Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art

Fluidity and Fragmentation

Kyunghee Pyun, Jung-Ah Woo, Kyunghee Pyun, Jung-Ah Woo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000453553
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

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.

Part I
Korean Modernity and Modernism

2 Korean Art in the Historiography of Multiple Modernisms

DOI: 10.4324/9780429351112-4

Kyunghee Pyun

Modernism in Korean Art in Multiple Modernisms

Modernism in this book is discussed mainly in the context of visual art. The essays demonstrate that the development of modernism in fine arts, design, and architecture in the Korean peninsula started around 1880, during the late Joseon dynasty; ripened in the 1930s in the spirit of avant-garde art of surrealism, cubism, and fauvism; and continued after World War II and the Korean War, well into the late 1960s.

In the master narrative of Eurocentric modernism, there has been little or no room for artists from Japan, China, Korea, Uruguay, Cuba, and the United States. Yet all of the following artists were working in Paris with ambitions to be concurrent with the “contemporary” art scene: Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) of Cuba, Pan Yuliang (1895–1977) of China, Na Hye-seok 나혜석 (1896–1948) and Paik Nam-soon 백남순 (1904–1994) of Korea, Joaquín Torres-Garcia (1874–1949) of Uruguay, Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) of Spain, Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968) of Japan, and Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–1953) of the United States. Exchange among artists and their willingness to expose themselves to new forms of art were greater than once assumed. The center and periphery model of modernism should be retired. These essays in this volume will enable students of modernism to perceive a multilayered, fluid model of artists, designers, creative directors, critics, and patrons from multiple locations—fragmented yet interconnected.¹

Encyclopedia Britannica defines modernism as follows:

in the fine arts, a break with the past and the concurrent search for new forms of expression. Modernism fostered a period of experimentation in the arts from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, particularly in the years following World War I.²

New forms of expression were not confined to the fine arts but deeply influenced industrialization, social change, emergence of modern science and social sciences including psychology, political science, anthropology, and economics.

Modernism in Latin America, however, is used in a more limited way, and refers to two intellectual movements: modernism in Spanish-speaking Latin America in 1880–1920 and modernism in Brazil in 1922–1945.³ Photographers like Manuel Álvarez Bravo of Mexico and painters like Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Frieda Kahlo were among the influential practitioners of modernism in visual arts. Tarsila do Amaral and Lasar Segall were active in Brazil. Modernism in Latin American visual art also coincided with other forms of culture such as literature, music, design, and architecture, as embodied by Mário de Andrade, who was at the forefront of São Paulo modernism.⁴

Modernism in South Asian art progressed in India during the 1930s and 1940s and remained influential in India and Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947. In the late nineteenth century, Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and several artists had adopted oil painting and European-style illusionism in rendering traditional Indian subject matters. Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) was a woman artist who practiced in a Post-Impressionist style, while Jamini Roy (1887–1972) synthesized traditional Indian painting into European modern art. Fyzee Rahamin (1888–1964) and Allah Buksh (1895–1978) combined a European academic painting style with the traditional Indian miniature.5 In 1947, Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002) and Maqbool Fida Husain (1915–2011) organized the Progressive Artists’ Group and practiced a diverse range of international modern art styles: Expressionism, Primitivism, Surrealism, and Cubism.⁶

In 2019 the Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) at Cornell University, and Asia Art Archive, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, launched a new research project entitled Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA). The project brought together leading international faculty and emerging scholars to investigate parallel and intersecting developments in the cultural histories of modern Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. If the findings of this project are compared with and contrasted to activities of modernists in Northeast and Central Asia, the global map of multiple modernisms will become more comprehensive. Modernism in Korean art can be placed within this narrative of modern art histories from South Asia and other countries on either side in the Pacific Ocean.

In the 1930s and 1940s, several artists were recognized for modernism in Africa, including Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) of South Africa, Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) of Nigeria, and Ibrahim El Salahi (b. 1930) of Sudan. El Salahi was a member of the Khartoum School of African Modernism and the Hurufiyya art movement. A Companion to Modern African Art includes sections on Modernities and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Arts of the Early Twentieth Century, and on Colonialism, Modernism, and Art in Independent Nations.⁷ Essays in these two parts share many similarities with those in our volume. Africa is an enormous continent with many countries, home to people of many ethnicities and cultures, while Korea was perceived as an ethnonational, relatively homogeneous country during those time peri-ods.⁸ Nonetheless, the way modernity emerged in cosmopolitan places by the social elite is strikingly similar. Artists who studied abroad in France or Britain willingly embraced the premises of modernism and mingled with visiting artists from Europe. Korean artists, too, absorbed new trends of modernism and reinvented them with indigenous traditions.

The way Korean artists developed subject matters with distinctive Korean features in Avant-garde styles of visualization also mirrored the progress of modern art in Latin America or by Latinx artists abroad.⁹ Both communities of artists reflected on the disparity between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. By learning about the activities and art-making processes of non-European artists in Africa and Latin America, readers and authors in our book alike should realize that new styles of art in the early twentieth century were in fact consumed, adopted, and experimented with by cosmopolitan minds in various places. Cases and artists in Mansbach’s Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1980– 1939 may look strikingly familiar to readers of this book.¹⁰ Like Polish or Bohemian artists in Eastern Europe, Korean artists lived as colonized citizens of Japan, felt humiliation in the vernacular land of their ancestors, and were forced to give up their native language, indigenous traditions, and many other privileges.

