Hyunjung Son

The Necessity of Public Photography Museum: Seoul Museum of Photography

Sujong Song

The Photographs Collection at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Han Sunjung

The Horse without a Head and the High Heels: Photographs of Han Youngsoo

Sunyoung Kim

The MoPS Collection and its meeting with the international art scene

Haely Chang

Painting through the Camera Lens: Kim Kyujin’s Experiment with Performativity and the Art Market in Early Twentieth Century Korea

As a Korean calligrapher, painter, and photographer, Kim Kyujin (1868-1933) operated the Ch’ŏn’yŏndang Photo Studio and Kogŭm Gallery of Calligraphy and Painting within the same building in Seoul during the late 1910s. In exploring Kim’s interactions between portrait photography and painting in these venues, the discourse of performativity lies at the heart of this presentation.

Kim’s photo studio found its greatest success within the social upheaval in Korea after the abolition of the status system in 1894. Amidst growing public awareness of how status was malleable, performed through education, clothing, and decorum, photography became a means for the self-articulation of new forms of social identity. Kim quickly grasped the performative nature of self-representation through his practice at the photo studio. Once he opened the Kogŭm Gallery, he extended this concept to the marketing of painting. Although painting was once limited to a select elite, as a pioneer in the commodification of painting, Kim liberated the genre from its exclusivity to the upper echelons of society. In Kim’s gallery, the opportunity to possess and appreciate paintings became accessible to anyone who could perform the act of purchasing, regardless of their status.

The performative aspect of photography reveals Kim’s vision of how the system of painting might be reorganized in his ever changing society. Rather than approaching Kim’s career as photographer and painter in isolation, this research highlights the dialectical relationship between the two genres. Photography functioned as an ideological tool for Kim to transform the market for painting by embedding it within a new system of production, exhibition, and circulation.

Stephanie Lee

Photography, gendered labor, and picture postcards of colonial Korea

As photographer and feminist scholar Ann McClintock warns in her scholarship on imperial representation, “Women are typically constructed as the symbolic bearers of the nation.” In analyzing photographs, picture postcards, and paintings of colonial Korean women participating in social and physical labor between 1907-1936, this paper questions how Korean women are constructed as the symbolic bearers of their nation in the context of Japanese imperial rule. It reads the intellectual and visual formulations of “Koreanness” while reconnecting them to the embodied realities of colonial women’s work that underlie gendered conceptualizations of early-twentieth-century imperial race and ethnicity. 

In the context of colonial Korea, gendered labor, feminist nationalisms, and the dissemination of photographic prints have been widely analyzed through the image of kisaeng, or female entertainers. Studying images of Korean women engaged in less symbolically potent forms of labor, such as studying, laundering, and sand sifting, reveals the entwinement of quotidian work and colonial modernity hidden in plain sight. Building upon the art historical historical scholarship of Sunglim Kim, Pak Mi-jong, and Jun Uchida, this paper considers a range of photographs conceived for the Ilbon Chiri Taegye Chosŏn p’yŏn (Japanese Geography and Custom Compendium, Chosŏn) and the ways in which gendering social and physical labor characterized Japanese imperial ambitions in the early twentieth century.

Suzie Kim

Architectural Photography as Visual Propaganda: Images of Korean Architecture in Pyongyang during the Postwar Period

With the rise of Communism in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), the North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung (in office 1948–94) implemented a new social agenda to rebuild Pyongyang after the Korean War (1950-53). From the mid-1950s, Pyongyang benefited from Soviet-aid programs that were developed to reconstruct the deprived city. The Union of Chosŏn Architects, an associate institution of the Korean Workers’ Party, composed of Korean architects trained from Soviet Union worked alongside foreign experts and architects to facilitate the reconstruction effort. The Union began constructing new architectural landmarks, government buildings, industrial facilities, and apartment complexes (munhwajut’aek) in the 1950s and 60s.

This paper questions how Kim Il-sung’s ambitious plan visualised the newly established political regime’s more austere and insular ideology through architectural photography in North Korean magazines. To signify DPRK’s socialist ambitions, these images presented the city as the main capital after re-unification. Photoshoots of nationalist, neoclassical, and Constructivist style architecture were highlighted in newspapers and architectural magazines. Photographs were taken from specific angles and emphasized sculptural properties of architecture to represent Post-war Pyongyang as an upscale socialist capital.

Hye-ri Oh

Repositioning Photography and Realism in a Global Context

The dissemination of realism in Korean photography as it emerged in the 1950s was preceded by and coincided with a series of political, social, cultural incidents, including liberation from Japanese colonial domination, the ideological conflict between South and North Korea, and the Korean War. To respond to the significant historical conditions, Korean photographers drew on their medium’s capacity to fidelity and claimed their commitment to social and historical circumstances. They tried to substantiate the rise of social consciousness through their photographic works. Simultaneously, the widespread photographic trend in Korea coincided with the global trend of realism during the post-World War II period.

