Monday, October 3, 2022
2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Eastern Time
Hybrid Event
In Person, George Washington University, Elliott School of International Affairs, Lindner Family
Commons (Room 602)
And Virtual via Zoom
About this event
What has happened to the post memory generation in South Korea? The country is notorious for conflicting views toward the Korean and Cold War among different generations throughout a range of political and cultural spectrums. This talk provides a rare opportunity to look at the oblivious postwar South Korean society, generation gaps in the Korean War, and ongoing ideological conflicts in South Korea. The historical interpretation of the Korean War has been the center of contentious debate in postwar South Korean society among different generations: 1) war survivors born and raised in the 1950s, 2) protestors participating in the Democratization Movement under the Military Dictatorship in the 1960s until the end of the 1980s, and 3) Shinsaedae (New Generation), whose understanding of the war has been largely controlled by the secondary sources of popular culture—who can be dubbed as the post memory generation in South Korea.
Presented by Dong-Yeon Koh, an art critic and author of The Korean War and Postmemory Generation (London: Routledge, 2021), it also serves as an important avenue toward the understanding of contemporary Korean arts and films on the Korean War by the generation of artists born after the late 1960s and afterward. The talk will be presented with the images of notable artworks by 13 contemporary Korean artists and filmmakers in artistic genres of documentary photography, participatory arts, performance arts, documentary films media installations, and memorials.
Speaker
Dong-Yeon Koh, an art critic, has served as a mentor and committee member in art residencies and museums in South Korea over the last two decades. She was the commissioner of the Goyang Outdoor Sculpture Festival (2017, 2018) and served as the managing committee of NaMAF (Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival) (2017-2021). Dr. Koh has also published more than 40 academic essays in academic journals worldwide including Inter-Asia Journal of Cultural Studies (Routledge), Flash Art, Modern Art Asia, Photography and Culture (Routledge), and Positions (Duke University Press). Koh’s recent books are From Softpower to Goods: Alternative Forms of Exhibitions and Populist Artistic Practices in Post-1990s East Asian Art (Seoul, 2018), The Condition for Art Criticism (Seoul, 2019), and Korean War and Post-memory Generation: The Arts and Films in South Korea (London: Routledge, 2021). She is currently an adjunct lecturer at Seoul National University.
Moderator
Sandra H. Park is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the George Washington University Institute for Korean Studies (GWIKS). She is a historian of modern Korea, the US empire, and the global Cold War. Currently, she is working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Anointed Citizenship: The Politics of Christian Border Crossing in Cold War Korea. Drawing on extensive archival research across government, military, and missionary archives, her book project examines the coherence of Christian moral politics as a pledge of allegiance for North Korean border crossers petitioning for citizenship in “Free” South Korea under the US military empire. Her project traces the cross-border movements of Christians and transpacific circulations of Christian political claims during and immediately after the Korean War, contributing to existing literatures on North Korean migrants and citizenship, religion and the global Cold War, and US-Korean relations in the twentieth century. As an interdisciplinary historian interested broadly in the entanglements between religion and Cold War politics in the transpacific world, Sandra’s research also extends to debates around religious freedom, the making of the US empire in Asia, and the politics of religious devotion in Korean America as well as socialist secularization in revolutionary North Korea. Her previous research on religion and the North Korean people’s court appeared in the Journal of Korean Studies.
