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This talk explores the aesthetics and politics of objects in art, life, and society in the 1960s and the 1970s in South Korea. During this period, art and cultural practitioners adopted and developed the method of using objects – everyday, industrial, traditional, or natural objects and human bodies – in their practice in order to establish contemporary Korean art and culture that was comparable to the art of the world and close to the public, or everyday life, in Korea. Their practices ranged from utilizing objects’ association with life and society to abstracting the quality of objects and even rendering the human body into an object, as seen in the 1968 action piece Transparent Balloons and a Nude. In this “art of participation,” as I propose to call it, the idea and method of objects emerged from and gave form to the concept and aspiration of participation: from the avant-gardist notion of art’s participation in life to the participation of art and artists in the reconstruction of the country, which meant not only the reorganization of the art, cultural, and social systems and the economic development, but also the elimination of colonial remnants and the oppression of the society and the government. While contributing to the larger discussion of multiple modernisms in the realm of art and culture, this talk expands the discussion of objects and their relationship to art and society and complicates the understanding of the relationship between art and society, or politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Camille (Ji Eun) Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest lies in artistic practices that actively employed non-conventional media, with a focus on their conversation with and operation within the socio-political conditions in Korea, and more broadly, in East Asia. Her research interests also include queer and feminist art practice, activism, and theory and the relationship between critical theory and praxis. She is working on her book project that examines how art and cultural practitioners responded to, participated in, or abstained from the modernization process in post-colonial Korea in the 1960s and the 1970s. Her work has been published in the Journal of History of Contemporary Art and will be included in the Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms.

Chair: Janet Poole is an Associate Professor at the Munk School fo Global Affairs and Public Policy. She is also the Distinguished Professor of the Humanities & Chair, Department of East Asian Studies. Poole’s research and teaching interests lie in aesthetics in the broad context of colonialism and modernity, in history and theories of translation, and in the creative practice of literary translation.

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Visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, cultural commentary, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by migrant workers, tenant farmers, factory workers, men, women, and children proliferated. Yet such representations were criticized as excessively grotesque and insufficiently political by leftist intellectuals at the time and have subsequently been overlooked by scholars in favor of socialist realism and its dynamic proletarian heroes.

This talk, by contrast, focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how the new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the surface of the lower-class body. This talk traces the emergence of the sensational proletarian as a central semantic figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean cultural producers’ efforts not only to grapple with modernity, imperialism, and capitalism, but to do so using the political ideology and imaginary of Marxism. During this period, Koreans in rural areas suffered from abject poverty, spiritual confusion, natural disasters, punishing agricultural taxes, and a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Leftist Korean cultural producers in the early twentieth century also encountered and engaged with Marxism as a new political/theoretical framework. Their interpretations of Marxism led to a flourishing of different forms of cultural production and inspired a visual and textual language that used the sensations of the body to interpret and articulate class politics.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Kimberly Chung is an Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural Studies at McGill University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from University of California, San Diego. Before arriving at McGill, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Hongik University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute of Harvard University. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana and was a special guest editor for the issue Sensibility and Landscape in Korean Literature and Film for Acta Koreana (Vol. 17 no.1, 2014). She is a co-editor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020). Her book The Sensational Proletarian: Affect and Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea is currently under review at Stanford University Press.

Chair: Michelle Cho is an Assistant Professor in the Department fo East Asian Studies, University of Toronto. Cho’s research and teaching focus on questions of collectivity and popular aesthetics in Korean film, media, and popular culture. She has published on Asian cinemas and Korean wave television, video, and pop music.Before coming to U of T, Professor Cho was a Korea Foundation Assistant Professor at McGill University. Prior to that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow of International Humanities at Brown University, affiliated with the Departments of Modern Culture and Media and East Asian Studies.

