The construction of national identity in South Korea and the tradition of masculinity in Korean Abstract Painting

ABSTRACT

Korean Modern Art History began to be produced in the 1970s, when Western Modernist Art History, based on Formalism, was introduced as a matrix to map the ‘evolution’ of 20th century Korean Art. Korean modern art history is based in the same paradigm as the West, beginning with Impressionism and ‘ending’ with Abstract Expressionism. First introduced to the country from the West immediately after the Korean War, Korean Abstract Expressionism is now deemed as South Korea’s ultimate ‘progressive’ and ‘modern’ art form, a ‘Korean’ painting style combining the Western art form with traditional artistic concepts of ‘Scholarly Painting’ (muninhwa). Japanese‐influenced painting styles originating in the colonial period (1910–45) are rejected as ‘non‐authentic.’ The problem is that Scholarly Painting was a gender and class specific art born from the rigid Confucian culture of pre‐modern Korea, and thus its revival as an ‘ultimate modern’ and ‘Korean’ form has the consequence of locating traditionally‐gendered notions of art and artist at the core of the South’s modern art. This essay uses a Semiotic approach to deconstruct this gendered modernist rhetoric by tracing the emergence of the sign ‘Koreaness’ in South Korean modern art, showing how it is defined within Korean Abstract Painting as an ‘ultimate Korean sign’ and how its use of anti‐Japanese rhetoric covers up the traumatic history of the Korean War.     

NATIONAL GALLERY EXHIBITS NEW YEAR PAINTINGS

The National Art Museum of China opened an exhibition to display its collection of New Year painting masterpieces prior to the Spring Festival 2008, or Chinese New Year.     

New Concepts Give Life to Purple Sand Art

China New Concept Purple Sand Art Exhibition was held recently in Baiyefeng No. 5 Hall in Beijing. The one-month exhibition offered Beijing people an opportunity to appreciate vitality of the old purple sand art in modern times. Purple sand, unique to Yixing, Jiangsu Province, has become the ideal material for tea things since the Ming and Qing dynasties. The special techniques developed over several hundred years have helped to perfectly integrate material, design and function.     

Evaluating equity: assessing diversity efforts through a social justice lens

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a formative evaluation of The Art Institute of Chicago’s initial efforts to diversify the museum field through the Diversifying Art Museum Leadership Initiative (DAMLI) programme. DAMLI is supported by the Walton Family Foundation and Ford Foundation as part of a movement to diversify the arts & cultural workforce in the United States. In Spring, 2018 the author was contracted to evaluate the museum-wide initiative to systematize and improve the experiences of high school, college, and graduate interns from demographic groups currently underrepresented in museum leadership fields. Through the use of [Fraser, N. (1995). Reframing justice in a globalizing world. New Left Review, 36, 1–19.] social justice framework, this paper will focus on the recruitment, selection, and management of internship experiences of the first four cohorts of undergraduate and graduate-level interns within the programme. The paper begins with an overview of recent diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the arts & cultural sector – highlighting the systemic issues leading to the need for such initiatives and presenting a typology for organisational responses to the issue. This paper then categorise the type of organisational change sought by The Art Institute of Chicago based on Fraser’s two-dimensional social justice conditions and remedies framework in order to assess whether or not the Art Institute is achieving its goal of attracting, retaining, and empowering a diverse set of students and influencing their decision to pursue a career in the museum field by providing an equitable and inclusive environment during the internship. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of this work for arts and cultural organisations interested in diversifying the cultural workforce.     

Book Reviews

The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740. Charles E. Clark The Oxford Companion to World War II. General Ed. I.C.B. Dear, Consulting Ed. M.R.D. Foot George Washington, Frontiersman. Zane Grey. Ed. Carlton Jackson The Tony Hillerman Companion. A Comprehensive Guide to His Life and Work. Ed. Martin Greenberg American Diner. Richard J.S. Gutman Roadside New Jersey. Peter Genovese The South. B.C. Hall and C.T. Wood The Critical Response to Herman Melville's “Moby-Dick.”. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance. Randall Knoper The Columbia Book of Civil War Poetry from Whitman to Walcott. Ed. Richard Marius Parables of Possibility: The American Need for Beginnings. Terence Martin Way Out West. Jane & Michael Stern Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America. David W. Stowe Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems, Songs, Movies, Plays and Folklore 1917–1953. Edited by James von Geldern and Richard Stites Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief. Edited by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester and Gareth Roberts Hard Maple, Hard Work. John Gagnon The Art of Democracy: A Concise History of Popular Culture in the United States. Jim Cullin Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Paul R. Gorman Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality. Jeff Ferrell Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Michael Rogin All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890. Maureen Ogle Children and the Movies: Movie Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy. Jowett S. Garth, Ian C. Jarvis, and Kathryn H. Fuller The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s. Ellen Gruber Garvey If You've Seen One You've Seen the Mall. Rob Kroes Women in the Trees: U.S. Women's Short Stories About Battering and Resistance, 1839–1994. Edited by Susan Koppelman New Feminist Art Criticism. Edited by Katy Deepwell Melodrama and the Myth of America. Jeffrey D. Mason Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City. Clay McShane Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century. David Montgomery Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi. Charles C. Bolton The Critical Response to Kurt Vonnegut. Ed. Leonard Mustazza Material Culture and People's Art Among the Norwegians in America. Ed. Marion Nelson Extremism in America. Ed. Lyman Sargent Mark Twain in the Company of Women. Laura E. Skandera-Trombley 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture. Timothy B. Spears The Sixties and the End of Modern America. David Steigerwald     

The way our generation imagined the world

Abstract

This paper tells the worldview of a generation that grew up in the Communist revolutionary ideology. For the people of this generation, the world was always divided into two worlds, the East and the West. Throughout China’s modern national history, the West, led by the United States, has been the imperialist aggressor and invader; on a global scale, it has been the hegemonic power that rejected and blockaded China; in social structure and ideology, it was capitalist, countering socialist China, and ever ready to subvert the New China. According to Mao Zedong’s three‐pronged theory of ‘enemy, friends and us,’ the West belonged to the ‘enemy’ side. The Bandung Conference in 1955, and prior to it, the Peace Conference for Asia and the Pacific Region held in Beijing, had a great impact on high‐school students in Mainland China. We viewed these conferences as promising signs that the New China would rid itself of isolation, and felt very close to those countries of ‘neighbors and friends.’     

Book Reviews

Art in the Age of Mass Media, John A. Walker. New England in Fiction 1787–1990. Robert B. Slocum. By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America. Nicholas K. Bromell. Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Eric Lott. Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770–1810. Shane White. M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America. H. Bruce Franklin. The Sixties: From Memory to History. David Farber, The Great American Outlaw: A Legacy of Fact and Fiction. Frank Richard Prassel. American Iconology. Edited by David C. Miller. The Ethnic Detective. Peter Freese. Wilton S. Dillon and Neil G. Kotler, editors. The Statue of Liberty REVISITED. Looking for God in the Suburbs. James Hudnut-Beumler. A Permanent Etcetera: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Post-War America. A. Robert Lee Historic Ranches of Texas. Lawrence Clayton and J.U. Salvant. Likenesses and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype. Delores A. Kilgo. The Fictional Republic: Horatio Alger and American Political Discourse. Carol Nackenoff. All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Culture. Creation's Journey: Native American Identity and Belief. Garrison Keillor. Peter A. Scholl. Handbook of Old Time Radio: A Comprehensive Guide to Golden Age Radio Listening and Collecting. Jon D. Swartz and Robert C. Reinehr. Rocky Mountain Divide: Selling & Saving the West. John B. Wright.     

Asia in the 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003

The 50th Venice Biennale of Art 2003 took the theme of ‘Dreams and Conflicts: the Dictatorship of the Viewer’, a theme that was said to reflect the difficulties of presenting art to diverse global audiences, with their own very different points‐of‐view. As an event, the Biennale has two tracks, one features works specially curated for the event, without necessarily any reference to place of residence of artists; the second track is specifically state‐based, where state art establishments present the work of ‘their’ artists in dedicated spaces, or even specially‐built permanent pavilions. This essay is structured as an art review, a statement of relative success or failure of aesthetic projects, mixing journalist convention, some light exegesis and purely subjective personal comment. Such review essays are relatively uncritical of the very frame of viewing and judging, and rarely make very clear the scale against which projects are measured. In this case, the main criteria for such ranking of the national pavilions was how they balanced the sort of self‐awareness that art in the early 21st century seems to require, against the implied aims of state promotion, and a sensitivity to styles or flavours of work prevailing in the world of the major Euro‐American arts institutions. This article goes on to consider several other artists and entries, and notes that few works were site‐specific to ‘Venice, Italy’, (as opposed to ‘place where important Biennale is held’). One exception was Fred Wilson’s work in the US pavilion. Work by practitioners based in Asia was reasonably well‐represented in the curated sections of Venice, particularly through the show orchestrated by Hou Hanru, a China‐educated curator who has made his career in Paris since 1990. While individual curators are able to move in circuits between Asia and Europe or North America, it is unclear how art circuits in various Asian territories will continue to interact with the larger Biennale circuit, and indeed the international commercial art market. Clearly the ‘national’ approach still has some momentum, and we can expect curators and state arts organizations to become more nuanced in their presentation.     

Culture = politics: the emergence of new cultural forms of protest in the age of freeter

This paper examines new cultural and political movements that have developed outside of traditional leftist politics since the early 1990s in Japan. The new movements, including Dame‐ren, the Cardboard House Art movements in Shinjuku and recent anti‐war protests on the Iraqi war, were mainly led by young people, in particular, the freeter generation, who did not experience the leftist politics of the 1960s. These movements are different from traditional Marxist political ones and even from the new social movements in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that they incorporate more cultural practices such as art, music, dance and performance into their political activities. The paper also explores the historical background against which the new movements were born and have developed since the end of the Bubble economy. It sees freeters, young part‐time workers, as emerging, new political actors that have appeared through the transition of a mode of production from Fordism to post‐Fordism. The transformation of society, economy and politics, known as ‘post‐modernization’ or recently as ‘globalization’, has asked us to re‐consider and re‐define the basic concepts such as class, proletariat, power, labour and work which we once shared. The paper tries to locate, through a critical examination, the new movements within a broader context of anti‐neo‐liberalism and anti‐globalization and find political potentiality within it.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article: Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism Robert L. Gale, A Mickey Spillane Companion Samantha Barbas, Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars, and the Cult of Celebrity Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (eds.), Art and Thought Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds.), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema Joseph L. Coulombe, Mark Twain and the American West Mark H. Zanger, The American History Cookbook Frances Early and Kathleen Kennedy (eds.), Athena's Daughters: Television's New Women Warriors Susan J. Matt, Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890–1930 David J. Cole, Eve Browning and Fred E. H. Schroeder (eds.), Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions David E. Nye, America as Second Creation: Technology and Narratives of New Beginnings James W. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering Peter C. Rollins and John O'Connor (eds.), Hollywood's White House: The American Presidency in Film and History     

Korean military brides in New York

ABSTRACT

This article tells the stories of five Korean military brides in the predominantly middle‐class neighborhood of Newburgh, New York, focusing on their association with the American military bases in South Korea and their daily struggles in cross‐cultural marriages in the United States. It examines the particular contexts in which personal and sexual relations developed between American soldiers and Korean women in the ‘camp‐towns’ or ‘GI towns’ (kijich’on). It also looks at the ways in which some Korean women employed fraternization as a survival strategy in a war‐torn society, and in which they struggled to come to terms with the American mainstream society after their migration to the United States. These life histories provide us with a unique lens through which to explore the unequal power relations between the United States and South Korea within the dialectical framework of militarism, gender and migration.     

NOTHING SHINES AT THE VENICE BIENNALE

The 52nd edition of the Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition opened its doors for previews on June 7, drawing artists, collectors, curators, dealers, critics and art patrons to     

Book Reviews

“No Sorrow Like Our Sorror”: Northern Protestant Ministers and the Assassination of Lincoln. By David B. Chesebrough The American Grocery Store: The Business Evolution of an Architectural Space. By James M. Mayo Public Television for Sale: Media, the Market and the Public Sphere. By William Hoynes The New Deal Fine Arts Projects: A Bibliography, 1933–1992. By Martin R. Kalfatovic Second to None. Edited by Ruth Barnes Moynihan, Cynthia Russett and Laurie Crumpacker Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family's Claim to Confederate Anthem. By Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America. By Page Smith Markers VIII. James A. Slater, ed Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone. By Robert C. Cottrell The Complete Short Stories of Jack London. Three vols. Eds. Earl Labor, Robert C. Leitz, III, and I. Milo Shepard     

Collection Revitalization,Art Education

"The Immortal Heritage:Exposition of Selected Works of the French Academy of Fine Arts from the National Art Museum of China(NAMOC)",an important program of"Col...     

The Art of Brush Strokes Sun Xiaoyun and Her Calligraphy Works

Sun Xiaoyun was born in a calligrapher family and began learning calligraphy at age 3. Upon graduation from junior middle school, like millions of youngsters during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), she was sent to the countryside to be "re-educated" by farmers and afterwards served in the army for 8 years. Except two years of training in jiangsu Chinese Painting Academy, Sun mastered skills of calligraphy virtually by self-study. From the late 1970s, Sun extensively studied works of man…     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

Caroline Ware,Consumer Activism and American Democracy During the New Deal, 1933–45

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how the New Deal consumer activist Caroline F. Ware crafted an ambitious consumerist vision for the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. This vision aimed to end the Depression and bring post-war prosperity and to create a new kind of American democracy and citizenship, one suited to the promises and perils of an industrialized, urbanized America. One member of a loose cohort of like-minded intellectuals, and self-styled consumer ‘experts', Ware made one of the most persuasively articulated intellectual contributions of the period to a particular kind of liberal consumer activism.     

Birds of a feather end up flocking together when studying abroad. Can a university bridge the cultural differences that challenge friendships between Pacific Island students and New Zealand students?

Intercultural friendship formation is a key challenge for international students studying abroad. In an increasingly globalised world, where people regularly engage with others from different cultures, meaningful intercultural friendships are important. However, culture can pose a considerable challenge that hinders the formation of friendships between people of different cultures. This paper explores challenges and insights into developing intercultural friendships between international Pacific Island students studying in Aotearoa New Zealand and domestic New Zealand Palagi¹ students. Similar to other studies, the findings in this study highlight the key challenges connected to cultural differences. These findings are surprising as New Zealand Palagi students would have gone to primary and secondary schools with Pacific Island students and should have had some contact and interactions with them and be more accustomed to cultural differences. Unique to this study is that these international Pacific Island students recognised that universities are in a prime position to champion and promote systemic interventions to assist both international and domestic students to engage with each other in order to promote cultural understanding. Overcoming intercultural friendship development challenges involves creating meaningful intercultural spaces and campus ‘friendship’ events to increase intercultural interactions, raise domestic students’ cross-cultural awareness, and encourage reciprocal intercultural learning. Such activities are likely to enhance the overall well-being of all students and improve the internationalisation of universities with increasingly diverse student cohorts.     

A Family of Suona Musicians

Sui Jingshan is an assistant professor at Anhui Provincial Art College. He was born of a family of suona musicians and his ancestors were all folk musicians playing suona, a double-reed traditional Chinese instrument. Sui was born in Bozhou, a county in the northern part of Anhui Province which borders with Henan, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces. It is also the hometown of Cao Cao, a great strategist, politician and gure of literature. The place enjoys rich cultural traditions and diverse…