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Contextualising the 20th-century copies of Koguryŏ-era paintings at the Ferenc Hopp Museum of Asiatic Art in Budapest, one can see that the purpose of making the copies was not only to display and preserve cultural heritage, but also to show that the newly established North Korean state saw in these paintings a renewal of its own national art. The increased attention to ancient wall paintings began with the colonial Japanese, who applied their newly learned scientific methods to archaeological research, uncovering hidden treasures in their colonised territories and expanding their knowledge of their newly acquired territories by making copies of the murals. After the liberation from Japanese rule, North Koreans used the new discoveries to forge a new national identity and a connection to their past, not only focusing on history but also developing new artistic methods (e.g., the large-scale revival of traditional ink painting, communal artworks) while studying and copying them. When copying the paintings, not only the consciously created forms were depicted, but also the damage, so comparing copies made by several artists in different periods over several decades is an important way of tracing the changes in the condition of the paintings. The mass production of reproductions of paintings (often for international use) for exhibitions in Central and Eastern Europe underlines the propagandistic purpose of these paintings and their intention to express the national identity of the time. The visibility of Korean culture in Hungary, represented through North Korean art, has been supported by a strong and conscious cultural policy, especially after the Korean War, when North Korea used its cultural products to promote and publicise Korean art in Central and Eastern Europe, and engaged in fundraising activities to rebuild the country, which had emerged from the ruins of the Korean War in the 1950s. Following conflicts between China and the Soviet Union, diplomatic relations and cultural exchanges between North Korea and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe became increasingly active between 1956 and the 1960s. Artists from North Korea became inspired by 19th century folk and historical art from Central and Eastern European art museums, and instead of the political propaganda images of the early 1950s, they began to produce artworks depicting national, ethnic and local elements. Thus, in the mid-1950s, there was a shift from politically charged propagandistic, anti-imperialist objects (such as political posters) to objects illustrating national art, presenting copies of artworks considered representative of North Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Widely called the "hermit kingdom," North Korea is one of the most reclusive countries in the world. In particular, for South Korea, although its past and present are deeply entwined with North Korea, physical access to the country is strictly denied. This study focuses on how contemporary South Korean artists have constructed North Korea as a liminal space in which reality and fiction, past and present collide. It analyzes contemporary artworks that attempt to de-border the other Korea. These works include Kwon Hayoun's Model Village (2014), a video centered on a reconstruction of an uninhabited North Korean propaganda village on the edge of the DMZ, and Park Chan-kyong's Sets (2000), a series of slides of a North Korean film studio that recreated the streets of Seoul and a South Korean movie set that included a replica of P'anmunjŏm. Based on the unique relationship between the two Koreas, the paper argues that contemporary South Korean art embodies the elusive reality of North Korea that defies the clear understanding of its truth. In addition, it shows that the ambiguous representation of North Korea is a compelling reminder of the long history of national division and the psychological and physical distance between the two Koreas. This de-bordering expands the epistemological frame through which to perceive Korea beyond that of a binary Cold War order framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Situating the art of Lisa Myeong-Joo in a history of South Korean–Australian politics and cultural relations, it is possible to see her series Self-Portrait of a Circle as an interrogation into the limits and imaginative potentials of the adoptee body in contesting the bodies of the nation-states of South Korea and Australia. In this essay, I argue that Lisa Myeong-Joo consciously plays with ethno-nationalist conceptions of representation and appearance through “performative anonymity” and equivocation toward place. By interrogating the dominant biological and cultural essentialist paradigms of family and state, Lisa Myeong-Joo’s practice contributes to ongoing scholarship on the Korean diaspora.

Since Buddhism appeared around the fifth century BCE, it has established itself as a discipline that gives philosophical teachings to many people beyond religion. After the twentieth century, Buddhism has gone beyond being a representative ideology of the East and continues to be a social and cultural inspiration for many people worldwide. By focusing on the artworks of three Korean artists, Jeong Hwa Choi, Kimsooja, and Do Ho Suh, this study explores in detail how Buddhism inspires artists to visualize self-reflection and transnational identity and how traditional Buddhism contributes to the universalization, conceptualization, and communication of contemporary art. It also discusses how Buddhism is being reinterpreted and visualized by contemporary artists today, becoming a work of art for the public, not art for the few. Their artworks, inspired by Buddhism, show how contemporary art shows humanist, participatory, empathic, diverse, and global aspects and conveys multilayered messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of the ‘Amorepacific Project for the conservation of Korean pictorial art’ (2018–2023) at the British Museum, three traditional Korean paintings have been investigated with the aim of supporting their conservation and obtaining information about the dyes used in the mounting textiles and other mounting elements. The paintings include a rare example of late 18th-century traditional Korean portraiture (accession number 1996,0329,0.1); a late 19th-century two-panel screen silk painting of Pyeongsaeng-do-Scenes of life (accession number 2016,3028.1); and a late 19th-century twelve-panel screen silk painting representing the Five Confucian virtues (accession number 1957,1214,0.1). The mounting textiles were investigated non-invasively by using digital microscopy and fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), and the results guided a minimally invasive sampling campaign. Fourteen samples were analysed by using high-pressure liquid chromatography coupled with diode array and tandem mass spectrometry detectors (HPLC-DAD-MS/MS), leading to the identification of the natural dyes indigo, sappanwood (Biancaea sappan, formerly Caesalpinia sappan), amur cork tree (Phellodendron amurense) and safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) in the mounting elements of the 18th-century portrait. These results confirmed some of the non-invasive observations and were in agreement with the production date of the painting. Both natural and synthetic dyes were identified in the mounting textiles of the panel screens. Among the synthetic dyes, fuchsin (C.I. 42510), methyl violet 3B (C.I. 42536), methyl blue (C.I. 42780) and benzopurpurin 4B (C.I. 23500) were identified. These are early synthetic dyes first synthesised between the 1860s and the 1880s, suggesting that the silk textiles are likely to have been dyed in the last part of the 19th century.

In the framework of the 'Amorepacific Project for the conservation of Korean pictorial art' (2018–2023) at the British Museum, three traditional Korean paintings have been investigated with the aim of supporting their conservation and obtaining information about the dyes used in the mounting textiles and other mounting elements. The paintings include a rare example of late 18th-century traditional Korean portraiture (accession number 1996,0329,0.1); a late 19th-century two-panel screen silk painting of Pyeongsaeng-do-Scenes of life (accession number 2016,3028.1); and a late 19th-century twelve-panel screen silk painting representing the Five Confucian virtues (accession number 1957,1214,0.1). The mounting textiles were investigated non-invasively by using digital microscopy and fibre optic reflectance spectroscopy (FORS), and the results guided a minimally invasive sampling campaign. Fourteen samples were analysed by using high-pressure liquid chromatography coupled with diode array and tandem mass spectrometry detectors (HPLC-DAD-MS/MS), leading to the identification of the natural dyes indigo, sappanwood (Biancaea sappan, formerly Caesalpinia sappan), amur cork tree (Phellodendron amurense) and safflower (Carthamus tinctorius) in the mounting elements of the 18th-century portrait. These results confirmed some of the non-invasive observations and were in agreement with the production date of the painting. Both natural and synthetic dyes were identified in the mounting textiles of the panel screens. Among the synthetic dyes, fuchsin (C.I. 42510), methyl violet 3B (C.I. 42536), methyl blue (C.I. 42780) and benzopurpurin 4B (C.I. 23500) were identified. These are early synthetic dyes first synthesised between the 1860s and the 1880s, suggesting that the silk textiles are likely to have been dyed in the last part of the 19th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 17 January 1981, during a cold Winter Day at the height of an authoritarian military regime, a group of South Korean artists named " Baggat Misul [Outdoor Art]" gathered around a riverbank outside Seoul to interact with nature and called it " jayeon misul [nature art]." A young woman artist Yong-sin Suh performed an act the group called "a lark," during which Suh alternated with two male artists in reading aloud sections of newspaper articles. These unhinged, free-spirited acts were inspired by the Korean folk theater tradition of pansori (traditional Korean musical opera), and kut (traditional Korean shamanistic exorcism). Korean shamanism by way of the mudang kut rituals has historically been a Korean indigenous belief intertwined with Buddhism and Taoism and stood as a counterforce to the mainstream nationalist neo-Confucian and imperial Christian conservative legacy that oppressed women and the nonconforming