Defining the "Ideal Woman:" Korean Femininity in Occupation-Era Modernisms, c. 1910-1945

A. Seungmin Fruman

Until now, women have been raised in the ideology that instructs them to devote themselves entirely to the welfare of men… Given this, how can a woman evolve into an ideal woman? Of course, she needs knowledge, skills, and artistic talent. She should be prepared to judge right from wrong in any matter, based on her common sense. She should be self-aware, with the desire to discover her unique abilities in realizing certain goals in life. She must understand contemporary thought, knowledge, and sensibility. Only then can she become a pioneer, equipped with all the power and qualifications that she needs in order to be an enlightened, ideal woman.[i]

-       Na Hye-seok, “The ideal woman”

 Through an examination of modernist depictions of Korean women from 1910-1945, this study will attempt to understand how both Korean and Japanese creators used Korean women’s bodies to construct an ideal Korean identity under occupation. I argue that the visual languages they developed to represent women display a clear link between imperial and nationalist ambitions and the “modern” woman, illustrating how specifically women’s bodies were manipulated within artworks to express sociopolitical ambitions on both sides of the colonial encounter.

Self-Portrait by Korean painter and feminist writer Na Hye-seok 나 혜석 (1896-1948) provides an especially salient entry point into depictions of women in occupation-era modernisms. Remembered as one of Korea’s most prominent “New Women,” Na straddled the transcultural interfaces between Korea, Japan, and the West that shaped Korean modernity during the colonial era. In 1914, four years after Japan’s formal annexation of Korea, she published “The ideal woman” (이상적 부인) in the magazine Hakchigwang 학지광, from which the epigraph is taken. The model woman Na espoused in this groundbreaking essay – goal-oriented, engaged in contemporary discourse, equipped with talents beyond the home – stood in stark contrast to the domestic “wise mother, good wife” (현모 양처) celebrated by Japanese imperialists and Korean male nationalists alike.

In Self-Portrait, Na translates “The ideal woman” into visual form. Her likeness confronts the viewer with a sober yet intense gaze. The exact emotion on her face is unreadable, yet beneath her severe features we can sense a host of personal concerns brewing – longing, stress, mourning, exhaustion – that communicate a depth to her individual subjectivity absent from contemporaneous portrayals of women painted by both Korean and Japanese men. She sits solo in a nondescript setting rather than attached to a man or child within a domestic scene, holding space as an independent woman. Formally, Self-Portrait has more in common with Euro-American Post-Impressionism than traditional Korean ink painting, mirroring Na’s own embrace of the Western feminist theories her male peers rejected. The somber mood of the painting does little to mask the firestorm that surrounded Na and the New Women’s existence; though she sits calmly, she almost seems to bear the weight of society’s glare upon her sloping shoulders. Through her choices in Self-Portrait, Na implies the intersecting currents of Westernization, imperialism, and nationalism that enmeshed debates over modern femininity and immediately affected her own life. Among painted representations of women throughout the colonial era, Na’s Self-Portrait stands apart for its defiance of the exoticism and domesticity that circumscribed the lives of Korean women. Understood as Na’s intervention into male-dominated discourse on the appropriate womanhood for colonial modernity, Self-Portrait emphasizes women’s agency during this period of political and aesthetic turbulence.

 Studying visual representations of women under occupation informs our understanding of how imperial male obsessions with Korean female bodies produced very real consequences. Recent legal debates over the “comfort women,” the estimated 200,000 primarily Korean women who were forced to perform sexual favors for the Japanese army during World War II, only add to the sense of topical urgency surrounding this subject. With the number of remaining comfort women rapidly dwindling and living memory of colonial atrocities in a precarious state, art from the colonial period serves as a record of the multiple imaginations that underlay the suffering of the comfort women.[ii] My analysis aims to contextualize such representations within a historical trend observed nearly universally by which women’s bodies were used by predominantly male artists as sites for constructing national memory. This critical framework extends far beyond Korean occupation, and holds the potential to decolonize our society’s deeply internalized concepts of femininity and women’s bodily autonomy that derive in large part from the ways female bodies have been portrayed throughout the history of art.

