The Korea Society Gallery

Exhibition Dates and Time: 
January 31 - April 18, 2008
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday

Open to the Public and Free of Charge

Location:
The Korea Society, 950 Third Avenue, Eighth Floor, New York City
(Building entrance on SW corner of Third Avenue and 57th Street)

Toys - always more meaningful than the simple playthings they appear to be-can embody the fantasies, values, obsessions and anxieties of a generation. Toy Stories: Souvenirs from Korean Childhood includes a veritable toy box of over 90 flamboyantly colored action figures, robots, miniature tanks and paper dolls from 1970s and 1980s Korea.

Action Figures
As Korean kids began watching cartoons on TV in the 1970s, action figures of their favorite animated heroes weren’t far behind. As the companies that manufactured the figures valued economy and conformity, reflecting the spirit of the times in Korea, these figures often were bland knock-offs of foreign models.

Robots
On Korean TV, in comic books and in toy stores, robotic heroes battled one another with steel limbs and futuristic weapons. Their fusion of man, machine and nature sparked young imaginations. Today, South Korea is one of the most technologically advanced countries on earth.

Military Figures
Toy soldiers and war games occupied an ambiguous space between fantasy and reality in a society where civil-defense drills were held regularly and a resurgence of the devastating Korean War seemed perpetually imminent.

Girls' Toys
Just as Korean boys got robots and tanks, Korean girls were given miniature kitchen and hospital utensils and paper dolls to encourage them to focus on becoming either a housewife or a nurse, the only roles considered appropriate for them. From the 1960s to ’70s, Korea became the manufacturing center for Barbie dolls, and their introduction signaled a new level of luxury in toys and established an inaccessible standard of beauty.

Join us for wine, hors d'œuvres and great company to launch our latest exhibition.

Film Screening: Robot Taekwon V
Animation feature-film,

Children growing up in South Korea in the1970s faced an overwhelming barrage of cultural influences from the United States and Japan, the nations that, for Koreans, defined the prevailing images of the successful modern industrialized state during the Cold War era. President Park Chung-Hee was determined to bring South Korea into their ranks and, as a means of achieving this goal, adopted an export-driven industrialization policy that laid the economic foundations for the country's rise to its present status as the 11th largest economic power in the world.

However, merely emulating the American and Japanese models of economic and technological progress could not instill within the Korean population a long-term self-sacrificing work ethic. Rather, the nation needed a Korean-specific hero who could create a vision of a forward-looking, technologized South Korea independent of the type of technological advances that the United States and Japan could already provide.

Kim Cheong-gi's 1976 animation feature-film Robot Taekwon V signaled a significant contribution in advancing the image of an independent South Korea through the persona of a Korean-specific robot that effectively stands guard against enemies of superior numbers and with access to advanced technology.

This presentation will illustrate how the Korean-specific features of Robot Taekwon V encouraged South Korean audiences to celebrate a Korea-centric paradigm of heroism that negated the United States and Japan and more importantly, exorcised the North Korean threat.

About the Presenter

Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park is an assistant professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in pan-Asian cinema, sound theory, international action cinema and post-colonial theory. He has previously taught at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, Illinois State University, Wesleyan University, University of Iowa, American University of Paris and the University of Paris IV-Sorbonne.