Event Description Searching the words, “South Korean Plastic Surgery” will lead to a plethora of vlogs with titles like “My Plastic Surgery Experience in Korea.” Sponsored by plastic surgery clinics or medical tourism agencies, such vlogs chronicle the YouTuber’s journey to South Korea, their multiple surgeries, the pain of recovery and surgery’s results. Focusing on […]
Event Description This presentation explores the sexual/gender hierarchy that prostitution policies constituted in the national community of postcolonial South Korea. It starts with an exegesis of the reformatories designed for ‘prostitutes’ (yullak haengwija) and other ‘women deemed as needing of protection’ (yobohoyŏja) based on both documents and interviews. While these reformatories for women were built […]
EVENT DESCRIPTION During the South Korean democracy movement in the 1970s and 1980s, lessons learned from non-colonial, vernacular folk traditions were central to devising a decolonial model of art practice, art education, and art history. This talk explores the so-called nativist turn in South Korea’s Minjung art movement (people’s art movement) by focusing on an […]
EVENT DESCRIPTION The global movement of Chinese migrants, and the concomitant emergence of Sinophobia, produced the ‘Chinese Question’ across Anglo-American settler colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Though its specific contours varied depending on local contexts, racial imaginings of Chinese migrant figures and attendant anti-Chinese campaigns spread expansively across the Pacific, from San Francisco […]
Through a roundtable discussion on the Candlelight Protest Movement (2016-2017), this event investigates the possibilities and grounds for transformative politics and the conditions for and limits of revolutionary change in a democracy. Drawing from their essays in the Journal of Asian Studies Forum “South Korean Candlelight Protest Movement” (forthcoming in Feb-March 2022), Jennifer Jihye Chun, […]
EVENT DESCRIPTION This talk will introduce the core arguments and interventions that animate Seeds of Control, one of the first English-language studies of the environmental impacts and legacies of Japan's colonial occupation of Korea. By outlining some of the central themes of the book, the author hopes to stimulate a broader conversation about green governmentality and colonial […]