Ghostly testimonies driven by VR and AI technologies: The Activism of the Heeum Museum of Military Sexual Slavery by Japan in Daegu, South Korea

Abstract

‘Comfort women’ refers to the estimated 80,000 to 200,000 women who were forced to serve the Japanese imperial army sexually, physically, and mentally during WWII in and beyond the Asia-Pacific region. To commemorate comfort women, the Heeum museum in Daegu, South Korea, organized the on/offline exhibition "Time, Place, and Testimony of Japanese Military Comfort Women Victims" in 2021. In this exhibition, visitors interacted with artificial intelligence (AI) holograms of comfort women. Using virtual reality (VR) technology, the museum also provided virtual spaces for visitors to revisit Daegu based on the memories and testimonies of comfort women. Based on field research that I conducted in South Korea in 2021, this article examines how the museum turned urban landscapes into open wounds so that visitors were haunted by comfort women’s ghostly presences and memories. To this end, focusing on virtual reality technology, this article first discusses what it means to enter the ruins of a deceased comfort woman (Kim Oak-sun)'s home and to experience a comfort woman (Moon Oak-ju)’s spectral presence in the city through her testimony. Second, relying on Freud’s concept of uncanny, this article examines how AI holograms of comfort women and their eternal testimonies create a space where familiarity and unfamiliarity oscillate between presence and absence, life and death, and told and untold stories. By doing so, this article examines how Heeum museum activists narrate (post)colonial pasts and futures by designating virtual and actual places associated with the memories of comfort women.