" Our adoptee, our alien "

L'exposition regroupant 25 adoptés coréen d'Europe et d'amérique s'est tenue à la Kyng Hee University Art Gallery F5 du 1 /08 au 30 / 09 à Séoul .

( Photographies : Eric Perriard - Kim Stocker )

Here's an interview from the Korea Herald (lia barrett, mihee-nathalie lemoine interviewed) :

Overseas adoptees feel alienated in birth land ( 7.08.2007 ) .

For Lia Hyun-joo Barrett, a Korean adoptee to the United States, the first shock she received upon coming to Korea eight years ago was that she no longer felt like a minority.

The 23-year-old photographer said she was surprised at "not being perceived as a minority by my appearance, which has always been how I was perceived."

Barrett is currently in Seoul for the fourth time, taking part in a joint exhibition of 25 overseas adoptees who work in the fields of the fine arts, photography, multimedia and installation.
However, Barrett says she feels rejected again, ironically this time in Korea, where many are still unprepared to embrace the nation's deserted children, feeling shame and guilt for the nation's record as "the world's largest exporter of orphans" since the 1950-53 Korean War.
"I still felt like a minority. It's like you're rejected from your homeland but also from your adopted land. It was the kind of this purgatorial state I faced for the first time," she said.
Her black-and-white pictures, capturing the solitude and trauma of adoptees and orphans, are on display at the "Adoptee-Alien: Visions from the Periphery" exhibition being held at the newly-opened Museum of Fine Arts at Kyung Hee University.

Her work contrasts the divided parts of her own life, "an unknowing pre-adoption time and life I have been told and experienced thus far." She said she attempted to "bring the two sides into the same discussion in order to counter the associations of orphans as commodities.
"In doing my own project, meeting Koreans, Korean adoptees, photographing orphans and meeting birthmothers have been very therapeutic for myself as a form of getting reintroduced to Korea, my history, my roots," she told The Korea Herald during the exhibition's opening last Wednesday.

Other artists participating in the exhibition share her feeling of alienation. They are faced with just as many - if not more - challenges in Korean society as they are abroad, where they must deal with their differing appearances and the difficulty of assimilation, they said.
"They were not aware of the adoptees coming back as an adult. They thought we were going to stay in our adopted country and be happy there, maybe never think strongly about Korea or want to come back here," multimedia artist Mihee-Nathalie Lemoine said of how Koreans reacted to her during her first visit to her birth country in 1993.
Lemoine, born in Korea in 1968 and adopted by Belgian parents the following year, is a leading activist for Korean adoptees' rights, based in Montreal, Canada.

She voiced a need for special visas for Korean adoptees to make it easier for them to visit the country and "feel less rejected." It is, after all, about "awareness and understanding," she said.
In 1999, the Korean government began issuing adoptees two-year F-4 visas which can be extended within the country. This change came as a result of a campaign forwarded by an adoptees' rights group, Global Overseas Adoptees' Link, which lobbied for an inclusion of Korean adoptees into a law regarding the status of overseas Koreans.
In the show, Lemoine exhibits a pop-art styled mixed-media work, entitled "Manipulated Past," along with other pieces depicting feelings of being "in-between."
The exhibition is focused on "the implicit space adoptees are deft at navigating: that of the in-between, the insider-outsider, the not-quite-other, and the assumed link between East and West," said curator Kim Stoker, an adoptee herself.
"Without exception, each of the 25 participating adoptee artists in this show cite that their artwork has been influenced by the nature of being a Korean adoptee," she said.

The art show, running through Sept. 7, was part of the weeklong International Korean Adoptee Associations 2007 Gathering, which ended Saturday.
It also included the first-ever international symposium on Korean Adoption Studies, drawing some 700 adoptees from across the world.

On Saturday, about 30 Korean adoptees from abroad and 10 birthmothers held a rally in downtown Seoul calling for the government to abolish international adoption from South Korea.
They began a signature campaign in opposition to overseas adoption.
According to data released by the Ministry of Health and Welfare, the number of both domestic and international adoptions is slowly declining, but overseas adoption still takes a larger portion of that figure.

As of the end of 2006, 1,332 adoptions were carried out domestically, while 1,899 adoptions involved a child moving overseas. In total, Korea has sent some 159,044 children abroad for adoption since 1950s, more than five times that of the domestic figure.
Recent statistics also show that Koreans adopted only 12 disabled children last year, less than 2 percent of those adopted internationally. The male-female ratio of adoption also shows that Koreans adopt twice as many girls as boys. Babies who were born outside of marriage accounted for almost all adoptions.

