Entwined within the recent political history of Korea—Japanese colonial period (1910–45), liberation from it, the division of the Korean peninsula into north and south at the end of World War II, the Korean War (1950–53), the New Village Movement by the former president Park Chung Hee in the 1970s, the Gwangju Uprising (1980), and the democratization of the south in the 1980s—are Korean women whose histories have been often ignored or marginalized for contradicting conventional values of marriage and family, and the messages of political regimes. It is possible to expose the silenced histories of women in a society with deep roots in traditional Confucian ethics if we follow feminist scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty and focus on accounts of Korean women in daily life, in fluid historical conjunctions, in latent opposition to collectivism.
This exhibition booklet explores four contemporary Korean artists, Youngjoo Cho, Dohee Kim, Sumita Kim, and Wonju Seo. Their art epitomizes the intersection of personal and collective histories of Korean women, and illustrates contemporaneous conversations against militarism, patriarchy, and nationalism.