Beyond Objects to Regional Contexts: Displaying Korea and Japan

2019

Focusing empirically on transcultural phenomena in-and-out of China, South Korea, and Indonesia, the three papers in this special section of The Journal of Transcultural Studies interrogate important aspects of transcultural circulations and exhibitions of objects between Euro-America and the Asia-Pacific, both historically and currently.

Master's Thesis, Ohio State University, 2021

This thesis examines the interpretation and representation of Korea and Korean people through Korean art and material culture at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1914 – 1945). To meet these ends, this research focuses on contextualizing the museum and its Korean art collection through an intersectional lens that considers both Japanese colonial and Western hegemonies. This contextualization reveals how the purposes of the modernist, universal survey museum and the hermeneutics of Japanese colonial historiography of Korea and Eurocentric Orientalism incorporated the ways that Euro-Americans appropriated Korean material culture into the museum to understand Korean civilization and people, thus reproducing Japanese colonial hegemony over Korea and validating Western colonial-imperial hegemonies generally. Based on articles from The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art and other primary sources, Korea typically occupied a position under Japan in the museum’s iconographic program. Similarly, museum professionals at CMA, such as Langdon and Lorraine D’O. Warner, were directly involved with the Japanese colonial apparatus in Korea, and admired its colonial efforts. I argue that this resulted in the double Orientalization of Korea, as such researchers adapted Japanese colonial knowledge about Korean material culture for the purposes of Western enlightenment, resulting in Korea becoming both the West’s and Japan’s inferior Other in the museum space.

Acta Koreana, 2014

This paper critiques a recent exhibit at the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) as a case study to explore the evolving role of museums in the twenty-first century. For the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Korea’s liberation from Japan, the NK Project presented oil paintings, propaganda posters and postage stamps from North Korea; photographs of North Korea by non-Koreans; and art installations and videos by South Korean artists with North Korea as the main theme. Taking the celebration of Korean independence as a point of departure, the exhibit explored the contradictions and ambiguities of a divided nation in order to help visitors better understand South Korea’s northern ‘other’. Within the context of the current political environment in South Korea, the paper analyses the NK Project’s effectiveness in furthering SeMA’s stated goals as a ‘post-museum’ and examines how art can foster cross-cultural conversations.

Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West. Artifacts and Intangible Heritage, 2023

This volume encompasses the proceedings of the First International Conference of the East and West in Korean Studies project Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West: Artifacts and Intangible Heritage, organized by Jong Chol An and Ariane Perrin in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in May 2021 with the support of the Academy of Korean Studies. Following an interdisciplinary approach from such fields as history, heritage studies, history of art and religious studies, nine essays were selected that best illustrate the main themes of the conference. This richly-illustrated publication presents little-known historical documents and various artifacts that had been lost to time within various institutions, private collections or museum collections, tracing back their history and significance.

This paper examines why the history wars between South Korea and Japan are intensifying in the 21st century and the prospects for reconciliation. South Korea’s history museums promote anti-Japanese nationalism, making it difficult to unshackle the present from the past. In 2014 there was controversy over a Japanese manga exhibit that resonates with broader bilateral disputes over colonial history ranging from the comfort women to forced labor. These battles over the shared past have become internationalized, stoking mutual vilification and jingoistic sentiments.

Asian Studies Review, 2021

The purpose of this special issue is to examine how visual representations have shaped changing notions of Korean society, culture and nationhood. While images surround us, and are increasingly recognised as crucial, we know surprisingly little about the role visuality plays in the context of Korean politics and society. Only a few selected studies engage the issues at stake. To address these issues, the authors in this collection explore how the Korean peninsula has been imagined, represented and displayed through images during critical historical and contemporary moments over the past century. The key moments that the contributors address include Japanese colonialism and its legacy, national division and authoritarian rules in North and South Korea, interactions with the international community, and the transition to democracy in the South. The visual realms the contributors draw upon include photographs, film, monuments, and digital reproductions of them. The key questions each contributor asks are: how have visual factors influenced key events? What can we learn from visual sources that we cannot learn from textual ones?