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--></style><title>Re: [KS] Chuch'e</title></head><body>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">Bruce Cumings wrote:</font></div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Times New Roman">There is a
very good book to be written someday on the degree to which interwar
Japan influenced North Korea; mostly I've just heard anecdotes from
Japanese old enough to have lived through that period who later
visited North Korea in the 70s and 80s, and found it much more
reminiscent of Japan in the 1930s-early 40s than they could ever have
imagined.</font></blockquote>
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<div><font face="Times New Roman">I'd like to add that Bruce Cumings'
observation can thoroughly be attested in the arts for exactly that
period -- from the late 1960s onwards. As I have already argued in
some conference papers (not in print yet ... will come...), the final
version of<i> Chsosônhwa</i> -- North Korea's "Korean-style
painting" (that is, the modernized version of traditional brush
painting) -- is very closely related to the late-colonial version
of<i> Tongyanghwa</i> in Korea (late 1930s and 1940s), which was again
strongly influenced by Japanese<i> Nihonga</i> (modernized traditional
painting in Japan, since Meiji period). The very fact that the
P'yôngyang Art Museum devotes an entire wall of its first floor to
some prominent colonial period painters like Kim Ûn-ho, Kim
Ki-ch'ang is telling! Kim Ûn-ho, is known for having painted a very
Japanesque style in the 30s and 40s. Both he and Kim Ki-ch'ang did
live in SOUTH Korea after 1945. Kim Ki-ch'ang, as you know, is South
Korea's most prominent brush painter today, and his style sure is
outstanding -- but as a young painter in the early and mid-1940s his
work was very different, very much influenced by<i> nihonga</i>. An
Chung-sik, who died in 1919, is also on display at this wall, as
possibly the first major figure having been influenced by<i>
nihonga</i> ... most of the pieces in P'yôngyang are -- and these
are on *permanent* exhibit -- pieces that are basically mirroring the
late 1930s, early 40s taste in colonial Korea RATHER THAN
JAPAN!!!</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">I think it is time to to forget
about -- well, more academically -- to reformulate the idea that Japan
was copying "the West" and Korea was copying Japan. If
looking at art, for example (but by no means only art) in colonial
Korea I see something very different than in Japan at the same time or
10 years earlier -- however you look at it, it is not an imitation.
Even when "imitation" or a "remake" was the aim of
a certain individual, the outcome looks quiet different, the
social-economic setting was different, the cultural background was
difference, the audience (in the arts) was different ... Why
would we care too much if chuch'esông etc. is a Japanese term?
Even<i> misul</i> is a Japanese neologism; that sure doesn't mean
China (<i>meishu</i>) or Korea doesn't have art, yes? As a historical
footnote that's interesting -- and yes, we notice that certain ideas
were "in the air," but isn't what North Korea made of it
quite different? -- and isn't that a quite different political
structure? As for my art example -- we sure see those influences, we
see them very clearly (although nobody writes about them in S.K., it
seems, as it isn't fashionable anymore to do so with the new romantic
imaginary of *selected* aspects of North Korean social, political and
cultural life that nurture nationalistic concepts of unity and
nation). </font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman"><br></font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">Regards,</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman">Frank Hoffmann</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman"><br></font></div>
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