gender-neutral community in South Korea. The paper analyzes the Korean shamanistic elements that were utilized in performative, conceptual, and nature art practices by South Korean artists in the post-WWII period to the present, within the framework of the intersection of Korean feminism, art activism, and shamanistic spirituality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To date, one of the first video artworks by and about Zainichi (ethnic Koreans living in Japan), Zainichi artist Soni Kum's three-channel video work Morning Dew (2020) is based on her interviews with sixteen Zainichi Koreans who went to North Korea during the repatriation project (1959–1984) and came back to Japan, and their descendants. I argue that Morning Dew , deliberately fails to give a coherent Zainichi representation, and in doing so, locates Zainichi experience in a context of the global diaspora, especially through the incongruent video montages on three screens, having animals lead the narrative, and filming the void. Queer imagination of failure helps explain the ways in which Kum's aesthetic choices and her lived experience intersect. Responsive to the bifurcated gender discourse that threatens the legibility of queer lives, queer failure helps to unveil the structural polarization in identity-based knowledge formation and explicate Kum's art of failing as a means to convey a portrayal more faithful to the diasporic life of Zainichi Koreans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines visual arts that represent the mass killings of unarmed civilians by the state before and during the Korean War (1950–1953). It analyses three South Korean artists, Kang Yo-bae, Suh Yongsun and Jeon Seung-il, who produced paintings that made direct reference to the grievous and unjust civilian deaths, a taboo subject that is still controversial in a society bound by the unfinished war. This article seeks to contribute to the critical inquiry into the long-delayed yet urgent issue of historical injustice from the perspective of visual representation. It draws attention to the following questions: how the artists establish relations with the violent past, vicariously and retrospectively; how they represent the grievous deaths in critical, imaginative and affective modes of visual expression; and how their paintings participate in a socially engaged act of ethical witnessing. The article further considers how their works are in dialogue with and simultaneously depart from the official investigative attempts in approaching the notion of truth. It argues that the paintings enact a communicative practice of mourning that mediates the living and the dead, without anticipating premature reconciliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines art works that problematise the contested memories of the Vietnam War in South Korea. The collective memories of the Vietnam War in South Korea are contested by the official memory, constructed by the military regime, and the counter-memories, generated by activists who call for Korea to apologise to the Vietnamese people for the atrocities committed by Korean soldiers. IM Heung-soon's publication This War (2009) and the single-channel video Reborn II (2018) present memories of South Korean veterans and Vietnamese rape victims. Kim Seokyung and Kim Eunsung's statue Vietnam Pieta (2015–2016) was installed in Vietnam and Korea as a gesture of apology for Korean soldiers' rape and murder of Vietnamese women and children. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs' concept of collective memories and Jacques Derrida's conditional apology, this article examines how these art projects represent the contested memories of the Vietnam War in Korea and the conditional apology suggested by Korean activism, relating them to the redress movements of historical justice for wartime atrocities in a transnational context. Analyses of these artworks suggest aesthetic, ethical and political limitations and possibilities in representing memories of wartime sexual violence and (un)conditional apologies in visual art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I discuss Korean artists' multi-layered, internal motives for engaging in artistic practices: their artistic devotion derives from their desires for moral self-cultivation, self-enjoyment, and self-forgetting. I speculate that these tendencies were intensified in Korean cultural traditions by distinctive sociopolitical circumstances of the Joseon period under the dominance of Neo-Confucianism, such as a fixed social hierarchy and Sino-centrist perspectives. This interpretation provides a useful lens for better understanding contemporary Korean artistic practices in both the fine and popular arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean art and music have a long history, but aesthetic research on them has only been around for a little over a hundred years. Critiques and discourses on traditional arts such as poetry, calligraphy, and painting can be traced back to the Joseon or even Goryeo dynasties, but the modern discussion on the common features of Korean aesthetics was conducted much later than that in Western Europe, where the field of aesthetics was established in the mid to late eighteenth century. Early aestheticists who tried to explain aesthetic consciousness in Korean culture and art converged on the concept of Jayeon , which can be translated provisionally as "nature," seemingly diverging from western aesthetics' focus on the concept of "beauty." Jayeon shares the same Chinese characters as ziran (自然), an early Daoist concept, but jayeon in a Korean aesthetic context does not appear to be limited to the connotation of its Chinese origin. This article unpacks the different