초록 열기/닫기 버튼
In the first half of 1930s, Lee Insung(Yi In-sŏng, 1912-1950), Korean Western painter, drew some paintings which expressed the contemporary history under the Japanese Colonial/Imperial regime. One of them was titled ‘Kyesan-dong Catholic Church’ which visualized the urban scape of Westernized Taegu with its focus on the Catholic Church that shows us the current Western-oriented ideas as well as the regional painters’ agenda of drawing their local scenery. In no time, the painting was followed by another painting titled ‘Some Day in the Fall’. It describes the local scenery of early autumn, emphasizing the blue sky and the red earth currently arguedly symbolic of Korean locality as well as two young and old females, one of whom is half-naked, altogether looking like Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian Women. ‘Some Day in the Fall’ expressed the East Asian history of the 1930s after the 1929 Great Depress. The 1930s in Japanese imperium was in a state of transition from Western-oriented modernistic ideas to the Idea of Overcoming Modernity, which witnessed the Western modernism facing the general criticism from East Asian peoples under Japanese hegemony, and the appearance of Overcoming Modernity in East Asian discursive space which identified the Orient as an alternative to the Occident. Also, the painting expressed Korean painters’ efforts for the aesthetical identification of Korea as an Oriental local, and the construction of ethnic Korean people as a historical and cultural unique entity. In some aspects, such efforts made by Korean painters contradicted Japanese efforts for the identification of Korea as a local comprising the Japanese imperium and at the same time a colony distinct from the empire. Nevertheless, Korean efforts and Japanese ones were complicit in localizing Korea and Koreans distinct from other ethnos. The localization served the basic agenda of Japanese Colonial/Imperial regime, viz., the differentiation of Korean ethnos from Japanese ethnos while serving Korean elites’ basic agenda of constructing ethical subjectivity of the Korean people. Both sides’ localizing efforts shows us what the Japanese Colonial/Imperial regime was. The regime constructed the optic angle as well as the aesthetics, which formed the colonized’s way of seeing the world as well themselves. This constituted the potentials of historical reading visual materials such as the past paintings.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Lee Insung, Kyesandong Catholic Church, Some Day in the Fall, the 1930s, Japanese Colonial/Imperial Regime, Overcoming Modernity, Orient, Occident, Locality, Visual Materials, Fine Art, Aesthetics
