Organizer: Frank Hoffmann, Independent Scholar

Chair and Discussant: Kyung Moon Hwang, Yale University

This panel addresses the specific conditions that resulted from the transfer of modernist culture within a colonial and post-colonial power structures. By looking at art, city development, and advertisements, we further examine changes in visuality during the post-liberation decolonialization and globalization process.

Modernism itself is a collective term encompassing the various authentic cultural responses to late 19th and early to mid-20th Century European and American changes in industrialization, sciences, and social life. Informed by Freudian theory as well as Social Darwinism and its belief in permanent, forward-going development of human kind, it reacted to a growing alienation and searched for alternatives to outdated moral values and cultural practices. In Korea, however, modernism had mostly been imported through Japanese colonial institutions, packaged as Japanese colonial policies; it was not an authentic cultural response to political and social change.  The colonial power structure, coupled with the 20th Century West-East flow of modern culture made it all but impossible for Korea to break away from the production of art work, fashion, design, architecture, etc. in the metropoles of Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, New York. This resulted in constant emulation of and comparison with external values adn evaluations, which was thoroughly stifling. Various Korean responses to this import of modernism, however, sought to overcome this dilemma and deal with inherent contradictions, mostly Koreanization attempts, and at least one major attempt in creating alternative modern art and culture. Only the 1980s Minjung Cultural Movement and later post-modern Korean culture, however, represent successful attempts to redefine a Korean avant-garde. This panel will examine the sources, trajectories, and results of various 20th Century modernist developments.

Frank Hoffmann, Independent Scholar

The modern is widely seen "as a known history, something which has already happened elsewhere, and which is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content" (Meaghan Morris). Conventional art history, not surprisingly, then presents the history of modernism as a chart, a genealogy of influences, drawing up a ledger of European and American (in the Korean case European, American, and Japanese) sources used by Asian artists. Such an approach usually results in the consideration to what extent, and how successfully, these artists emulated their purported Western models.

In colonial Korea and Taiwan modernism was introduced and promoted as part of the package of Japanese colonial institutions and their activities (exhibitions, award and censorship systems, education, etc.). As a packaged import of modern styles, all imported at roughly the same time, modernism—unlike in Europe or North America—was not and could not be an authentic cultural response to the major and rapid political, economic, and social changes Koreans lived through. In order to better understand Korean modernism, we will be looking at the complex of colonial modernism and colonial institutions, with focus on the annual Chosôn Art Exhibition (Sônjôn). Thus, we must acknowledge the absence of a Korean avant-garde during this period and the fact that modernism in Korea had little in common with modernism in Europe and America. The aim here is to articulate the inherent dilemma of this colonial form of modernism, to point out how the colonial power structure, the institutional structure, and the make-up of modernism in colonial Korea created such a trap, what this meant for the post-liberation period, and how we might be able to reevaluate and appreciate artwork from this period today.

Jongmin Paek, University of Hamburg, Germany

The Minjung Cultural Movement (minjung munhwa undong) of the 1980s was the first movement in modern Korea that produced a conceptual mapping of the nation's place in the world. Japan experienced several such nativist political and cultural movements over the preceding 150 years, but none as powerful and monolithic as the Minjung movement, and none so late within the history of modernity. What happened to the movement since the 1980s? Did the Minjung Cultural Movement completely phase out with the newly founded democracy of the 1990s? Which elements of the various visual forms through which the Minjung artists articulated and asserted national and personal identity have survived the 80s? What triggered the new generation of artists to shift their creative output from anti-dictatorship and anti-colonialism to an anti-American rhetoric? These inquires will help define the present state of what might be marked Koreanized modernism. Today, an increasing number of artists is steadily turning to political and social realities of the local, national and international landscapes, focusing on issues from local environmental problems to the unification of South and North Korea. In this sense, the various forms of Minjung art continue to create increased awareness among citizens, who are embracing art as a means of power, just as in the 1980s—but with a shift in issues.

The paper will discuss concepts of modernism and post-modernism and its relationship with Koreanized modernism as created by the Minjung Cultural Movement, then and now. It will discuss several artists and their work within this context.

Valerie Gelezeau, Marne-la-Vallée University, France

Contemporary South Korean cities are physically and visually dominated by ap’at’û tanji, or large apartment complexes. Although almost unknown to Korean city-dwellers before the 1960s, these large apartment complexes have been a key element in the constitution of the "modern" Korean city.

What is the connection between these collective housing structures—which are so alien to traditional forms—and modernist urbanist theories that developed in Western countries during the first part of the 20th Century? How has the ap’at’û model progressively become one of the main normative visual traits of South Korean cities? How did western-style housing blocks migrate to Korea on such a large scale and achieve such wide success among local populations? These questions put at stake the relationship between the development of ap’at’û tanji in South Korea and a particular modernist ideology, understood as a system of ideas that values growth and development and associated with a process of economic and social modernization. The paper will pursue this through an analysis of the Korean context using a macro-geographic approach that will facilitate the interpretation of the "visual city."

After a brief critical approach of the concepts of modernism, modernity and modernization in the field of cityscape and architecture, the paper will address the various origins of the ap’at’û tanji model, whose roots are intertwined with modernist western theories of urban planning filtered by Japanese mediation; the paper will then show the crucial role of the 1970s in making the "Koreanized" apartment complex one of the strongest visual norms of the modern South Korean city.

James P. Thomas, University of Texas at Austin

In Korea, as elsewhere, modernism has entailed the simultaneous production and repression of tradition. While "Korean National Cultural Treasures" were codified as such, the likes of shamans and fortunetellers were stigmatized and defamed—or at least until those traditions have become sufficiently remote (as living practices) that they too could be designated "national treasures." Modernism has been highly instrumental to economic and structural development largely through its links to notions of "progress" and "cultural cultivation." Familiarity with western art and music, for example, has become a litmus test of cultural cultivation, a threshold into a culturally astute middle class, constantly escalating the standards and stakes of social sophistication. Thus, even with the challenge to Western authority and questions over the future of Korea that have come in the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis, conventional forms of modernism continue to be embraced in Korea—long after they have become highly circumspect—if not completely discredited—throughout the West. Indeed, however we might challenge its effects on new forms of social expression, modernism has gone from a movement among Korean artists, intellectuals, and social reformers in the early 20th Century to a highly commercialized and massified force that now inundates most of South Korean society. Implicit in current Korean modernist ideology are notions of Social Darwinism that reinforce the lines of cultural division—"Western"/"Asian," "Korean"/"other"—thus rendering western forces of influence stronger and more inevitable than ever. But the key question remains: is the State the primary force behind these developments? Or do we need to look to popular forces as well? By analyzing various forms of Korean art, architecture, and advertising, we will examine the shifting terrain of Korean modernism and its links to emergent forms of social identity and practice.