Ah, “Cinderella” — the classic tale of a young woman rising above the unjust oppression of her evil step-relatives to achieve greatness. In Zummarella, an exhibition featuring Min Kim Park’s photographs and videos on display at Emory’s Visual Arts Gallery, the Cinderella is no longer a fantastic character or a celebrity, but instead any woman. And instead of marrying Prince Charming or a heavyweight boxing champion title, she attains something greater: self-actualization.

Park, a Korean-born artist that now works in Chicago, gave a talk following the opening.

She explained that the term “zummarella” is a blend of azuma, the conservative Korean notion of a housewife, and the timeless fairy tale Cinderella. The azuma was known for humility and self-sacrifice, placing the concerns of her family’s welfare above her own. In a rapidly modernizing and globalizing world, Korean woman have reclaimed their gender’s status, championing the super-mom-and-career-woman deserving of self-reward for her accomplishments.

Park’s series extends far beyond the content on display in the Visual Arts Building.

For her earlier work she captured Korean women in their homes, allowing them to chose their backdrops, props and poses that they felt best described them. This exercise resulted in quiet images of strong women staring straight at the camera, poised in an environment where they felt empowered and accomplished. While male artists have depicted women as sexual objects, Park allowed women to reclaim their own bodies and sexuality by allowing her subjects to direct their own poses and photographs.

The photographs in the gallery refer to the notion of the zummarella obliquely, yet these images are altogether striking. The exhibition consists of several large-format photographs hung minimally on the walls with pins. With only one exception, each photograph consists of two young (non-Korean) women arrested in distorted poses. In one, a sharp-featured woman stretches her arms and legs out in a Superman stance, resting atop the back of her backwards-facing companion. In other photographs, both subjects appear equally powerful in dynamic and dramatic combat stances. In all images, the women’s brilliantly clad bodies are intertwined against a stark black background.

The costume and poses of these zummarella, now taken out of the context of Korea and applied to America’s younger generation, introduce a new element: superheroes. The primary colors of their trendy, mix-and-match wardrobe are a direct reference to the underwear-over-pants and cape-toting icons of American culture. Not to mention their poses: many of them are taken straight out of “Spiderman” and “Batman” movies and television specials.

Appropriating the traditionally male role of the superheroes, Park empowers her young female subjects in her oeuvre. Then again, these women do not stand on their own, often forcing one in the pair to be submissive to realize the other woman’s heroic stance. Despite their prominence in popular culture, the superhero is fictional. She invokes the truth that women, despite all of the strides made during the 20th century in women’s rights, still face obstacles in achieving their goals. Park’s work asks us: Is the idea of the super-mom-and-career woman a myth? Is the zummarella an impossible achievement in our society?

Two videos and a projected comic-book strip supplement the photographs to problematize the issue of the zummarella as a superhero even further. We watch two subjects struggle as they attempt to mold their bodies together to create the flying pose. The dialogue chronicles their light-hearted, yet still salient, bickering: “It’s not about you,” mutters the woman who assumes the more authoritative superhero position. The comic-strip is a humorous explanation of how to attain the poses in the photographs.

Park said she wants to create a body of work that is “accessible to a greater number of people.” Park gladly receives criticism from colleagues, her work is too obvious, because it signifies that she is successful in engaging her audience in conversation on woman’s status in our contemporary culture. The photographs on display in the Visual Arts Building until Jan. 24, wants us to dream that the empowered woman ideal is more than just a fairy tale.

— Contact Desi Gonzalez.