"For the Korean people, even visiting orphanages, opening up the society to the thought of domestic adoption, exposing them to make it not so taboo, would be very beneficial," Barrett said.
Dae-won Wenger, secretary-general of G.O.A.L., stressed the need for government measures and a changed social atmosphere to ensure that children do not end up in orphanages.
"It's important that the government does not just say, 'Okay. Let's stop international adoption,' but there should be many other measures - persuading families so that they remain together, supporting single mothers - so that families can eventually stay together," said Wenger, who was adopted by Swiss parents in 1972 when he was 6 years old.

Lars Liebing, a Korean adoptee based in Denmark, said he was lucky to find his birthparents 11 years ago. Liebing, whose Korean name is Lee Jae-sun, was adopted with his twin brother in 1975 when they were 5 months old.
"Actually (my birth parents) found us. We were born as triplets, and they kept the last one because he was the weakest one, physically. It was quite a surprise to find out that we had two brothers in Korea."
Liebing, working as a copywriter at Bang & Oulfsen, said he is still having a hard time understanding why Koreans feel sorry for adoptees.
"At the grand opening today, a Korean speaker said he wanted to give us their apology. I don't think it's necessary. That's just the way that was. Korea was back then a very poor country."
At the First International Korean Adoption Studies Research Symposium, experts offered fresh views on how to interpret the size of overseas adoptions in Korea.

Kim Park Nelson, the symposium's organizer and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, said it's up to Koreans to decide whether they will continue permitting international adoption or not.

"I feel really strongly that outsiders, people who are not Korean, cannot make a decision, I hear a lot of American adoption agencies trying to pressure the Korean government to keep it going, but Korea can make its own decision."

By Ahn Hyo-lim

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Here's an article about a protest during the Gathering :

Yonhap News ( 14 . 08. 2007 )

(Yonhap Feature) Korean adoptees from abroad and birth mothers protest overseas adoption By Kim Young-gyoSEOUL, Aug. 5 (Yonhap) - Roh Myung-ja has gotten together with her son every year since 2004, when she was reunited with him after giving him up for adoption about 30 years ago. She is one of thousands of Korean women whose children were adopted overseas.

The 49-year-old Roh believes what she has experienced in the years before her son returned to her should not happen to anyone. Now, she works as a staff member of Mindeulae, (Dandelions), a civic group of South Korean parents whose children were adopted overseas and who oppose the nation's adoption system, which sends thousands of orphaned and abandoned children abroad. "We hope that no other mothers have to go through the pain and suffering that we went through. Overseas adoption leaves deep-rooted scars both on the birth mothers and the children," Roh said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency on Saturday. About 30 Korean adoptees from abroad and 10 birth mothers, including Roh, came together Saturday for a rally in downtown Seoul calling for the government to abolish international adoption from South Korea. The mothers and adoptees were not all related to each other. They held up picket signs that read, "Real Choices for Korean Women and Children,""Korean Babies Not for Export" and "End Overseas Adoption."A signature-gathering drive also began to express opposition to overseas adoption. The civic group plans to collect one million signatures nationwide.

Government figures show that there have been about 87,500 domestic adoptions, versus 158,000 international adoptions, since the end of the Korean War in 1953. In 1977, Roh had to give up her 11-month old child, and had no idea that her son had gone to the United States. "I was literally shocked when I got a phone call in 2004 saying that my son is coming from the U.S. to look for me," Roh said. Roh said that no one asks or is responsible for what happens to the children after they were adopted overseas. "My son luckily turned out fine. But who knows what other kids undergo?" she said. "The day when I took my son shopping for the first time, he said to me, 'This is my first time in my life that I went shopping without caring that I am not white,'"Roh's son, who was not able to make a trip this week to Seoul from South Dakota, wholeheartedly supports her actions, she said. Jaeran Kim was one of the adoptees from overseas who joined in Saturday's protest. A social worker focusing on domestic adoption in the U.S., Kim was adopted from South Korea by a U.S. family in 1971. "When people talk about the adoption, they don't care about how the child grows up or how it affects the birth mothers," she said. "The adoption system is too much dominated by the adoptive families and the adoptive agencies."Kim stressed that she did not have negative experience as a Korean adoptee in the U.S. and is in a good relationship with her adoptive parents. "It is not a matter of whether you had a good experience or bad experience as an adoptee. The adoption system goes way beyond that. It works within a political, institutional structure of society," she said.

Kim, who was on her third visit to South Korea, has not been able to find her birth parents yet, but plans to live in South Korea with her husband and children for a while in the future. "Adoption does not only affect me as an adoptee, but it also affects my family -- my husband and children. My children do not have their grandparents in South Korea, and they lost their part of the Korea culture, too," she said. She argued that a child should be adopted by the extended family or extended community at least, and that international adoption should be the last option. South Korea, the world's 11th-largest economy, was the fourth country in 2004 following China, Russia and Guatemala to send the most children to the U.S. for adoption, according to a research paper by Peter Selman, a British scholar. ygkim@yna.co.kr