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

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

The Cinematic Golden Age and Cold War Culture

with

Han Joon Magnan-Park
Assistant Professor, Film, Television and Theater Department, Notre Dame University

Thursday, September 21, 2006

After the armistice, South Korean society rushed full-on towards economic development, soon pulling itself up to become one of the most advanced and dynamic countries in the world. It's a story with a happy ending, but Han Joon Magnan-Park, an assistant professor in the Film, Television and Theater Department at Notre Dame University, showed his audience that at the time, Korean cinema wasn't nearly as cheery about the country's prospects.

Using the 1961 film The Stray Bullet as an example, Magnan-Park noted how director Hyun Mok Yoo had consciously patterned the work on the 1948 Italian neo-realist film The Bicycle Thief.  The Bicycle Thief depicted an Italian family struggling to survive in the aftermath World War II; though masterfully sympathetic, the characters in the film only bring their family closer to disintegration as they struggle to save it.

So too in The Stray Bullet: The main character, a government accountant, sacrifices his meager salary to meet his family's needs—to the point of ignoring his own toothache rather than paying a dentist to fix it. But it's just not enough. Beset by chronic unemployment and despair, the accountant's brother turns to robbery and his sister to prostitution. Adhering to neo-realist strictures, The Stray Bullet leaves it to audience members to formulate their own "answers" to the problematic reality it displays.

More than just a philosophical exercise, the film expresses a deep and uniquely Korean unease: the feeling that the Confucian value system isn't up to the task of regulating an increasingly modernizing society. A pillar of Korean society for centuries, Confucian thought mandated clear duties for every individual. All the characters in The Stray Bullet perform these duties as best they know how, and still end up mired in poverty and chaos. With this in mind, Magnan-Park suggested, the film's lack of resolution can be read as a question posed to Korean society: What value system do we rely on now?

Produced during the brief flowering of South Korean democracy that followed the removal of Syngman Rhee, The Stray Bullet's question—and its depiction of a bleak, chaotic society-struck a nerve with viewers. When Park Chung Hee assumed power shortly after its release, the film was banned.

About the Presenter

Gallery Talk and Film Screening

with

Robert L. Cagle
Cinema Studies Specialist, University of Illinois

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Made from overwrought anguish and predictable improbabilities, melodrama doesn't encourage its audience too look too deep. But according to Robert L. Cagle, a cinema studies specialist at the University of Illinois, look at post-war American melodramas and post-IMF crisis South Korean melodramas and you'll see critical thematic and philosophical similarities.

Both sets of cinema were produced by recently traumatized societies: WWII in the case of 1950s America, economic calamity in the case of late-90s Korea. Both societies were embracing economic growth and watching as consumer culture sparked conflict between tradition and modernity. In mid-‘50s America, filmmaker Douglas Sirk presented these realities in films like There's Always Tomorrow, All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. All three melodramas highlighted characters striving to escape lives they feel trap them, in the process creating an even more anguished personal mess. A common thread, Cagle noted, is that American melodramas of the period tend to feature characters that are afraid of losing their place in the world; either physically, through losing a home, or emotionally, through damaging important relationships.

The same can be said for contemporary Korean melodramas. In recent films such as The Man Who Went to Mars and Cracked Eggs and Noodles, Korean melodrama directors portray an emotionally deadening consumer culture through the symbolic pervasiveness of Korean electronic gadgetry. The characters go through the same process of disillusion and loss.

American and Korean melodramas do part ways, however, when it comes to the end of the film. In American melodramas, characters whose world has collapsed around them usually find another form of personal satisfaction and re-invest their faith in the typical American dream: a classic Hollywood happy ending. Contrast this to Korean melodramas, where the main characters don't recover. When Korean melodrama characters realize they've lost it all, the film usually takes them back to a fleeting memory of past happiness and then ends, eschewing resolution.

This perspective gives South Korean melodramas a more sophisticated feel than their American counterparts. Korean melodramas, Cagle said, "dare to raise questions...they don't give audiences the false hope that American films do, and don't feel as manipulative."

About the Presenter