The Occupation Era: Japanization/Westernization in Culture and Aesthetics

 Japan’s occupation of Korea lasted from 1910 until 1945 and marks one of the most painful periods in the Korean collective memory. To assimilate its East Asian colonies under its own Westernized version of modernity, the Japanese government embarked on a program of cultural imperialism that penetrated nearly all aspects of society in its territories. In Korea this entailed a thorough transformation of the visual arts, spurred by the implementation of Western-derived art institutions sponsored by the Japanese state. Perhaps the most effective of these was the annual Joseon Art Exhibition 조선 미술 전람회 (henceforth the Seonjeon 선전), first held in 1922. As colonial Korea’s most prestigious exhibitionary space, the Seonjeon – which was juried almost entirely by Japanese critics and artists – effectively allowed Japanese imperial interests to dictate the trajectory of Korean artistic production.[iii] Aiding this process was a steady migratory movement between Korea and Japan: from the turn of the century, Japanese “settler-artists” established studios in Korea, while in the opposite direction many prominent Korean modernists (including Na) studied art in Japan under the auspices of the Japanese government. These systems created a mechanism of unequal exchange by which the modernisms practiced and taught in Japan were imposed on the peninsula and molded into Korean vernaculars.[iv]

Under this process of forced assimilation, Korea received two main threads of modernism from Japan: yōga 洋画, or “Western-style” painting, and nihonga 日本画, “Japanese-style” painting. Yōga, which encapsulated contemporary Western influences such as academic realism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism, had been adopted by contemporary Japanese artists beginning in the mid-nineteenth century as part of the country’s enthusiastic Westernization. Through the work of the aforementioned colonial systems, Western modernisms filtered into Korea via Japan, leading to a conflation of the two and positioning Japan as the supposed purveyor of Western modernization in Korean arts and industry alike. The Tokyo School of Fine Arts (Tokyo Bijutsu Gakkō 東京美術学校) in particular was known for its intensive yōga curriculum that impressed a form of academic realism infused with modernist influences upon the Korean artists who studied there. One such artist was Kim Kwanho 김 관호 (1890-1958), whose 1916 Sunset(Fig. 1) is considered the first Korean painting of a female nude, a Western classical staple foreign to Korean orthodox painting. Referencing French Impressionism and Symbolism in both technique and subject matter, Sunset attests to the currents of transnational cultural movement that drove Korea’s aesthetic Japanization.[v]

Fig. 1. Kim Kwanho, Sunset, 1916, oil on canvas, 127.5 x 127.5 cm. Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan.

 Nihonga, conversely, emerged to describe painting methods “indigenous” to Japan and involved an intentional separation from Western materials in favor of traditional Japanese painting elements. This effort responded to a growing desire in the late Meiji era to “preserve” an “authentic Japanese art” that was seen as being under threat from foreign influx.[vi] Nihonga was accompanied by the resurgence of bijinga 美人画, a long-established Japanese tradition of “beautiful women” images that gained renewed significance at this time. Upon arrival in Korea, bijinga fused with the existing Korean miindo 미인도 genre, which likewise entailed romanticized depictions of women primarily for the pleasure of male viewers. We can observe this convergence of miindo, bijinga, and nihonga in Miindo by Kim Eun-ho 김 은호 (1892-1979), which employs traditional Japanese and Korean pictorial conventions – including sinuous lines, flat and muted colors, and simplification of the surrounding space – to portray an idealized Korean woman. In accordance with the bijinga and miindo genres, the woman in Miindo appears frozen in a moment in time; she seems almost weightless, the lack of a shadow or impression on the earth beneath her feet detaching her from the real world. Like Kim In-sung, Kim Eun-ho enjoyed special popularity with the Japanese Seonjeon jurors during his lifetime, a reflection of the imperial state’s encouragement of nihonga and miindo as art forms espousing a Japanized pan-Asianism.[vii] As experimentations with Japanese modernisms that employ women as primary subjects, Nude and Miindo hint towards the close ties between artistic expressions of modernity and the female body. Their apparent passivity before the male artist and viewer contrast strongly with Na’s likeness in Self-Portrait, who seems to take command of the pictorial space.

