The Modern Boy and Modern Girl in Colonial Korea: 1910

Details

Category: Gallery

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

Yeon Shim Chung teaches art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Wagner College.  She completed her doctoral dissertation "Ultra-sauvage, Ultra-moderne: Gauguin's Ceramics and Sculpture," at the New York University's Institute for Fine Arts in September 2005.  Part of her dissertation will appear in The Journal of Modern Craft in March 2008. Chung is currently working on a book dealing with modernity, subjectivity and femininity in colonial Korea. 

Photo From Pyŏl Kŏn Kon (별건곤), July 1927

Registration Fee:
Single-Program Ticket: $5 (members) / $10 (non-members)
Series Pass (for all seven monthly gallery talks): $20 (members) / $50 (non-members)
buy tickets online or use the fax registration form (pdf)