Photography has been commonly accepted as the reflection of the real and the tangible. However, such an intrinsic and universal quality cannot be assumed. Historically, the significance of photography has been continuously challenged by its technological changes and shifting historical demands. This paper repudiates realism in photography as a monolithic and universal conception. Instead, it illuminates that the ideas of realism and realist representation in Korea continued to be redefined in relation to changing local discursive frames of anti-colonialism, anti-communism, and the weight on humanism, and extending transnational cultural relationships between Korea and the West, and between Korea and Japan during the post-colonial period. This paper examines how the divergent conceptions of photography tend to be formulated in ways that respond to local cultural and political conditions and to intercultural dialogues in global contexts.

Hyewon Yi

The Staged Self: Chan-Hyo Bae’s Photography

This paper analyzes Korean photographer Chan-Hyo Bae’s series of four photographic tableaux subsumed under the title Existing in Costume, which the artist began while living in the UK. Cross-dressing as British noblewomen emulating the conventions of British portrait painting, Bae, in his first series, Self-Portraits (2005–2007), deploys masquerade to interrogate the artist’s identity as an Asian man living in Western society. Bae’s work addresses his experience of cultural alienation and existential identity crisis provoked by the conflict between his early dreams about Occidentalism and his fabricated “Oriental” femininity as a way to resist the predominantly white heterosexual male culture while still expressing his desire to become British. In these portraits, Bae’s darker skin tone and masculine hands are left as clues to his Asian male identity, while the objects Bae holds metonymically represents his personal, cultural, and gender identity. The subsequent series, Fairytales (2008–2010), Punishment (2011–2012) and Witch Hunting (2013–2016), reveal the artist’s broader cultural critiques through the use of Western fairy tale characters and historical figures. These scenes present the binary power structures of oppressor and oppressed. Oscillating among these roles, Bae is always the protagonist in search of answers about the roots of his alienation and exclusion.

Existing in Costume is deeply concerned with desire and representation, subverting the tradition that was British, European, white, and gender-specific. While Bae can be grouped with many artists who use masquerade and parody as vehicles of gender fluidity and critiques of cultural stereotypes—notably Marcel Duchamp and Yasumasa Morimura—Bae’s work confronts the legacies of racism and colonialism in gentler, and perhaps more tactful, manner.

Boyoung Chang

Imagining the other Korea: Photographs of North Korea

How has North Korea been experienced and how does photography mediate the experience? What do photographs convey about the country, which is often called “the hermit kingdom”? This study examines photographs of North Korea, by both Korean and non-Korean photographers, to discuss various perspectives through which the other Korea is visualized. While the global technological innovations in the 1990s caused increasing availability of imagery of North Korea, such contexts as economic crisis and the development of the nuclear program in the country, the demise of the international Cold War, and the improvement of inter-Korean relations affected the formulation of the viewpoints.

The research includes studies of photographs that document official events and political leaders; provide supposedly unfiltered, rare glimpses of everyday lives of ordinary people; depict border space around North Korea. With the discussion of the representational framework, including the stereotyped perception of the country and the universalization of socio-political contexts, I argue that the photographs embody how North Korea is imagined than betray its truth and reality, which is elusive enough to fully grasp. Furthermore, the images’ consumption shapes and confirms the idea of the country.

Young Min Moon

The Souvenir Photographs from the Military Camptown in South Korea, circa 1980

Over the prolonged armistice of the Korean War, townships began forming around the US military bases concentrated in locations distant from the mainstream Korean society. By exploring the souvenir photographs from the city of Dongducheon near the Demilitarized Zone whose economy has largely been dependent on the military bases, this paper examines the intersectionality of race, gender, and international relations in the context of the Cold War.

The souvenir photographs collected by Kim Yong Tae from commercial photo salons feature American soldiers stationed in South Korea and their temporary partners. The photographs simultaneously present iconographic images of the geopolitics of the divided nation and the personal aspirations. Another set of souvenir photos by Kang Yong Suk, shot in clubs where Korean nationals are prohibited, present US servicemen at leisure, accompanied by Korean female club workers. Underlying the fraternization is the double standard: the simultaneous prohibition of prostitution in general and closely monitored regulation of prostitution by the Korean government by administering VD clinics.

Together, these photographs reveal the complex entanglement of the inter-state security interests, military ambitions, economic needs and sexual gratification through military prostitution. Behind the façade of the flexing of muscles, heavy make-ups and ostentatious fashion, and affectionate embraces, the club workers grapple with their abject poverty, economic dependency, state regulation, racial hierarchy, discriminations and violence, hopes and despairs, all in pursuit of survival and dignity as human beings.

Jeehey Kim

Photography and Korean Identity since the 1970s

Following the realist style that dominated Korean photography of the 1960s and ‘70s, a new generation of photographers emerged to engage in formal experimentation that promoted the expressive potential of their medium. This paper explores the ways in which those younger photographers contextualized marginalized people, while also addressing what was considered authentic Korean tradition, thereby promoting ethno-nationalism to intervene in the discourse of minjung (the people).

The paper also discusses photographers who challenged the imaginary of Korea by revealing the history of state violence and patriarchal culture. And, as the Korean photography scene is male-dominated—and as it is rare to find male photographers addressing the sexual hierarchy and patriarchal structure within Korean culture—I will introduce female photographers who have been producing critical works in the discourse of gender and the myth of homogenous Korean ethnicity.