HART2120: THe Arts of Korea

Literary Nonfiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Art. Vivid visual materials of the North Korean art scene based on nine visits over six years by Georgetown University professor BG Muhn. The art creation environment of North Korean contemporary ideological and collaborative paintings revealed for the first time. NORTH KOREAN ART: THE ENIGMATIC WORLD OF CHOSONHWA offers the reader a rare glimpse into the art, culture, and society of North Korea, a country largely closed off from the world for more than seven decades. This book examines the development and characteristics of chosonhwa, the style of painting unique to the DPRK and that nation's primary vehicle for Socialist Realism art through the present day. Author BG Muhn made nine trips to Pyongyang in six years. He documents his journey from initial fascination, through first-hand research, to his unexpected discovery of the creative and expressive dimensions of this art form. He gained special access to see national treasures, interviewed artists and cultural leaders, and surveyed a broad range of books and visual documents. Through his perspective as a practicing visual artist, Muhn makes the case that North Korean painting merits inclusion in the global art canon. This comprehensive and revealing text is the first of its kind and is an important contribution to the fields of East Asian, 20th century and contemporary art history.

This is the first monograph on the subject to be published in English. It comprises 130 full-colour plates of shaman gods. Supported by two introductory chapters 'Reflections on Shaman God Paintings and Shamanism' by Kim Tae-gon, and 'The Shaman God Paintings as an Icon and Its Artistic Qualities'.

This highly engaging volume by one of Korea s leading scholars of comparative provides a valuable introduction to centuries-old beliefs, myths and folk tales relating to Cosmology and Flood, Birth and Agriculture, Messengers of the Underworld, Shamans, Disease, Good Fortune, Love and Family, Gods of Village Shrines, and Heroes."

Spaces of Possibility, which arose from a 2012 conference held at the University of Washington�s Simpson Center for the Humanities, engages with spaces in, between, and beyond the national borders of Japan and Korea. Some of these spaces involve the ambiguous longings and aesthetic refigurings of the past in the present, the social possibilities that emerge out of the seemingly impossible new spaces of development, the opportunities of genre, and spaces of new ethical subjectivities. Museums, colonial remains, new architectural spaces, graffiti, street theater, popular song, recent movies, photographic topography, and translated literature all serve as keys for unlocking the ambiguous and contradictory�yet powerful�emotions of spaces, whether in Tokyo, Seoul, or New York.

This book examines the development of national emblems, photographic portraiture, oil painting, world expositions, modern spaces for art exhibitions, university programs of visual arts, and other agencies of modern art in Korea. With few books on modern art in Korea available in English, this book is an authoritative volume on the topic and provides a comparative perspective on Asian modernism including Japan, China, and India. In turn, these essays also shed a light on Asian reception of and response to the Orientalism and exoticism popular in Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, the history of Asia, Asian studies, colonialism, nationalism, and cultural identity.

Imperial tombs, Buddhist architecture, palaces, and art treasures in Korea and Japan have attracted scholars, collectors, and conservators�and millions of tourists. As iconic markers of racial and cultural identity at home and abroad, they are embraced as tangible sources of immense national pride and popular �must-see� destinations. This book provides the first sustained account to highlight how the forces of modernity, nationalism, colonialism, and globalization have contributed to the birth of museums, field disciplines, tourist industry, and heritage management policies. Its chapters trace the history of explorations, preservations, and reconstructions of archaeological monuments from an interregional East Asian comparative perspective in the past century.

This pioneering volume navigates cultural memory of the Korean War through the lens of contemporary arts and film in South Korea for the last two decades. Cultural memory of the Korean War has been a subject of persistent controversy in the forging of South Korean postwar national and ideological identity. Applying the theoretical notion of "postmemory," this book examines the increasingly diversified attitudes toward memories of the Korean War and Cold War from the late 1990s and onward, particularly in the demise of military dictatorships. Chapters consider efforts from younger generation artists and filmmakers to develop new ways of representing traumatic memories by refusing to confine themselves to the tragic experiences of survivors and victims. Extensively illustrated, this is one of the first volumes in English to provide an in-depth analysis of work oriented around such themes from 12 renowned and provocative South Korean artists and filmmakers. This includes documentary photographs, participatory public arts, independent women's documentary films, and media installations. The Korean War and Postmemory Generation will appeal to students and scholars of film studies, contemporary art, and Korean history.

