Accept Me for What I Am, If You Want Me is a public intervention staged on the streets of Incheon, Korea. It employs a vehicle installed with a horn speaker playing a pre-recorded campaign speech in Korean of a fictional female political candidate from Taiwan. I pose as the character and deliver the speech. It drives around the streets aimlessly.
Drawing on the historical parallels between Korea and Taiwan, this project dislocates a commonplace electoral campaign situation from Taiwan in Incheon. Contradicting propaganda’s inherent purposefulness and forcefulness, we see the vehicle wander about and hear the female speaker attempt to translate a message to an ambiguous audience. While an obscure Taiwanese woman politician’s solicitation in a Korean city seems absent of logical locale and meaning, it creates an allegorical space where we are invited to ponder the paradox of a woman’s struggle to be on an equal footing with men in a public sphere. Investigating the state of isolation and the sense of belonging in our search for an identity and a place in today’s society as women, it mediates a specific cultural experience with the memory, history of people locally.