Author: Yurim Oh

The Korea Society marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Korean War with two exhibitions running June 25 through September 10: Steel Helmets: U.S. Korean War Graphics  and Korean War in Color. Both open six decades to the day of the outbreak of conflict.

Steel Helmets: U.S. Korean War Graphics  features twenty-eight framed graphics—eighteen Korean War film posters and ten comics—from the era. With images ranging from the stark to the romantic, the film posters project images of bravery, climatic extremes, love and loss. The comic-book images, sometimes brutally visceral, portray war in all its hell and heroics. Korean War in Color  features thirty images by famed correspondent and veteran John Rich, now in his 90s. Though most Americans recall the War through black-and-white press photos, the Kodachrome images here show the war in vivid, color detail—images of masses on the move, soldiers in the field, individuals in repose.

Accompanying the gallery exhibitions are a selection of films featured on the exhibition posters, a book signing by legendary photographer John Rich, and a lecture by author Brian Locke.

Steel Helmets: U.S. Korean War Graphics and Korean War in Color
June 25-September 10

Over the centuries, masked dance evolved from shamanic ritual to popular entertainment.  By the mid-eighteenth century, masked dance was firmly rooted as popular entertainment featuring dance, song and dialogue, with distinct regional varieties on offer.  Masked dance-dramas were staged outdoors and in the countryside as all-night, bonfire-lit events. The performances took place during planting and harvest, to promote fertility, and on the eve of the lunar new year and Buddha’s birthday to ensure good fortune. The dramas also were performed to welcome foreign envoys.

Dancers began by donning the masks—made from gourds, wood, bark, animal fur, cloth, and paper-mâché—and, like their shamanic predecessors, invoking the deities.  What followed was a riotous series of satirical sketches featuring characterizations of wayward monks, pompous playboys, love triangles and farcical noblemen. In this way, the dances functioned as a catharsis for the community, releasing through laughter the pent-up tensions created by the Chosŏn Dynasty’s (1392-1910) rigid moral and social strictures. The performance ended at dawn when the masks were tossed into the bonfire, symbolically expelling misfortune. As a result of this tradition, intact dance-drama masks from the period are exceedingly rare.

This exhibition features traditional dance-drama masks carved by four master artisans in the 1970s and 1980s. The masks here are of four regional types: Pongsan (Hwanghae province in the northwest of North Korea), Songp’a (Seoul), Yangju (north of Seoul), and Tongnae (south of Kyŏngsang province). The exhibition also features reproductions from an original set of Hahoe (Andong) exorcism masks from North Kyŏngsang province. Each regional style has been designated as an Important Intangible Cultural Property of Korea.  Unfortunately, the carving of traditional masks has become a dying skill.  Of the four artisans featured here, only one survives.

The masks in this exhibition are on loan from the collection of Dr. Theresa Ki-ja Kim.