Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

with

Suk-Young Kim
Professor of Theater at the University of California at Santa Barbara

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Communist regimes are often described as "drab," but North Korea is highly fashion conscious-a place where style and politics go hand in hand.

For decades, North Korea's political leaders have been preoccupied with designing uniforms for almost every sector of society. Fashion, especially women's fashion, is seen as a national project, meant to promote group identity and ideology. Like many authoritarian regimes, North Korean designers have been drawn to masculine, military styles that seem to embody revolutionary spirit. But women's fashion in North Korea also allows for a contradictory sense of traditional femininity.

Suk-Young Kim, Professor of Theater at the University of California at Santa Barbara, will discuss the purpose of state-directed fashion in North Korea, as well as the ways in which the country's dress codes affect women's body politics.

About the Presenter

Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

Film Screening of A Petal (꽃잎) and Q&A Session with Actress Young-Lan Lee
Associate Professor of drama at Kyung Hee University

Thursday, July 12, 2007

May 1980 still lives in infamy in South Korea. That month, residents of Kwangju demonstrated for an end to decades of military rule. But newly installed President Chun Doo-Hwan would broach no dissent. He ordered elite Korean paratroopers to storm the city and crush the protests. Untold numbers of protesting civilians were massacred in the assault.

It took director Jang Sun-Woo 15 years to find a producer brave enough to tackle the topic, but when he did, he filmed his masterpiece—A Petal (꽃잎)—a fierce and uncompromising look at the Kwangju uprising and its political and personal aftermath.

A Petal’s female lead was played by Lee Young-Lan, who won a Best Supporting Actress Award in 1996 at the Asia-Pacific Film Festival for her stirring performance. Following the screening, Lee will talk with the audience about the making of the film, its impact it’s release had throughout Asia and the painful, lingering legacy of the Kwangju uprising.

About the Presenter

Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

with

Soyang Park
Post-Doctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University

Thursday, May 24, 2007

The 1980s were a turbulent period in South Korean politics, with society rebelling against the military government and demanding democratic reform. But the pro-democracy movement wasn't limited to politics. South Korea in the 1980s also saw the rise of the minjung (grassroots) movement in the arts.

Throughout the decade, and into the early ‘90s, leading minjung artists worked around the theme of han (a uniquely Korean sense of lingering grievance) to create pieces which critically examined deep, often unpleasant, cultural realities and echoed the calls for political change.

At a powerful gallery talk, Soyang Park, a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for the Arts in Society at Carnegie Mellon University, will explore the minjung movement and the accomplishments of its leading artists, such as Lim Ok Sang and Oh Yoon, as they materialized the ghosts of contemporary Korean society.

About the Presenter

Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

with

Yeon Shim Chung
Professor of Art History at the Fashion Institute of Technology

Thursday, June 7, 2007

When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, it brought more than bayonets and colonial police to the Korean Peninsula. It bought a new movement in fashion, known as mobo moga (the modern girl / modern boy.)

In contrast to traditional Korean styles of dress, mobo moga (which was influenced by contemporary French fashion) set out a new model of femininity and implied a social and moral consciousness of womanhood. Mobo moga images quickly entered the popular media and became pervasive in forms ranging from cartoons to women's magazines. Mobo moga was also unique because of its social breadth: the style was closely linked to lower-class serving women in cafés, bars and theaters as well as to ordinary middle-class women who frequently imitated Westernized types of women.

But more than most fashion trends, mobo moga sparked widespread public debate. Its assumptions about femininity clashed head-on with Confucian values. Social satirists and other critics charged that mobo moga was born out of capitalism and modern consumerism and infused with inappropriate longings to imitate the West. Yeon Shim Chung, professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, will discuss how mobo moga shaped Korean fashion-and society-for decades to come.

About the Presenter

Exhibiting Korea
A New, Monthly Series of Gallery Talk Programs at The Korea Society

with

Valérie Gelézeau
Associate Professor of Geography at Marne la Vallée University and author of The Republic of Apartments

Thursday, April 5, 2007

Residents of Seoul from the early 1960s would hardly recognize their city today. Back then, traditional single-family homes were the norm. Today, the South Korean cityscape is dominated by large apartment complexes (ap'at'ŭ tanji). In Seoul, the total share of apartment in the housing stock jumped from 4% to 53% between 1970 and 2006. During decades of rapid economic growth, mega-sized tanji (megaplexes) drove Seoul's urban frontier outward, and smaller miniplexes quickly transformed marginal neighbourhoods in the 1990s. This rapid change has radically changed South Korea's housing culture, and Korean culture at large.

Geographer Valérie Gelézeau believes that the causes of South Korea's housing shift are cultural as well as demographic and economic. At her talk, Gelézeau will argue that the shift augurs more than a simple response to urban growth, housing problems and land pressure.

About the Presenter