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This talk examines the works of the “New Woman” Myeong-sun Kim (1896-1951), focusing on her two Korean translations of Gerhart Hauptman’s Lonely People (1891), namely Lonely People (1924) and When You Look Back (1925). While Kim’s translations are often regarded as early Korean novels due to their departure from a literal translation of the German play, I argue that they should be seen as feminist adaptations of the original work, with a distinct emphasis on narrative and characterization. Unlike Hauptman’s German play, which centers on a male protagonist struggling against traditional ideologies such as family and religion, Kim’s Korean novels foreground women’s suffering, free love, and independence. In doing so, they critique the practices of early marriage, concubinage, and patriarchy in Joseon during the Japanese colonial period. The transformation of the male narrative into a female narrative in Kim’s works highlights the importance of the translator’s characterization, with feminism playing a crucial role. Male characters are portrayed as feminists who understand and respect female characters, in contrast to the patriarchal German protagonist of the source text. Meanwhile, female characters are depicted as more independent and active owners of their own lives in the target texts. Kim resists the oppressive and suffocating patriarchal society, rewriting the German play into two feminist novels of Joseon.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Sun Kyoung Yoon is Associate Professor of literary translation at the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her research interests include English translations of Korean literature, decolonising translation, and translation and gender. She has published many articles on literary translation in international journals such as The Translator, Target, Perspectives, Journal of Gender Studies and Acta Koreana. Recently, her article ‘Fidelity or Infidelity? The Mistranslation Controversy over The Vegetarian’ that deals with translation and gender has been published in Target.

Chair: Camille (Ji Eun) Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest lies in artistic practices that actively employed non-conventional media, with a focus on their conversation with and operation within the socio-political conditions in Korea, and more broadly, in East Asia. Her research interests also include queer and feminist art practice, activism, and theory and the relationship between critical theory and praxis. She is working on her book project that examines how art and cultural practitioners responded to, participated in, or abstained from the modernization process in post-colonial Korea in the 1960s and the 1970s. Her work has been published in the Journal of History of Contemporary Art and will be included in the Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms.  

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This talk explores how demographic shifts, economic transformations and changing conceptions of heterosexual adulthood relate to queer life in South Korea. Specifically, Wolff examine how queer Koreans in their 20s and 30s navigate the conflict between achieving a feeling of economic stability and a sense of queer selfhood. As economic instability and labor insecurity became normalized following the Asian Financial Crisis, corporate and civil servant jobs also became coveted for the sense of stability (anjeong-gam) they seemed to promise. With marriage and fertility rates at all-time lows due to factors like financial precarity and high-parenting costs, many idealize “stability” as a pathway back to these disrupted processes of “adulthood.” However, queer Koreans have historically experienced precarity on the basis of heteronormative conditions for achieving and maintaining economic stability.

Wolff”s research found that as queer college graduates labored towards “stable” careers, they were paradoxically beset by affective forms of instability, as queer embodiment and political participation threatened workplace discrimination and even dismissal. While academic theories of “precarity” often describe how the loss of economic stability leads to disrupted social reproduction and evacuated futures, this talk seeks to complicate the concept and its temporal associations. By elucidating how dynamics of heteronormativity have shaped notions of precarity,Wolff argue that instability and stability must be understood as emergent processes articulated through dynamics of kinship, class, gender, sexuality, and social difference.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alex Wolff (they/she) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto. Their research examines intersections of economics, gender, and sexuality through a focus on queer sociality and activism in South Korea. Building upon preliminary fieldwork (2017-19) and a year of ethnographic research in Korea (2020-21), they are currently writing a book manuscript that explores how class, economics of kinship, and structural marginalization relate to the ways LGBTQ+ Koreans build publics, politics, and their futures. Their work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Korea Foundation, and the Center for Critical Korean Studies. They received their PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, in 2023.

Chair: Jesook Song is a Professor at the Department of Anthropology, university of Toronto. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA. Mediating Gender, her co-edited volume with Michelle Cho, is scheduled to come out in the University of Michigan Press in early 2024.