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Index
12/13 | Music Studies Colloquium: Dynamic Korea, Amplifying Registers - Katherine Lee
12/6 | Pyongyang via Almaty: Post-Socialist Visions of North Korea - Y. David Chung / Alexander Kan / Lisa Min
12/2 | Key Issues Hindering Further Integration in East Asia and Korea’s Role - Various
11/15 | 70th Anniversary of the Korean Language Program at UC Berkeley - Various
11/12 | Satire and National Identity in North Korean Comedy Series ‘My Family’s Problem’ - Immanuel Kim
11/8 | Korea Peace Day: No Reconciliation Without Truth (Talk); Memory of Forgotten War (Film) - Various
11/6 | Religious Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Modernity in Northeast Asia - Taylor Atkins
10/25 | Artist as Producer and Kitsch: The Ethnographic Turn and the Colonial Collection - Aimee Kwon
10/24 | 1970s South Korean Literature, Film and State-sponsored Visual Art - Various
10/14 | The War Film Genre and Politics of History in South Korean Cinema - Kyu Hyun Kim
9/28 | Technology and Development of Metal Movable-Type Printing and Print Culture in East Asia - Various
9/16 | History as Artifice in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy - Peter Paik
9/6 | Tansaekhwa and the Case for Abstraction in Postwar Korea - Joan Kee
Friday, December 6 (4:00 p.m.)
Pyongyang via Almaty: Post-Socialist Visions of North Korea
Location: 370 Dwinelle Hall
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Speakers:
Y. David Chung (University of Michigan)
Alexander Kan (Writer)
Lisa Min (UC Berkeley)
Steven Lee (UC Berkeley)
Monday, December 2 (4:00 p.m.)
Overcoming the Asia Paradox: Key Issues Hindering Further Integration in East Asia and Korea’s Role
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies, Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco
Speakers and Topics:
Kathleen Stephens (Stanford University/Former U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Korea)
North Korea: Obstacle or Catalyst for Regional Integration?
Tai Ming Cheung (UC San Diego)
China and the Dynamics of Arms Races in East Asia in the 21st Century
Daniel Sneider (Stanford University)
Korea-Japan Relations Under Stress
T.J. Pempel (UC Berkeley)
Moderator
Friday, November 15 (4:00 p.m.)
Forum to Commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the Korean Language Program at UC Berkeley
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Speakers and Topics:
Kay Richards (UC Berkeley)
History of the Korean Language Program at UC Berkeley
Kijoo Ko (UC Berkeley)
Current Status of the Korean Language Program at UC Berkeley
Hye-Sook Wang (Brown University)
Korean Language Education in U.S. Higher Education: History, Evolution, and Prospects
Hyo Sang Lee (Indiana University)
What Do We Teach?: The Fallacy of Teaching Grammar in Korean Classes
Tuesday, November 12 (3:30 p.m.)
Satire and National Identity in North Korean Comedy Series ‘My Family’s Problem’
Immanuel Kim (Binghamton University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: Media coverage of the DPRK in the past and today hardly focuses on the production of comedy films. The stern and dismal portrayal of the nation-state leaves anything but the consideration of its citizens’ ability to laugh at their own national crisis for observers outside of the DPRK. However, this kind of representations from the media (both in and outside of the DPRK) not only perpetuates the seemingly draconian regime but also ossifies the presuppositions of the nation-state. Scholars on North Korean film have made attempts to understand the country through its film medium, only to conclude that film serves as yet another tool for raising the ideological consciousness of the viewers and for nation-building. In fact, such studies on North Korean film often examine dramatic films or melodrama, assuming that the grand narrative of the DPRK is articulated through the repository of such serious and nationalistic films. Comedy films, on the other hand, may offer a new or add to the existing scholarship on North Korean film by projecting a slightly different understanding of the process of the cultural production. This talk examines the process of making Uri Ji Munje (My Family’s Problem), which debuted in 1973, as the agent of laughter for the North Korean audience as well as for any viewers. By utilizing the North Korean film critic Kim Yŏng’s analysis of the film, Kim highlights comedic moments in My Family’s Problem that have posed problems in the filmmaking process. Kim Yŏng writes that situating the problematic wife of the protagonist as the source of national crisis has enabled the filmmakers to overcome some of the lackluster moments typified in other DPRK films and has intensified the comedic value of the film. This talk elaborates on two of Kim’s implications: first, the domestic space, occupied by the wife of the protagonist, is the agent of political subversion; and second, the subversive potentiality of the domestic space inversely targets national politics (or the duty of men) as the true source of comedy.