ways in which jayeon captures the key characteristics of Korean art and aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Park Soo Keun (朴壽根 Pak Sugŭn, 1914-1965) was a modern artist active in Korea from the later Japanese colonial period of the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. Despite the poverty and adversity it caused him, Park persisted in producing paintings of ordinary people, including the poor, that he observed in his everyday life. His use of local color and the distinctive textures of his multilayered oil pigments led to his posthumous recognition by Korean critics and American art collectors as one of the most “Korean” artists. Park’s paintings often present women as the main subjects. His interest in the rediscovery and restoration of Sin Saimdang 申師任堂 (1504-1551), who emerged in the 1960s as a significant female icon with the traits of a wise mother, talented artist, and learned noblewoman, is epitomized in his visual depiction of female figures. Park’s silent, serious representations of Korean mothers, symbolizing suffering and self-sacrifice for the sake of the country’s next generation, evoke nationalistic sentiments, admiration, memories, and nostalgia. Through investigating the construction and representation of such a Korean female identity in the social and cultural context of Park’s time, this study elucidates the current enthusiastic reception of Park’s paintings in Korea and the growing international recognition of a distinctive Korean style in studies of modern Korean art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Park Soo Keun (朴壽根 Pak Sugŭn, 1914-1965) was a modern artist active in Korea from the later Japanese colonial period of the early 1930s to the mid-1960s. Despite the poverty and adversity it caused him, Park persisted in producing paintings of ordinary people, including the poor, that he observed in his everyday life. His use of local color and the distinctive textures of his multilayered oil pigments led to his posthumous recognition by Korean critics and American art collectors as one of the most “Korean” artists. Park’s paintings often present women as the main subjects. His interest in the rediscovery and restoration of Sin Saimdang 申師任堂 (1504-1551), who emerged in the 1960s as a significant female icon with the traits of a wise mother, talented artist, and learned noblewoman, is epitomized in his visual depiction of female figures. Park’s silent, serious representations of Korean mothers, symbolizing suffering and self-sacrifice for the sake of the country’s next generation, evoke nationalistic sentiments, admiration, memories, and nostalgia. Through investigating the construction and representation of such a Korean female identity in the social and cultural context of Park’s time, this study elucidates the current enthusiastic reception of Park’s paintings in Korea and the growing international recognition of a distinctive Korean style in studies of modern Korean art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at the following questions: how did Goryeo celadon; which flourished during the Goryeo dynasty and was known to contemporary China and Japan, suddenly drew interest from Korean and Japanese scholars in the modern period when it started to be collected and reproduced, and even exhibited around the world; and how was it perceived during the Joseon dynasty. It examines the contemporary views and perceptional changes towards Goryeo celadon by reviewing historical records, collections of literary works, diaries, and other materials written by Joseon literati who would play a role in linking their Goryeo predecessors and their own successors in the modern world. The accounts which show the interest, the appreciation, and the collecting of Goryeo celadon are concentrated in historical records and literary collections produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through those writings, it is understood that Goryeo celadon was thought of as something exquisite or elegant, profound, and authentic that could hardly be mimicked. Meanwhile, literati texts written in the late Joseon period describe the Goryeo celadons as physical objects, that were either owned by the authors or seen by them and remembered with specific images. In the late nineteenth century, Goryeo celadons were even selected as royal gifts for diplomacy. This study finds that unlike previous studies which have emphasized the process of modernized Japan and Western powers indulging in Goryeo celadon out of cultural interest and taste since 1900s, Goryeo celadon was actually collected and appreciated starting in the eighteenth century. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Goryeo celadons were continuously stolen from graves and bought by the Japanese. Starting from the eighteenth century, information on Goryeo became increasingly common as books and artwork from China was introduced and rapidly disseminated. Various historical books including Gaoli tujing and collected literary works were copied, kept, and read. In particular, the Gaoli tujing was found to have survived in various manuscript exemplars produced in Korea; this has implications for other important texts. Various pieces of information on Goryeo continuously and repeatedly contributed to the formation of how Goryeo was viewed; this viewpoint was reconstructed and established as the present image of the dynasty. The memories and experiences gleaned from texts and physical objects overlapped and interwove in the Joseon period to imbue Goryeo celadon with symbolic meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Korean hyperrealism, a style that transfers photographic imagery and conventions to the medium of painting, is one of the