This approach widens how psychoanalytic theory could be applied to the formal analysis of artworks describing the impact of immigration and assimilation within an art historical context. Moreover, this analysis establishes Min’s work as being essential to visualizing the impact of late twentieth-century global migrations through artistic output.