Friday, November 8 (4:00 p.m.)
Korea Peace Day Activities at UC Berkeley
Location: David Brower Center, Berkeley
Charles Hanley (Journalist)
No Gun Ri: No Reconciliation Without Truth
Film Screening: Memory of Forgotten War
Panelists:
Paul Liem (Korea Policy Institute)
Sarah Sloan (ANSWER Coalition)
Stephen McNeil (American Friends Services Committee)
Wednesday, November 6 (4:00 p.m.)
Empire as a Moral Problem: Religious Cosmopolitanism and Colonial Modernity in Northeast Asia
Taylor Atkins (Northern Illinois University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies
Summary: In the early twentieth century, against the backdrop of colonial violence, the Japanese annexation of Korea, and World War I, religious and secular groups in East Asia voiced support for a new ethos of humanitarian internationalism. This presentation examines the confluences between millenarian “new religions” such as Chŏndogyo (Korea), Ōmotokyō (Japan), and Daoyuan (China), Bahá’ís, Esperantists and other groups espousing world peace, gender and social equality, and religious unity. Under the scrutiny of the Japanese imperial state, these communities presented teachings that were inimical to colonial hierarchies, but they had to do so without resort to the standard means and methods of social, economic, and political reform, such as protests, provocative civil disobedience, lobbying, electioneering, coercion, and either the threat or actual use of political violence.
Friday, October 25 (4:00 p.m.)
Artist as Producer and Kitsch: The Ethnographic Turn and the Colonial Collection
Aimee Kwon (Duke University)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Co-Sponsor/s: Institute of East Asian Studies
Summary: In the 1930s, with Japan’s expansions into the Asian continent, colonial Korean culture in general, and literature in particular, came to take important roles as both subject and object of such imperial expansions. This paper reexamines the colonizer and colonized binary by re-contextualizing the rise of translated texts packaged as ethnographic “colonial collections.” In particular, this paper historicizes the ethnographic turn relegated to colonial culture by examining the rise of colonial collections as a manifestation of mass-produced objects of colonial kitsch at this time. The complex position of the colonial artist/writer cum (self-)ethnographer situated in between the colony and the metropole embodies an uncanny contact zone as the artist and work of art become reified as objects of imperial consumer fetishism. In the colonial encounter, the artist as producer and the art object of his or her labor meld into indistinguishable and interchangeable forms, as producer and product of kitsch. In such relations of colonial alienation, cultural producers struggled to map out spaces as agents of artistic expression, while agency for the colonized artist often meant further alienation through self-ethnography or through mimicry of the colonizer’s racialized forms and discourses.
Thursday, October 24 (4:00 p.m.)
Panel on 1970s South Korean Literature, Film and State-sponsored Visual Art
Location: Berkeley YWCA, Main Lounge (2600 Bancroft Way)
Co-Sponsor/s: Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies
Speakers:
Youngju Ryu (Univ. of Michigan)
In 1970s South Korea, poet Kim Chi Ha became an international symbol of democracy when he challenged the legtimacy of the military dictatorship. Last year, Kim returned to center stage as an ally of the dictator’s daughter and a mouthpiece of the ultraconservatives who supported her election as South Korea’s pres-ident. This talk will explore the changing place of committed literature in the ongoing struggle over the mean-ings of South Korean modernization.
Jisung Kim (UC Berkeley)
South Korea has often been touted as the quintessential demonstration of the superiority of free market capitalism for ‘developing’ the Global South. This talk addresses the experience of capitalism’s globalization from the vantage point of post-IMF South Korean cinema in such films as “The Host” and “Take Care of My Cat.”
Yuri Chang (SUNY Binghamton)
This presentation focuses on the politics of representation of power and memory in public space by examining cultural monuments and exhibitions – in particular the art projects sponsored by the South Korean government for the 1988 Seoul Olympics and the 1995 Gwangju Biennale.
Monday, October 14 (4:00 p.m.)
