Meanwhile, in Korea

We have now translated the second article I mentioned, the one about representations of family in modern art in Korea. Turned out that it wasn’t about the Japanese colonial period but, instead, about the post-Korean War period. If the author is to be believed, paintings of families were rare before the Korean War. And, if the example she uses is typical, they showed families arrayed in clear hierarchical order, with stony faces staring straight out of the picture and no emotional interaction. Family equaled household and households were people stuck together inside the walls of a house by kinship or marriage. After the war, we see nuclear families; but, at least to this Korean art historian, what is more important is that we see the emotional interaction missing in earlier family images. Parents and children now look at each other; in one case they dance naked together in a space without walls. The author attributes this change to the experience of the Korean War in which families were often divided, family members were lost, and the “big family” structures of the past turned out to be less important in the struggle for survival than the personal ties of mothers and children. Male artists were fantasizing about being able to reunite their families but retain that kind of intimacy. Interestingly, however, while postwar visual art depicted happy families, postwar literature was filled with stories of suffering families broken by the war. Why the visual arts became a vehicle for positive fantasy while the literary arts became a vehicle for gloomy retrospection remains a puzzle.

Any ideas?