few art forms of the late 1970s that has yet to receive substantive re-evaluation. Contrary to some critics' derogatory dismissals, the style raises issues of cultural identity central to the aesthetics and critical theory of art after the Korean War. This study investigates how the hybrid forms and iconographical attention paid by Korean hyperrealism to common objects of everyday life reflect Korean society at a time when sophisticated encounters of opposing socio-political identities were taking place. After reviewing the history of this little known art form, especially of its critical discourse with prevalent social currents in the Korea of the period, the present study proceeds to define its iconography in relation to its "cultural other," American hyperrealism. Many works of Korean hyperrealism engage some of the most pressing issues of Korea in the 1970s. In terms of subject matter, the works show complicated views of the character of the urbanization policies under President Park Chunghee (Pak Chŏnghŭi 朴正熙). Formally, the works present photographic details with a monochromatic tendency, a minimal surface infused with a sense of real-time theatricality, and an image of actual objects confluent with the illusionistic details. Juxtaposing and combining many antithetical concepts in an attempt to maintain a fragile balance, Korean artists struggled to create a culturally relevant mode of modernist expression and representation, and thereby translate their experience into a distinctive artistic language that is unique to their time period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In North Korean paintings, history is mobilized to legitimate the North Korean system and its leaders. Utilizing the mode of socialist realism, North Korean paintings give visual form to a socialist world, a utopian vision full of unremitting heroism, harvest, and happiness centered on the ruling Kim family. In these paintings, positive heroes such as laborers, workers, farmers, and children are depicted in historically correct scenes that always propel the North Korean revolution forward. After adopting socialist realism from the Soviet Union, North Korea localized this creative method to meet its specific political needs through medium and content. Through this process, socialist realism came to reflect the ideals of juche , the state ideology of North Korea. Informed by North Korean theoretical writings on art and art reviews, this article examines how history is visually mobilized in three paintings created in 1985 and 2000 through the language of juche realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the proliferation of Korean native camp shows and the roles of Korean women entertainers at the military service clubs of the Eighth United States Army in Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s. The role of the "American sweethearts" in USO camp shows—to create a "home away from home" and boost the morale of the American troops during wartime—was carried out by female Korean entertainers in the occupied zone at a critical moment in US-ROK relations during the Cold War. The article argues that Korean entertainers at military clubs were meant to perform the entertainment of "home" and evoke nostalgia for American soldiers by imitating well-known American singers and songs. However, what they performed as America was not simply the reproduction of American entertainment but often a manifestation of their imagination; they were constructing their own version of the American home. Their hybrid styles of American performance were indicative of how the discourse of the American home itself was constructed around ambivalence, the very site where women entertainers were enabled to exceed the rigid boundaries of race and gender, transcend their roles as imitators, and exercise their agency by productively negotiating this ambivalence. [End Page 203] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long regarded as paradigmatic in histories of modern art in Asia, abstraction assumed new urgency in the hands of ink painters like Jung Tak-young (1937–2012). During the politically and socially turbulent early decades of postwar Korea, Jung played an exemplary role in the Korean emergence of a self-consciously abstract ink painting through sustained experimentation that included rejecting the use of ink, the very material that crucially defined ink painting. For Jung, abstraction was a necessary platform for rethinking entrenched concepts of medium, presence, and form in hopes of arriving at a more expanded view of contemporary art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mixrice, an art collective of artists Yang Ch'ŏlmo [Yang Chul Mo] and Cho Chiŭn [Cho Ji Eun] won the 2016 Korea Artist Prize for their provocative multimedia project that featured a two-channel video installation, titled "The Vine Chronicle." Centrally documenting the various lives of trees, like a 450- year old Zelkova tree from the village of Kangdong-ri, the video portrays their itinerant lives as they are moved to various sites to fuel capitalist development schemes: camping resorts, apartment complexes and redevelopment sites. Using this exhibit and its unique post-pastoral perspective as a frame, this article explores contemporary perceptions of Korean environment in art and literature. In this study, I am interested in drawing connections among ecocritical artworks and literary works that highlight the dispossession of human and non-human life and the history of rapid South Korean development. These works seek to complicate notions of South Korean development, environmental degradation and migration through a post-pastoral frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]