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This article takes so-called migrant labor fiction in South Korea as an opportunity to think about the long-standing question of the politics of representation. Looking at recent fiction from Kim Insuk, Kim Chaeyŏng, and Kang Yŏngsuk, Hanscom argues that whatever its avowed politics, a text presenting the experience of the migrant laborer must claim a certain veracity or proximity to the real to achieve its effects. That the crossing of geopolitical borders is figured in these examples through the fantastic representation of speech outside of linguistic difference does not diminish the need to think through such representations in terms of the problem of realism, for which fiction is comprehended and valued to the extent that it expresses the actuality of the subject. In these stories, this actuality comes to the reader in two linked forms: the mundanity of the everyday, particularly the trope of urban poverty and the figure of the common people; and the imagined divorce of speech from ethnic-national or cultural context. What the essay finds is that rather than presenting a transcultural ideal of post-national community, representations of speech in these stories instead retain a culturalist impulse for which the “tie of language” remains linked to the “tie of blood.” Beyond the interpretation of an empathetic surface politics that aims to persuade the reader of the humanity of the laborer, culture remains linked to an economy of human types signaled by linguistic belonging.

Mixrice, an art collective of artists Yang Ch’ŏlmo [Yang Chul Mo] and Cho Chiŭn [Cho Ji Eun] won the 2016 Korea Artist Prize for their provocative multimedia project that featured a two-channel video installation, titled “The Vine Chronicle.” Centrally documenting the various lives of trees, like a 450-year old Zelkova tree from the village of Kangdong-ri, the video portrays their itinerant lives as they are moved to various sites to fuel capitalist development schemes: camping resorts, apartment complexes and redevelopment sites. Using this exhibit and its unique post-pastoral perspective as a frame, this article explores contemporary perceptions of Korean environment in art and literature. In this study, I am interested in drawing connections among ecocritical artworks and literary works that highlight the dispossession of human and non-human life and the history of rapid South Korean development. These works seek to complicate notions of South Korean development, environmental degradation and migration through a post-pastoral frame.

A binary model of patronage has often guided previous studies on modern Korean Buddhist paintings from the metropolitan area around present-day Seoul. This model sharply contrasts works sponsored by the royal court at the end of Chosŏn with those commissioned by abbots of prominent temples during the colonial period. In this model, formal features of paintings are aligned with social status and the political stance of patrons; court-sponsored works are considered as displaying conventional style and iconography, while those sponsored by abbots who collaborated with Japanese colonialists show new painting techniques and iconographic motifs. Yet the complex history of Korean Buddhism and its visual culture complicates any attempts to address the history of Korean Buddhist art at the turn of the twentieth century from a monolithic and linear perspective. The Buddhist art and architecture of Anyang’am, founded in 1889 by a devout layman who later became fully ordained, provide a case study for rethinking this binary model of art and patronage. My investigation reveals that the Buddhist art and architecture of the temple, dating from the 1890s to 1910s, show stylistic, iconographic, and spatial affinities with those sponsored in the region by the court a few decades earlier. I argue that the patron emulated royal sponsorship to promote the newly founded temple through visual representation. This study challenges the presumed relationship between art and patronage, while arguing that differences of painting styles and iconographic motifs are modulated by far more diverse factors rooted in the changing religious and cultural context.

It is noted that European pictorial technique was introduced during the Chosŏn dynasty via China and that Western objects exchanged through diplomatic activities by Chosŏn envoys played a significant role in the spread of this new painting style in Korea. However, it is not fully understood how Chosŏn people perceived Western painting techniques, which elements they favored and which were less appreciated. Nor do we know by what routes the new visual elements were transmitted. Focusing on multiple channels through which various images were imported and the diverse agents who took part in the cultural transmission between Chosŏn Korea and Qing China, this study explores Chosŏn Korea’s reception and understanding of Western painting techniques and the application of this new style in their works of art, such as “Han Palace” or “Towers and Pavilions” in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In addition, Chinese paintings and prints, which were mass-produced for larger markets and circulated throughout China as well as exported to other foreign countries are investigated as possible sources for the Chosŏn works. Taking paintings by professional painters in Beijing working outside of the Qing imperial court and Suzhou prints as vehicles of carrying the new artistic taste and pictorial techniques, this research proposes the assumption that these Chinese visual materials infused with Western style were imported to and circulated in Korea from the late eighteenth century onward and that these foreign images contributed to Korea’s (mis)perception and (mis)understanding of Chinese art and European pictorial conventions.

At the end of the nineteenth century, western incursions into Korea had gradually opened the peninsula to the outside world, and by the 1890s foreigners were not only permitted to reside in the country, but becoming commonplace in treaty ports and in the capital. At the same time, Britain, Russia, and increasingly, Japan, were engaged in a contest for geopolitical supremacy in the northern Pacific; Great Power contestation over access to trade in north China centred on the Korean peninsula as a major point of tension for the international balance of power. In this period a number of British official visitors came to Korea, and three prepared reports on the characteristics of the Korean people, society, economy, and geography. They were all politicians or colonial functionaries: Charles W. Campbell, a naturalist and consular official stationed in Seoul, George Nathaniel Curzon, a Conservative member of Parliament, who would later become Viceroy of India, and Joseph Walton, a Liberal member of Parliament from Yorkshire with a consuming interest in East Asian affairs. These men’s narratives provided a great deal of the information on Korea available to the British official mind as it formulated its East Asian policy. This article assesses the underlying motivations behind these visits, and examines the effect of British regional geopolitics on these men’s attitudes to encounter in Korea.

This article studies an important period 1929–1931 in the life of Kim Il-sung (C. Jin Richeng), the first leader of North Korea, through an analysis of his previously unknown personal file written by officials of the Communist International in the Soviet Union in 1941 after Kim had escaped to the USSR from Manchukuo. It is possibly the first biography of Kim Il-sung ever written. The document sheds new light on some aspects of Kim’s early life, including his arrest in 1929, his service in the Chinese People’s National Salvation Army, and the events surrounding his admission into the Chinese Communist Party. On the basis of this file and other documents of the era, such as diaries of Kim’s superior Zhou Baozhong and Comintern chief Dimitrov, this paper presents an account of Kim Il-sung’s life and career in the late 1920s – early 1930s and reveals the distortions of the official North Korean biography of Kim Il-sung in service to the ideological goals of the state.