We are Not Fighting Against the Commies: The War Film Genre and Politics of History in South Korean Cinema
Kyu Hyun Kim (UC Davis)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: In this talk, designed to be a part of my ongoing engagement with the problem of representing history in Korean cinema, I will focus on a select group of recent Korean films directly depicting or set against the North-South conflicts following the 1945 liberation, culminating in the Korean War (1950-1953), including Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005), 71 Into the Fire (2009), A Little Pond (2009), In Love and the War (2010), The Front Line (2011) and Jiseul (2012), to discuss how these films address the question of historically representing the war experience. My interpretations of these films will differ significantly from the existing academic analyses (heavily psychoanalytic or otherwise textually-focused) in that I will try to illuminate these films in view of their interactions with the genre conventions of war film, as well as in relation to the changing socio-cultural perceptions of the post-liberation history and the Korean War that cannot be entirely attributed to shifting tides in the politics of left and right. I will hopefully demonstrate that, instead of simply following the (elite- or media-generated) politically charged understanding of the post-liberation history, these films are reflecting complex patterns of interaction among cinematic conventions, cultural habitus, select invocation of memories and historical data, and the anxieties and fantasies of contemporary Koreans in relation to global modernity.
Saturday, September 28 (9:00 a.m.)
Technology and Development of Metal Movable-Type Printing and Print Culture in East Asia
Location: Seaborg Room, Faculty Club, UC Berkeley
Co-Sponsor/s: Academy of Korean Studies, C.V. Starr East Asian Library
Speakers and Topics:
Kwonhee Nam (Kyongbuk National Univ.)
Metal typcasting and typesetting technologies during the late Koryo and the early Choson dynasties
Youngjung Ok (Academy of Korean Studies)
Korean editions of Chinese books printed by Metal-Type in the early Choson
Sungsoo Kim (Chongju Univ.)
Reprints employing the kyemija font
Koungmok Chon (Academy of Korean Studies)
The compilations and publications of Nuljae (Yang Song-ji)
Zhenghong Chen (Fudan Univ.)
The technology of metal moveable-type printing, with special reference to the Shanghai Library copy of Bai shi Changqing ji
Fujimoto Yukio (Reitaku Univ.)
On the Korean edition of Shiqi shi zuan gujin tongyao employing the kyemija font
Munemura Izumi (Printing Museum, Tokyo)
Tokugawa Ieyasu and the development of surugabang
Seungcheol Lee (Cheongju Early Printing Museum)
Research on the larger and smaller kyemija font
Yonghyun Yun (National Science Museum)
The technology of metal typecasting in Korea
Wanwoo Yi (Academy of Korean Studies)
Sepcial presentation on the history of calligraphy during the Koryo as reflected in metal font styles
Roundtable Participants:
Mack Horton (UC Berkeley)
Yuming He (UC Davis)
Ghichul Jung (Univ. of Kansas)
Junghee Lee (Portland State Univ.)
Young Kyun Oh (Arizona State Univ.)
Deborah Rudolph (UC Berkeley)
Jiwon Shin (Arizona State Univ.)
Monday, September 16 (4:00 p.m.)
The Master Who Mistook Himself for a Monster: History as Artifice in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy
Peter Paik (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: Park Chan-wook’s most famous film, Oldboy, evokes polarized responses among critics and film scholars alike. Its detractors dismiss the film as a superficial exercise in stylized violence and gratuitous imagery. Film scholars have used critical paradigms drawn from Marxism and post-structuralism to interpret the film. This talk seeks to go beyond these approaches to examine Oldboy as an allegory of the South Korean experience of compressed modernity. It argues that the rapid development of South Korea has enabled historical types to flourish that have become unfamiliar in the affluent societies of the West, in particular the figure of the master who can conquer his desires and overcome his fear of death. Drawing on the theoretical work of Nietzsche, Alexandre Kojéve, and Alexis de Tocqueville, this talk explores the question of what it means to create and portray such a human type once a democratic consumer society has emerged and closed off the possibility for any kind of authentic difference, especially the aristocratic values that have to do with the capacity to rise above oneself, one’s physical appetites, and materialistic desires.
Friday, September 6 (4:00 p.m.)
Tansaekhwa and the Case for Abstraction in Postwar Korea
Joan Kee (University of Michigan)
Location: IEAS Conference Room
Summary: Starting in the mid-1960s, a group of Korean artists began to push paint, soak canvas, drag pencils, rip paper, and otherwise manipulate the materials of painting in ways that prompted critics to describe their actions as “methods” rather than artworks. Later known as Tansaekhwa, or Korean monochrome painting, this loose constellation of works became the international face of contemporary Korean art and a basis for what later came to be known as contemporary Asian art. Yet Tansaekhwa’s significance also lay in how its constituent artists offered another response to abstraction. Artists like Park Seobo, Ha Chonghyun, Kwon Young-woo and Lee Ufan considered the possibilities of ink painting as extrapolated from its limitations, as well as questions of process that challenged the frontality of painting. This talk introduces Tansaekhwa and how some of its representative works made a case for abstraction as a way for viewers to engage productively with the world and its systems.