Conflicted realities : modernity at large in late Chosŏn society -- The ordinary is extraordinary : the epic in everyday life -- Tableaux de mode : landscape and person in late Chosŏn society -- The anxiety of influence : (mis)reading Chinese art in late Chosŏn Korea -- Rescuing art history from the nation : the late Chosŏn between Europe and Edo Japan.

The Ten Kings hanging scrolls at Tokyo's Seikadō Bunko Art Museum are among the most resplendent renderings of the Buddhist purgatory extant, but their origin and significance have yet to be fully explored. Cheeyun Kwon unfurls this exquisite set of scrolls within the existing Ten Kings painting tradition while investigating textual, scriptural, archaeological, and visual materials from East Asia to shed light on its possible provenance. She constructs a model scheme of the paintings' evolution based on more than five hundred works and reveals channels of popularization, mass production, and agglomeration. The earliest images of the Ten Kings are found in the tenth-century sūtra The Scripture on the Ten Kings, known to be the work of the monk Zangchuan. By the mid-twelfth century, typological conventions associated with the Ten Kings were widely established, and paintings depicting them, primarily large-scale and stand-alone, became popular export commodities, spreading via land and sea routes to the Korean peninsula and the Japanese archipelago. An examination of materials in Korea suggests a unique development path for Ten Kings subject matter, and this--in conjunction with a close analysis of the Seikadō paintings--forms the core of Kwon's book. Among the Korean works discussed is a woodblock edition of The Scripture on the Ten Kings from 1246. It is markedly different from its Chinese counterparts and provides strong evidence of the subject's permutations during the Koryŏ period (918-1392), when Northern Song (960-1127) visual art and culture were avidly imported. In the Seikadō paintings, Northern Song figural, architectural, landscape, and decorative elements were acculturated to the Koryŏ milieu, situating them in the twelfth to early thirteenth centuries and among the oldest and most significant surviving examples of Koryŏ Buddhist painting. Efficacious Underworld fills major lacunae in Korean, East Asian, and Ten Kings painting traditions while illuminating Korea's contribution to the evolution of a Buddhist theme on its trajectory across East Asia. With its rich set of color reproductions and detailed analysis of textual and visual materials, this volume will invite significant revision to previously held notions on Koryŏ painting.

Almost forty years after the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition, the subject of invented traditions--cultural and historical practices that claim a continuity with a distant past but which are in fact of relatively recent origin--is still relevant, important, and highly contentious. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea examines the ways in which compressed modernity, Cold War conflict, and ideological opposition has impacted the revival of traditional forms in both Koreas. The volume is divided thematically into sections covering: (1) history, religions, (2) language, (3) music, food, crafts, and finally, (4) space. It includes chapters on pseudo-histories, new religions, linguistic politeness, literary Chinese, p'ansori, heritage, North Korean food, architecture, and the invention of children's pilgrimages in the DPRK. As the first comparative study of invented traditions in North and South Korea, the book takes the reader on a journey through Korea's epic twentieth century, examining the revival of culture in the context of colonialism, decolonization, national division, dictatorship, and modernization. The book investigates what it describes as "monumental" invented traditions formulated to maintain order, loyalty, and national identity during periods of political upheaval as well as cultural revivals less explicitly connected to political power. Invented Traditions in North and South Korea demonstrates that invented traditions can teach us a great deal about the twentieth-century political and cultural trajectories of the two Koreas. With contributions from historians, sociologists, folklorists, scholars of performance, and anthropologists, this volume will prove invaluable to Koreanists, as well as teachers and students of Korean and Asian studies undergraduate courses.

The perfect comprehensive starting point for anyone looking to conduct research on Pyongyang, this historical dictionary is ideal for those who want to know more about the cityOCOs history and development."