The practice of Eurocentric modernism in visual arts was not always mediated by Japanese interlopers.¹¹ Many artists from China, Taiwan, and Korea were reading Japanese art magazines and attended art schools in Japan. However, the strong-willed and fortunate few made their way to Berlin, Paris, New York, New Haven, or London. Pai Un-song 배운성 (1901–1978) studied in Berlin from 1922 to 1936 and settled in Paris until 1940.¹² Lee Jong-woo 이종우 (1899–1981) lived in Paris from 1925 to 1928. From 1922 to 1929, Lim Yong-ryeon 임용련 (1901–?) attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received an MFA degree from Yale University in New Haven in the United States. Lim travelled to Paris and showed works at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 1929–1930. His wife, Paik Nam-soon followed the footsteps of Na Hye-seok: after attending Tokyo Women’s Art School in 1923, she studied in Paris from 1928 to 1930. Previously Na had studied at the atelier of Roger Bis-sière (1888–1964), a Fauvist painter in Paris in 1927, and visited the United States, returning to Korea in 1929.

These aspiring artists went back to Korea and intermingled with younger artists, including those who had studied in Tokyo but could not travel to Europe. Do Yu-ho 도유호 (1905– 1982), for example, first left for Beijing and then studied history at Frankfurt University, eventually receiving a Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of Vienna in 1935, and working at the Institute of Prehistory until 1939. Kim Jae-won 김재원 (1909–1990) studied archaeology at the University of Munich from 1927 and received a Ph.D. in archaeology in 1934. He worked with Dr. Hentze at Kent University in Belgium from 1934 to 1940. Byun Wol-ryong 변월룡 (Varlen Pen, 1916–1990) was an ethnic Korean born and raised in the Russian Maritime Province off the Pacific Ocean. As a Russian citizen, Byun was educated at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute for Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture and fled to Samarkand in Uzbekistan to avoid the German invasion from 1942 to 1944. Eventually he became professor of drawing at the Ilya Repin Leningrad Institute.¹³ Byun was contemporaneous to Lee Joong-seop 이중섭 (1916–1956) and Yoo Young-guk 유영국 (1916–2002).

One should not omit, however, the indigenous efforts to modernize themselves without external influences or stimulations. Intellectuals of the late Joseon dynasty scrutinized Christianity and European scientific knowledge out of sheer inquisitiveness and patriotic zeal to seize cultural hegemony in East Asia at the time when Manchu-ruled China lost its legitimacy as a superior civilization.¹⁴ If the nineteenth century had not been interrupted by external forces and imperial interference, homegrown modernism, many scholars believe, could have emerged without fragmentation and much suffering. The aim of this book is to present a dynamic model of the cultural advance toward modernism—not of a unilateral direction from the Western world to Korea, but of a bilateral selection, moderated and intentional, of styles and ideas suitable for taste, patronage, and consumption of new bourgeois citizens. One should assume that behind a small fraction of artists able to study abroad stood a larger number of artisans, craftsmen, technical designers, or amateur artists who were intellectually curious and financially motivated for new pursuits of material culture.

Historiography of Geundae and Hyeondae: From Modern to Contemporary

Korean artists in the early twentieth century shared a familiar career trajectory with their contemporaries in Central and South America, South Asia, or Africa. Modernity in Korea was apparent by 1895, when Emperor Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire. The Gabo Reformation (1894) brought drastic changes in governmental and social structures in the direction of Westernization. The modern postal system and police department were established in 1895. It was also in this period that modernized suits and short haircuts became required for governmental officers. In 1894, an electricity company was founded to provide service for trams and lights. Trams were operated in the Namdaemun and Jongro districts, major commercial venues in Seoul.¹⁵ The first electric bulbs in Korea were installed at Geoncheongung, part of the Gyeongbokgung Palace Complex, as early as 1887, with technical support provided by Thomas Edison’s company. Around 1900, street lights were set up in Jongro streets. American missionaries had arrived in the Joseon dynasty by the 1880s. In 1885, Henry G. Appenzeller, a Methodist missionary, built Baejae Hakdang to educate boys, while Horace N. Allen and Horace G. Underwood helped build a medical college called Gwanghyewon, which was renamed Jejungwon with blessings from Gojong. Mary Scranton established a school for women, Ewha Hakdang, in 1886. Gojong also helped one of his concubines, Sunheon Hwang-gwibi 순헌황귀비, establish a school for women’s education and named it Myungshin Girls School, which later became Sookmyung Women’s University. While Catholicism had suffered from persecutions such as the Sinyu Persecution 신유박해 of 1801, the Myoungdong Cathedral was built by the French Foreign Missionaries in the style of a French gothic church in 1892–1893.¹⁶ In 1908 Ko Hui-dong 고희동 (1886–1965) went to Tokyo to study oil painting. Ko was originally a civil officer translating documents into French at the court for the Korean Empire.¹⁷

The essays in this volume focus on talented, aspiring, yet frustrated artists of modernism in Korea, which lost sovereignty to Japan from 1919 to 1945. Many of these artists had exposure to Christianity via schooling or cultural organizations. The term “modern” itself has close ties with Christianity, as it derives from the fifth-century Latin term mod-ernus, which distinguished a “Christian present” from a “pagan past.”¹⁸ But in the nineteenth century, Western modernity was defined by much more complex philosophical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic terms that...