Kim Ku's Fight for Korean Independence and Unification-Gallery Talk

In a gallery talk to kick off an exhibition entitled Wishing for Independence: The Life of Kim Ku in Photographs, Jongsoo James Lee, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Korea Institute and the translator of Kim Ku's autobiography, told audience members that a better appreciation of the life and legacy of this unique Korean patriot is vital to the future of the Korean Peninsula. In his talk, Lee surveyed Kim's dramatic life and discussed in detail his contributions to Korea's independence and national reunification. Born the year that the Treaty of Kanghwa-do was signed (1876), Kim experienced "stormy wanderings" and a "checkered fate" well before he went into exile in China in 1919 to sustain his career in the independence movement. Deprived of the opportunity for a systematic education by the circumstances of the time, he studied the Chinese classics at a sodang as a child, then later was ordained a Buddhist monk and ultimately even converted to Christianity after his return to secular life at the age of 27. After 1905, when he was in his 30s, he participated mainly in educational movements including the Patriotic Enlightenment movement and the New People's Association. As his fleeting encounters with Confucianism, Buddhism and Christianity would suggest, Lee said, Kim was comparatively lacking in a sense of self in relation to ideology. In this respect, he was relatively free of didactic obsession with ideology and tended to be wary of anyone driven exclusively by an ideological-theoretical vision. Moreover, while Kim possessed a true plebeian simplicity rarely to be found in the political leaders of his times, he was an activist with a traditional leaning who advocated the loyalty typical of Confucianism or the Righteous Army instead of modern values and a Western lifestyle. Kim's independence movement after he went into exile into China was focused on the firm maintenance and recognition of the Korean Provisional Government (KPG). When the KPG became little more than a empty name in the late 1920s, following the departure of the other independence movement leaders, Kim alone stayed behind in China and maintained the semblance of the KPG. Given his background, Lee noted, Kim revealed a deep conviction that the division of Korea was not solely the result of systemic confrontation with foreign powers but also reflected a problem of national identity. When he was able to return to Korea following the liberation in 1945, the chaotic political situation inevitably was viewed by Kim to be intrinsically linked to the right-left polarization endemic to the political process of the day. As a result, he viewed the establishment of a unified government as the paramount national task. If unification and independence are just two sides of the same coin, as Kim firmly believed, national unification signified and amounted to nothing less than a "second independence movement." This conviction led Kim to make the fateful decision to travel to Pyongyang to attend a "National Unity Conference" in April 1948. The delegates at this Conference declared themselves irrevocably opposed to the holding of separate elections and the establishment of two separate governments in the North and the South. In short order, however, separate governments were established in both halves of the Korean Peninsula. Just a little over a year later, Kim was assassinated under circumstances that remain murky to this day. "If Kim Ku were alive today," Lee concluded, "he would definitely give the advice that [Korea] needs honest dialog, and that can only happen when leaders meet face to face with an open heart."