Koyang-si: Misul munhwa, 2018. 303 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) KOR₩28,000, paper. ISBN 978-89-6303-171-2.
Of the four branches of the Korean National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), the one inside the Tŏksugung Palace grounds was clearly the most appropriate for a multimedia exhibition on the “Arrival of New Women” during the 1920s and 1930s. A popular tourist destination in Seoul, Tŏksugung is unique among the extant royal palaces of the Chosŏn period (1392–1910) and the Tae-Han Empire period (1897–1910) for having two Western-style buildings on its grounds. Jointly called “Sokjojŏn,” the East Wing, designed by the Welsh architect John Reginald Harding, was completed in 1909 and served as the final residence of King (and first Emperor of the Tae-Han Empire) Kojong until his death in 1919. The West Wing, designed by the Japanese architect Nakamura Yoshihei, was completed in 1937 to house the collections of the Yi Royal Family Museum of Art. In between the completion of the two wings, Japan colonized Korea in 1910 and Kojong’s death in January 1919 preceded the March First Independence Movement. The Japanese colonial state’s violent suppression of the movement gave way in the 1920s to a strategically more open set of policies that allowed for the proliferation, albeit under varying degrees of censorship, of new media such as magazines, daily newspapers, films, records, theatre, popular fiction, commercial posters, and photographs. These in turn fueled rapid societal changes, one of which was the emergence of New Women (sinyŏsŏng)—female intellectuals, artists, writers, students, actors, and singers who made regular use of, and were regularly depicted in, these media, as men and women contested and navigated multiple layers and vectors of colonial and gendered oppression and control.
The West Wing serves as one of the branches of the MMCA, and housed the exhibit that ran from December 21, 2017 to April 1, 2018 for which this book serves as an accompaniment to and record of. Many if not all of the exhibition’s varied assemblage of paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, magazine covers, newspaper articles, cartoons, film clips, objects, commercial graphic designs, and contemporary artistic reflections that implicitly bring the threads of the 1920s and 1930s into the present are carefully and beautifully reproduced in the book. The organization of the body of the book matches the three-section organization of the exhibit: the first, “New Women on Parade,” covers the representations and images of New Women by male authors and artists across the media; the second, “I Am Painting, and Painting Becomes I,” features women’s self-representations; and the third section, “Woman Is Everything,” focuses on five examples of noted New Women: Na Hyesŏk (art, literature), Kim Myŏngsun (literature), Chu Sejuk (women’s rights), Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi (dance), and Yi Nanyŏng (popular music).
These images are bookended by a preface from the head of the entire MMCA, Bartomeu Marí, and Kang Sŭngwan’s overview chapter at the front, and by six academic essays and additional notes at the back. Kang’s essay covers considerable ground—the intersections of visual culture and complex modernities filtered by colonialism and gender; comparative histories of New Women in the West, Japan, and Korea; and the development of women’s education in Korea. Most intriguingly, the chapter flags the emergence of capitalism and consumerism, and the concomitant if gradual movement of women from inside of private homes to outside into public streets, shops, and media. Reading, listening, painting, and moving in sports and travel became possible for educated, elite women. At the back, Kim Sujin’s chapter overviews who the New Women were, their roles as cultural symbols and social phenomena, and their multiple meanings. Pak Hyesŏng looks at intersections of New Women with modernity in colonial period visual arts. Kwŏn Haengga examines the lives of women’s art college graduate women artists who studied in Japan. Nam Ŭnhye compares the writer Kim Myŏngsun with Na Hyesŏk, while Kim Soyŏng’s piece examines colonial modernity and representations of women, especially the dialogical interplay between reflections such as theatrical performances by actresses, and depictions of New Women by others in the media. In the last chapter, Chang Yujŏng analyzes and celebrates the lives and works of three prominent New Women across the colonial and post-colonial periods: Yun Simdŏk, a star actress and singer; Ch’oe Sŭnghŭi, a dancer of world renown; and Yi Nanyŏng, probably best known for her hit song originally recorded in 1934, “Tears of Mokp’o” (Mokp’o ŭi nunmul). Notes on the multitude of images in the book by various contributors, and a chronology of women’s art in Korea by Ch’oe Yŏl bring the book to a close.
If the artwork and visuals sample an eclectic array of female artists and writers, the academic essays tend to focus on famous and therefore accessible women from Korea’s modern history. This might make academic readers wish for even more essays that were organized around thematic concerns, such as contestations and configurations of “appropriate/inappropriate” clothing and cosmetics for women; the ranges and the limits of employment opportunities for women of the 1920s and the 1930s; or divergent women’s lives based on locale, such as by region-province or by urban-rural divides. Detailed treatments of non-literary and artistic figures such as Korea’s first women economist, who received her bachelor’s degree from Stockholm University in 1931 and died in poverty in Korea in 1932, Ch’oe Yŏngsuk, or one of Korea’s earliest female pilots, Pak Kyŏngwŏn, at the centre of a controversy about whether or not she was a collaborator with the Japanese colonial authorities, or Yi Myŏngsuk, the winner of a beauty pageant held in Korea in 1931 sponsored by a Japanese newspaper, among others, might have provided some novelty for specialists as well.
Historians of gender, visual culture, society, art, and media in general will find the book’s images to be accessible and of comparative interest, while specialists of these fields in Korean modern and contemporary history in particular will find that the essays provide concise and useful overviews. The book, thus, is undoubtedly a rich source of captivating images, and insightful essays that explain historical context, examine individual figures, and spotlight comparative links.
Hyung-Gu Lynn
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada