Indigenous Globalisms: Korean Art, Colonialism, and the 20th Century

FAIN: FT-59047-11

Christine Young-Kyung Hahn
Kalamazoo College (Kalamazoo, MI 49006-3295)

During the first fifty-three years of the 20th century, Korea was colonized by a rival nation, divided into North and South, and ravaged by civil war. The Korean art world, like all other aspects of Korean society during this period, underwent tremendous change in a compressed period of time. Amid the travails of the first half of the 20th century, there emerged new modes of art-making, new roles for art-makers, and art objects were increasingly deployed as tools of cultural diplomacy and markers of a burgeoning South Korean national identity. With the support of an NEH Summer Stipend, I seek to complete research for three chapters of a book manuscript on the history of painting in post-colonial, post-division South Korea.