 Another colonial cultural import of importance beyond the arts was the figure of the “New Woman” (sin yeoja 신여자/sin yeoseong 신여성), which originated in the West during the nineteenth century and took root in Japan during the 1880s. During occupation, it migrated to Korea, where it became a fixture of society and subsequently the subject of intense debate.[viii] New Women were typically educated women who led independent professional and private lives and defied restrictive gender roles by engaging actively with the public sphere. The term was first circulated by influential feminist magazines such as Sin yeoja, where writers such as Na published social commentaries calling for reform (kaejo개조) and liberation (haebang 해방) for women within a broader push for Korean independence.[ix] The New Women sparked anxiety from both Japanese and Korean critics who, despite existing on opposing sides of the colonial encounter, shared a fundamental concept of the submissive woman as the bedrock of the politically vital Korean family unit and thus sought to limit the spread of “modern ideas” that threatened Korean women’s place within the home. Tellingly, Korean male nationalists proposed a cult of domesticity in which women would advance Korean self-determination by dedicating themselves to raising the next generation and promoting national and cultural health within the home. Aware of women’s importance to the nationalist cause but uneasy with their newfound assertions of autonomy, these male intellectuals advised women to be “wise and prudent professional wives” who “scientifically managed” their households for the sake of Korea. This model femininity essentially paid lip service to women’s desires for greater agency while relegating women to the domestic sphere under the guise of lofty national goals.[x] As is made evident by the overlaps between imperial and nationalist ideals concerning modern womanhood, the New Women experienced contentious relationships to both Korean and Japanese power and waged their battle for self-determination against layered patriarchies.

The politics of female sexuality and bodily autonomy lay at the center of the New Woman debate. Na and other New Women advocated yeonae 연애 (“free love”), claiming their right to wield agency over their personal romantic relations (in particular to divorce and take lovers, as was the norm for Korean men) and basing their arguments off trends in sexual anarchy they observed in the West.[xi] Significantly for representations of New Women in art, traditionalist fears of the New Women’s supposed sexual depravity manifested as a policing of women’s bodies. Many New Women expressed their autonomy by adopting short bobbed haircuts and Western-style clothing, which quickly became iconic symbols of the New Women’s supposed sexual availability and are visible across cartoons and paintings of women from the period. The vilification of these physical traits exemplifies the female body’s constant utilization throughout the colonial period as an outlet for general anxieties surrounding the turbulence of occupation.

These new and ambiguous colonial sociocultural vernaculars furnish necessary contexts for understanding how modernist pictorial representations of women’s bodies exhibited colonial realities. In the following analysis, we will see how two major dichotomies – escapism vs. confrontation of occupation modernity, and female passivity vs. female agency– manifested across Korean interpretations of the imported Western and Japanese modernisms described above, as well as how these dichotomies reveal the intimate connections between womanhood and “Korean” identity that loomed large in both the Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist imaginations.

 Lee In-sung’s Hyangtosaek: “Local Colors” and Colonial Fantasy

 A Day in Autumn by Lee In-sung 이 인성 (1912-1950) features a Korean boy and girl surrounded by a lush natural landscape, overgrown with a variety of tropical plants non-native to Korea. The colors are supersaturated, the deep blue of the sky practically vibrating against the deep orange and red tones of the figures’ skin and the vivid greens and yellows of the plants. The girl’s breasts are exposed and she appears only to be wearing a simple wrap garment as she engages in the pastoral activity of gathering, hinted by her basket. The unnaturally rich color palette and nonsensical landscape situate her within a wonderland detached from reality, identifiable as a Korean setting only by Lee’s explicit indication. While a native Korean may have read the painting as a celebration of Korea’s natural beauty, to an imperialist viewer Lee’s tropical backdrop would have conjured an image of Korea as a paradise ripe for the taking. Further, the girl’s nudity links this escapist fantasy to Korean women. Embedded within the natural abundance of Lee’s landscape, she becomes part of the imperial promise, her body representative of the Korean abundance that surrounds her.

