Hyungji Park
Yayoi Kusama’s notorious New York “happenings” of the late 1960s – nude bodies painted in polka dots, staged orgies that famously “failed as orgies” – seem an unlikely point of entry into Han Kang’s quiet, devastating novel The Vegetarian (2007). And yet Kusama haunts the novel’s middle section, “Mongolian Mark,” in which an unnamed video artist attempts to recreate Kusama’s experimental film Self-Obliteration (1967) by painting flowers on his sister-in-law Yeong-hye’s naked body and then filming himself having sex with her. Is there any element of consent in this episode of coerced sex? How much does Yeong-hye understand about what is happening? This essay argues that Kusama’s philosophy of “self-obliteration,” the process by which the self dissolves into the surrounding world, is key to unpacking the question of sexual consent posed in “Mongolian Mark” and to understanding Yeong-hye’s phytomorphic desire. Drawing on Kusama’s happenings, her 1950 self-portrait, and Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic reading of Kusama’s hallucinatory identification with flowers, the essay demonstrates that phytomorphism is Yeong-hye’s version of self-obliteration, a nonviolent, slant resistance that allows her, like Kusama, to be restored to infinity.