Although modernization in Korea started more than a century later than in the West, it has worked as a prominent ideology throughout the past century--in particular it has brought radical changes in Korean architecture and cities. Traditional structures and ways of life have been thoroughly uprooted in modernity's continuous negation of the past. This book presents a comprehensive overview of architectural development and urbanization in Korea within the broad framework of modernization. Twentieth-century Korean architecture and cities form three distinctive periods. The first, defined as colonial modern, occurred between the early twentieth century and 1945, when Western civilization was transplanted to Korea via Japan, and a modern way of life, albeit distorted, began taking shape. The second is the so-called developmental dictatorship period. Between 1961 and 1988, the explosive growth of urban populations resulted in large-scale construction booms, and architects delved into modern identity through the locality of traditional architecture. The last period began in the mid-1990s and may be defined as one of modernization settlement and a transition to globalization. With city populations leveling out, urbanization and architecture came to be viewed from new perspectives. Inha Jung, however, contends that what is more significant is the identification of elements that have remained unchanged. Jung identifies continuities that have been formed by long-standing relationships between humans and their built environment and, despite rapid modernization, are still deeply rooted in the Korean way of life. For this reason, in the twentieth century, regionalism exerted a great influence on Korean architects. Various architectural and urban principles that Koreans developed over a long period while adapting to the natural environment have provided important foundations for architects' works. By exploring these sources, this carefully researched and amply illustrated book makes an original contribution to defining modern identity in Korea's architecture, housing, and urbanism.

In his foreword, author Sung-woo Kim says, All people seek after truth. They seek the truth that will explain life and death and help them to make the best of themselves. With Buddhist Architecture of Korea, temples that have dotted the Korean peninsula for almost 2,000 years are examined in great detail, including the role they have played in helping Koreans on their own quest for truth. Buddhist architecture is an integral part of its iconography, making this book indispensable.

In recent decades, few nations have transformed themselves as radically as Korea. Amid Seoul's glass-and-steel skyscrapers and luxury apartments, however, the traditional Korean home or Hanok is experiencing a surprising renaissance. Hanok: The Korean House showcases twelve very special Hanok that reflect today's Korea--a country that's putting a modern twist on traditional values. While the exteriors of these houses are indistinguishable from Hanok built decades ago, the interior designs have been completely updated. Traditional materials of stone, wood, and clay are still the only components used in these houses. They also incorporate natural elements such as wind and sunlight, and baesanimsu--known in Chinese as feng shui--used to position the Hanok in harmony with the natural forces and geographical features of the site. But many of these new Hanok owners are architects who have incorporated open floor plans and cutting-edge architectural elements to create a more functional home.

Convergent Flux illustrates the contemporary architectural and urban planning developments in South Korea in the context of the country's considerable urban density. In recent years South Korea, which long stood in the shadow of the superpowers Japan and China, has surged in economic terms. That said, industrialization and the population explosion connected with it have created enormous challenges for the country at the interface between globalization and cultural identity. Some 10.5 million inhabitants live in the center of the capital Seoul, while the metropolitan area includes around 25 million residents making it the second largest conurbation in the world after Tokyo. The result is high urban density, which spells an enormous demand for the more efficient use of space and encourages verticalization in architecture. The publication outlines the current developments in South Korean architecture, urban development and landscape architecture by examining 32 projects in detail. An in-depth view of contemporary South Korean architecture is given by five essays that address topics such as the fusion of tradition and the modern, the re-defining of so-called "social spaces" and the country's special topographical situation. The authors are both architects, trained at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Never before translated into English, this official history of the reign of King T'aejo--founder of Korea's illustrious Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910 CE)--is a unique resource for reconstructing life in late-fourteenth-century Korea. It includes a wealth of detail not just about politics and war but also religion, astronomy, and the arts.

Die Entwicklung der modernen Architektur in Korea und später in Südkorea ist eng mit den Umwälzungen verbunden, denen das Land seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert ausgesetzt war. Die Autoren untersuchen die wichtigsten Perioden von der späten Joseon-Dynastie bis zur demokratischen Gegenwart und zeigen, wie die Architektur mittels technologischer und stilistischer Sprünge seit langem einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Identitätsstiftung der koreanischen Nation leistet. Die architektonischen Analysen konzentrieren sich auf Gebäude, an denen die Herausbildung eines spezifisch koreanischen Modernismus besonders gut zu beobachten ist: Sie reichen von der Festung Hwaseong bis zu Bauten des 21. Jahrhunderts wie der Paju Book City, dem Ssamziegil Shopping Center, dem Wolkenkrater Boutique Monaco und dem Bauzium Sculpture Museum.