 A Day in Autumn is an example of hyangtosaek 향토색 (“local colors” or “return to the land”), one major vernacular modernism that emerged in colonial Korea. The term describes genre paintings of Koreans – primarily women and children, sometimes nude – situated within paradisiacal, pre-modern Korean settings. Hyangtosaek emerged during the late 1920s amidst growing debates among Korean artists over what defined “Korean” art. Proponents of hyangtosaek proposed that Korean art should not imitate Western art nor serve a particular political function, but rather find and celebrate Korea’s “local colors” – which typically manifested as countryside landscapes and scenes of Korean cultural customs.[xii] Given the known anti-colonial political views of many hyangtosaek artists, Kim Youngna and Chung Yeon Shim have interpreted hyangtosaek as a well-intentioned attempt by Korean artists to celebrate indigenous Korean identity through Korean archetypes and cultural idioms. Yet they maintain these primitivist scenes nonetheless reinforced colonial imagery of Korea as a pre-modern sexual paradise, demonstrating both the inescapability of the Japanese cultural-imperialism machine and the ambiguities involved in separating colonial and nationalist modernisms.

This more sinister layer to hyangtosaek becomes apparent when we consider its formal and thematic links to Western and Japanese imperialist visual languages for portraying “inferior” races. For instance, A Day in Autumn shares notable similarities with French Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin’s highly exoticized portraits of Tahitian women. Gauguin’s works are generally recognized as examples of the Euro-American myth of the “noble savage,” in which non-Western peoples were presented as being “uncorrupted” by modernity, becoming sources of ethnographic fascination as well as the targets of escapist fantasies.[xiii] Lee’s “pseudo-Gauguinesque”[xiv] approach to A Day in Autumn was no coincidence. In a series of influential columns articulating the philosophy behind hyangtosaek, artist and critic Sim Yeong-seop 신 영섭 (?-?) argued that the East and West held fundamentally different attitudes towards nature and claimed that hyangtosaek represented the East’s “pure and basic” attitude by depicting humanity in harmony with the natural world. Sim explicitly identified Gauguin as being one of two Western painters closest to his “Asian ideal” of natural purity (the other being Henri Rousseau, another Primitivist), establishing a clear connection between hyangtosaekand Western colonial painting. Kim Youngna has even pointed out that the figure of the girl bears a striking resemblance to the leftmost woman in Gauguin’s Maternity, a copy of which was found in Lee’s personal collection.[xv]

 Just as Gauguin staged Tahiti to white Europeans as a fantasy removed from modernity, so too did Japan nurture a tradition of colonial portraiture that presented Korea to the Japanese viewer as a backwards land of promiscuity. Daybed by Tsuchida Bakusen 土田麦僊 is a prime example of this genre, featuring two traditionally dressed Korean women (likely female entertainers known as kisaeng 기생) in a highly suggestive bedroom setting, seemingly awaiting the (Japanese male) viewer.[xvi] Their postures, one reclining and the other standing demurely with her hands folded, are marked by stillness and passivity. Their conventionalized faces and lack of personality indicate that they do not embody specific people as much as generalized types, a trope of kisaeng portraits that erased Korean women’s individual subjectivities to construct a colonial stereotype. In Daybed, Bakusen delivered a romanticized vision of Koreana that communicates Japan’s imperial ambitions through the implicit domination of the Japanese male over the Korean woman. The trappings of this genre are likewise uncomfortably echoed in the nudity of the Korean girl in A Day in Autumn, exposing hyangtosaek’s connections to nested imperialist modes of classifying and ranking ethnic groups.

 To further problematize the genre, we can read hyangtosaek as a case study of a greater cultural phenomenon observed across imperial relationships, by which artistic interpretations of “land” and “folk” come to embody the national characters of the colonizer and colonized as a tool of political and psychological subjugation. To understand this, it is necessary to interrogate hyangtosaek as an outgrowth of the influential mingei 民芸 (Korean: minye 민예) or “folk-craft” theory introduced by Japanese art collector and philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu 柳 宗悦 (a.k.a. Yanagi Muneyoshi). Mingei activists championed Japanese “folk” art as proof of Japanese indigenous artistic genius and of Japan’s superiority within the sphere of East Asian art, which they elevated above Western art in a rhetorical move meant to consolidate Japanese cultural clout both within East Asia and against the West. Yanagi called on Japanese artists to embrace mingei as part of an overarching “return to the Orient” (Tōyō e no kaiki 東洋への回帰)[xvii], which can essentially be read as a translation of the Japanese imperial goal into the realm of aesthetics: to telegraph to the world an Asia in Japan’s image, with Japan at the helm.

