Grounds for Photography in Authoritarian South Korea

Grounds for Photography in Authoritarian South Korea

Date: 22 May 2012 (Tuesday)
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Room 2.38, Main Building, HKU

Between 1968 and 1970, a number of photographers turned their cameras downwards so as to focus on the ground. The intentional shift ran counter to what since 1961 had been an emphatic, and even relentless, drive to rebuild the South Korean capital of Seoul into a vertical metropolis. Almost as soon as army general Park Chung-hee seized control of the South Korean government in 1961, the state embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious campaign to develop Korea economically, a campaign whose most spectacular manifestation was less the dizzying pace of development than the almost overnight proliferation of high-rise buildings, from the erection of Samil Building, the first skyscraper in Korea, to the masses of apartment complexes that continue to define Seoul’s built environment today. So closely aligned were these attempts to define the place known as Korea, and particularly Seoul, that these images figured as material embodiments of state intent. That photographers like Jun Min-cho, Joo Myungduck, and Yook Myung-shim chose to refuse the verticality that so defined these attempts at architecture might consequently be regarded as a response to the South Korean state, which by 1968 was moving dangerously towards fullfledged dictatorship. A key aspect of this lecture will be a discussion of Space (Konggan), South Korea’s most significant journal of visual culture in the 1960s and 70s. First published in 1966 by de facto state architect Kim Swoogeun, it became a metaphorical ground upon which various images of ground mediated competing ideas of land, nation, and state.

Speaker: Joan Kee

Joan Kee is an assistant professor in the History of Art department at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A specialist in contemporary art in East and Southeast Asia, her articles have appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Artforum, Art Journal, as well as forthcoming works in Art History and Art Bulletin. In 2004, she guest-edited a special issue on contemporary Asian art for the journal Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, and in 2011 co-edited “Contemporaneity and Art in Southeast Asia” for Third Text with Patrick Flores. Her book, The Urgency of Method: Tansaekhwa and Contemporary Korean Art, is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2013.