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The designation of handicrafts as “intangible heritage” under South Korea’s Intangible Cultural Properties Protection Law contains an inherent contradiction: The skills of potters, weavers, paper-makers and other craft producers are akin to the embodied and artful work of dancers and singers in performance genres similarly recognized by the law, and they are likewise realized through disciplined and embodied knowledge made manifest in evanescent performance—thus their “intangibility.” But in contrast with performing arts, handicraft production leaves its tangible trace in a material object, in such things as cast metal, worked wood, ceramics, and textiles. In other words, the resulting craft object is a witness to the performance of intangible heritage and thus to the validity of the object’s claims as an authentic and valuable Korean thing. Market value makes possible the viability of the craft, but marketable crafts also assume innovations and compromises to meet consumer tastes with a viable price point. In this article, I explore the ambiguities of handicraft performance, how certain aspects become front stage and iconic demonstrations while others are carried out backstage, how claims are made for the Koreanness of the performers, and how some processes and materials are necessarily compromised in the practical production of handicrafts for a high end market. It is not my aim to argue against a compromised authenticity but rather to situate the story of Korean handicraft inside an ongoing discussion about what it means to do handicraft in the broadest possible sense in the twenty-first century. The verb “to do” is carefully chosen to include not only the critical process of making things in the sense of throwing pots or looming cloth but the surrounding networks of material acquisition, labor, circulation, marketing, consumption, and general discursive “craft talk.”

A significant number of museums in Korea make use of replicated artifacts in their displays, regardless of the emphasis that is put on the importance of showing original heritage artifacts. By looking at examples of replicated artifacts in Korean national museums, this article attempts to assess the relevancy (or irrelevancy) of having authentic objects in museum displays, as opposed to contemporary replicas of these artifacts. The curation of Korean art and culture is approached from the perspective of reality or a ‘felt past’ that visitors are able to experience in museum exhibitions. Although the original and the replicated object are intrinsically different, the influence replica display has on visitor experience and display integrity varies according to the expectations and goals of viewing of the observing party.

Since the 2000s, regional museums and memorials specializing in Korean modern history and culture have been created and opened to the public. Public regional museums that purport to cover the “modern” era have one common and significant feature; Japanese colonial architecture serves as a place to collect, preserve, and display artifacts and other visual material associated with Korean modern history. By the end of the 1990s most Japanese colonial buildings and structures, ranging from Japanese Shintō shrines and temples to government buildings had been excised from the Korean landscape. Some Japanese colonial buildings were demolished to symbolically regain sovereignty, while others remain in use due to financial considerations. However, a 2001 amendment to the Cultural Property Protection Law and related social movement have dramatically changed how Japanese colonial buildings are treated: no longer the dregs of the tragic colonial era, they have become heritage and a resource to be preserved and utilized. This change has encouraged the creation of regional modern history museums. This article explores the interpretational shift marked by the birth of modern museums in contemporary Korea. Firstly I examine how, or whether, the construction of Korean regional modern museums housed in Japanese colonial buildings is associated with anti-Japanese nationalism. Concerning this issue, I focus on the contents and configuration of three different exhibit facilities located in Kunsan. Secondly I seek to interpret the consequence and the significance of the interpretational shift in postcolonial Korea that has made preserving and actively utilizing colonial era buildings possible in the light of case studies on three exhibit facilities in Kunsan.

The National Museum of Korea (NMK) is a site for teaching its visitors about the wonders of the Korean past through exhibition of exemplary art works. Through participant-observation in a Korean art history program organized by the NMK, museum visits, an interview with a senior curator, and an analysis of the NMK’s self-published book 100 Highlights of the National Museum of Korea, I interrogate the museum’s ideology in order to gain a better understanding of the messages about Koreanness communicated to the museum’s visitors. I am interested in the curatorial choices made by the museum that may ideologically condition spectators to associate Korean artistic excellence with Buddhism. I combine an analysis of language used in curation of Buddhist art on museum labels and displays, and within the NMK’s self-published book of 100 museum highlights, with a discussion that illustrates how the NMK creates new regimes of value in its presentation of Buddhist objects as national heritage.

Many mistakenly posit the presently close relations between Korea and the United States as having begun with Japan’s surrender in 1945. The alliance exists to this day, and there are still many who can scarcely imagine a Korean peninsula without U.S. military forces present. The curious triangle of Korean-U.S.-Japanese relations, however, began much earlier. A forced treaty with Japan in 1876 was the first attempt to coerce Korea away from the traditional East Asian world order, while a treaty of “amity and commerce” with America in 1882 represented a more autonomous move toward a new global configuration. With annexation in 1910, the first battle lines had been drawn: Japan had betrayed Korea and America represented the best hope for salvation. And this was more than historical reality; it also clearly manifest itself in works of early modern Korean fiction, which reveal a naïve optimism regarding America’s role in Korea’s mod-ernization and rescue. With the failure of America, however, to come to Korea’s aid during the independence movement of March 1, 1919, there came a turning away from the U.S. and to Japan. The U.S., once the promised land, became a wasteland, while Japan came to fill the vacated position of redeemer. From the 1920s, we see a systematic dismantling of America’s privileged position and a concomitant acceptance of the reality of Japanese hegemony. Ironically, however, Japanese oppression and American silence liberated Koreans psychologically from the naïve fantasy of U.S. salvation, even as they politically drove them further toward subjugation and assimilation.

A thorough understanding of the study of the Classics in the Chosŏn dynasty requires careful analysis of all of the classics. In this article, I will focus on one specific classical book, the Doctrine of the Mean. The interpretation of the Doctrine of the Mean can be divided into two main academic scholarly groups: one group deepened and developed the Neo-Confucian system of thought inherited from Zhu Xi, while the other em-phasized the superior practical applications of the original Confucian philosophy and criticized the theory of Neo-Confucianism as too ideological without clear practical ap-plication. The former group emphasized two points. First, they expanded the theory of self-cultivation to include Neo-Confucianist theory concerning mind-nature. Second, pro-ponents of this group eventually developed the Neo- Confucianist theory of mind-nature as one of the core topics in the seventeenth-century Horak debate. The second group scholars rejected Zhu Xi’s authority with respect to the Doctrine of the Mean, including, for example, his thirty-three-chapter system of dividing the pre-viously undivided text of the book. Instead, this group criticized Zhu Xi’s addition of two chapters of his own to the Doctrine of the Mean, and used their own chapter system to divide the book, excluding Zhu Xi’s additions. They not only criticized Zhu Xi’s stance on metaphysical analysis, but also emphasized that the core of the Doctrine of the Mean should be to put the course of the Mean into practice in everyday life and human relations.