In Yanagi’s construction, Korea existed as a preserved remnant of the Orient’s “lost, premodern past,” whereas Japan served the function of “active modern consciousness and aesthetic discernment.”[xviii] Crucially, Yanagi and other mingei advocates wrote of an “essential national identity” to be found in Korean art that was childlike, sorrowful, and inevitably subordinate. In his seminal 1922 article Chōsen no bijutsu 朝鮮の美術 (“Korean Art”), Yanagi established that “art is the manifestation of the heart of a people” and then claimed that, in Korea’s case, “incessant external pressure dictated that the people were compelled to serve other powers… Korea’s history became a history of dealing with outsiders, one, moreover, of inevitable subservience to more powerful polities.”[xix] This interpretation conjured the persuasive image that Koreans were a people who silently accepted conquest, being predisposed to pain and longing, and transformed Korean art into evidence that Korea was a land destined to be dominated – an assumption that served the Japanese Empire’s purposes.

Thus, existing as it did within Yanagi’s postulate that Korean art captured an innate Korean character of naïveté and submissiveness, the pastoral lean of hyangtosaek – conceived though it may have been as a triumphant expression of Korean national pride – arguably reinforced imperial notions of Korea’s “backwardness.”[xx] The fact that hyangtosaek succeeded among nationalist Korean artists despite its firm roots in Japanese imperial desires shows just how deeply Japan’s program of cultural imperialism penetrated the Korean art sphere. As we can see from A Day in Autumn, it is often not easy to distinguish Korean artists’ attempts to assert national pride from the primitivism that enveloped them.

Still, it is significant that both Korean nationalists and Japanese imperialists constructed their ideal Koreas through portrayals of Korean women. This pattern speaks to a broader trend by which specifically women’s bodies served as sites of national identity determination throughout the occupation era. Here it is necessary to recall the ongoing discourse over the New Women that pervaded modernist representations of women at the time: as the New Women became the targets of nationalist reactions to colonial modernity, so too did their presence in art serve as an outlet for anxieties surrounding Korea’s future. Hyangtosaek responded to this anxiety by placing women in an otherworldly paradise removed from the “corrupting” forces of modernity – a concept closely associated with the perceived “corruption” of the New Woman – as a source of comfort to both Korean male nationalists and (perhaps unwittingly) the Japanese colonial regime.

Hyangtosaek thus highlights a central dichotomy in Korean modernist depictions of women: namely, the female body’s perceived association with or separation from modernity. As we will see, whereas Lee’s hyangtosaek engaged indirectly with colonial modernity via escapism, other artists directly confronted lived realities through representations of recognizably contemporary womanhood. These images grapple with the same questions of intersecting colonial and nationalist male gazes and female passivity vs. agency that envelop A Day in Autumn, using a different set of visual languages that transgressed – rather than perpetuated – imperial visual forms. Leaving behind the primitivism of hyangtosaek, iterations of the New Woman in colonial modernisms revealed opposing nationalist and feminist stances on women’s role in determining Korea’s future and, by extension, what Korea’s future should look like.

 Yi Yu-tae’s Nihonga and the “Wise and Prudent Professional Wife”

 In Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment by Yi Yu-tae 이 유태 (1916-1999), we see an unnamed young woman progress through three different stages of life: youth, marriage, and motherhood. In the first panel of the triptych, she sits calmly in a garden, surrounded by symbolic white flowers; in the second, she prepares for a traditional wedding amongst female relatives; and in the third, she tenderly cradles a healthy young boy, as ageless and serene as ever. In all three panels her placid gaze lands on something we cannot see. A sense of peace and order pervades the work, the perfect reflection of a well-ordered domestic life lacking the literal and metaphorical darkness of Na’s Self-Portrait. From first glance, Yi transports the viewer to a cloistered world of dutiful wives, mothers, and daughters.

 Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment’s use of line, flat blocks of color with minimal shading, simplified settings, and traditional Japanese conventions to represent the figures and their clothing solidly identify the work as nihonga. The women in the painting can further be classified as bijinga/miindo: their faces and figures are highly generalized according to traditional bijinga standards of beauty, and their bodies, lacking cast shadows, appear almost weightless. Yi’s use of bijinga/miindo to render the life of a modern Korean woman places Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment in dialogue with a well-known bijinga triptych of the same name by Japanese painter Kuroda Seiki 黒田 清輝 (1866-1924). Kuroda’s Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment (1897, Fig. 2) features three nude female figures against nondescript gold backgrounds, modeled in the Western academic realist formal style. The women appear to be suspended in time and space: Kuroda has positioned them as one might position models for anatomical studies, effectively rendering them as passive objects for viewers’ consumption rather than beings with agency and individual subjectivities. Moreover, by surrounding his idealized female figures with ethereal expanses of gold, Kuroda places them within a heavenly space symbolic of the idyllic world the burgeoning Japanese empire promised its citizens.[xxi] Kuroda’s Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment provides a particularly powerful example of women’s bodies in bijinga serving as tangible expressions of imperial ambitions, illustrating the intimate connection between femininity and the construction of authority seen throughout the colonial period.

Fig. 2. Kuroda Seiki, Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment, 1897,  oil on canvas, each 180.6 x 99.8 cm. National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, Tokyo, Japan.

 Yi’s intentional reappropriation and transformation of the same subject amounts to a quiet subversion of imperialist imagery to assert the Korean nationalists’ version of modern womanhood, yet at the same time reflects the overlap between Japanese and Korean male gazes that circumscribed the New Women’s existence. The women in Yi’s Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment are not presented as inert specimens for observation floating in a void; relative to Kuroda’s female figures, they exist in identifiably modern spaces and engage in recognizable activities with other people. By inserting distinctly Korean characters and cultural forms into Kuroda’s highly recognizable visual framework, Yi recast an emblem of Japanese imperial promises into a reaction towards Japanese occupation. This reappropriation would not have gone unnoticed by the Korean/Japanese artistic-intellectual elite, yet Yi is just vague enough to leave open the question of whether his version of Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment is a tribute or a transgression. While they possess more liveliness than Kuroda’s female subjects, Yi’s painted women remain strictly depersonalized, a deliberate choice derived from bijinga and miindo that Joan Kee suggests expresses the pressures of Japanese censorship as much as it does Yi’s own reductive gaze towards Korean women.[xxii] Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment thus conveys the ubiquitous presence of the colonial state in all matters of artistic representation, which lent an ambiguous character to expressions of Korean resistance within Japanese-imported modernisms – a theme observed across Lee In-sung’s hyangtosaek, Yi’s subversion of bijinga and, as will be discussed, Na’s use of yōga.

The counterspecificity of Yi’s bijinga/miindo women also communicates a certain vision of what constituted the ideal modern Korean femininity, particularly as it related to yeonae and women’s personal and public independence. Seen progressing linearly through maidenhood, marriage, and childbearing, the main female character in Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment leads a life that aligns firmly with the “wise and prudent professional mother” archetype espoused by the Korean male intellectuals. She betrays no dissatisfaction with her domestic life, none of the desire for satisfaction in her sexual and professional lives that churns under the surface of Na’s Self-Portrait.

Furthermore, while endowed with greater animation than Kuroda’s female figures, Yi’s central subject is nonetheless idealized and reduced down to a romanticized type. Her face and body are composed using conventions that do little to differentiate her from the other women in the painting, obscuring her individuality. Yi deliberately dresses his ideal modern woman in traditional clothing and hairstyles, imbuing her with a sense of timelessness that subtly denies rather than embraces the painting’s historical moment. Yi’s dilution of his subjects’ individuality and avoidance of modernity belie an underlying reluctance on the part of male intellectuals to accept the New Women, who to them embodied the most disruptive aspects of colonial modernity in their embrace of foreign philosophies and challenge to entrenched Korean patriarchy. Wisdom, Impression, Sentiment’s calculated bijinga/miindo denotes another instance of women’s bodies serving as a means of projecting political ambitions, in this case the nationalist movement’s distinctly male recipe for Korean cultural revival.

Here, Na’s Self-Portrait comes back to the fore as a re-insertion of the female voice lost in hyangtosaek and bijinga/miindo. In Self-Portrait, Na defies the assumptions about womanhood set forth by men on both sides of the colonial divide and makes plain the universality of the male gaze. At once a reflection of Na’s personal experiences with marriage and divorce and a personification of New Womanhood as a whole, Self-Portrait stands a testament to the New Women’s relentless efforts to pursue fulfillment, in love and life, on their own terms.

Na Hye-seok’s Self-Portrait and the Politics of Free Love 

“Because of this unprecedented tragedy, I lost trust in everyone, I had to deal with public shame and ridicule, my parents and relatives abandoned me, and my good friends turned their backs on me... I’m left wandering in the wilderness, lost in the darkness, staring at the emptiness. Am I walking in the darkness with a brush and palette in my trembling hands, seeking one last beam of light?”[xxiii] These words, penned by Na after her cataclysmic divorce from Kim Wu-yeong 김 우영 (1886-1958) in her controversial “A confession about my divorce: To Ch’ŏnggu” (이혼 고백장: 청구 씨에게), can only weakly approximate the devastation that faced New Women who dared to assert their right to yeonae in colonial Korea’s highly Confucian society. It is tempting to read Self-Portrait as a premonition of the “darkness” and “emptiness” that she would go on to describe in “A confession,” and which brooded over the precarious lives of prominent New Women more generally. A deeper study of Na’s career – which in many ways embodied the stakes of the New Women’s struggle for yeonae – reveals how her popular persona was intimately tied to her femininity throughout her life and contextualizes her deliberately somber choices in Self-Portrait.

Na enjoyed significant early success. Born to a well-off family, she was sent to the Tokyo School of Fine Arts to complete her artistic education, where she became the first Korean woman to major in Western-style painting. After graduating in 1918 and returning to Korea to participate in the anti-occupation March 1st Movement, she married Kim, with whom she had three children. Over the next decade she built a prolific artistic and literary career that culminated in a 1927-1929 tour through Europe and the United States, during which she began an affair with Choi Lin 최 린 (1878-1958). When Kim learned of the affair in 1930, he divorced Na in an ugly public split that destroyed her popular image and ruined her professional prospects. The two articles Na published in 1934-35 detailing the separation and its aftermath, “A confession” and “Starting a new life” (신 생활에 들면서), only invited more condemnation of her perceived sexual promiscuity. Particularly controversial was her criticism in both essays of the fact that Korean men were allowed to keep mistresses and concubines whereas total marital fidelity was expected of Korean women.[xxiv] In addition to Korean men’s hypocrisy over chastity, Na went so far as to object to chastity itself, which she saw as counter to nature. [xxv] This defense of yeonae, however, fell on deaf ears. Although Na continued to paint and write long after the separation, critiques of her work were forever colored by accusations against her character that were rooted in her affair, which became the defining event of her life. Never quite able to recover the public’s favor, she died alone and spent decades forgotten until her writings were rediscovered in the 1990s.

Self-Portrait, painted two years before the divorce while Na was in Europe, seems to hint towards the trouble brewing on the horizon. The space depicted within the image is relatively flat; Na reduces shading to blocks of color with minimal blending, with the exception of the figure’s face and hands. The work presents a limited color palette of somber browns and purples, drawing the viewer’s attention to the light yellow and pink regions of Na’s illuminated face and hands. The detail in Na’s face, practically sculptural with its sharp highlights and shadows, suggests an individuality absent from women in hyangtosaek and bijinga paintings. She has portrayed herself as a being with believable weight and substance, rather than as a porcelain-skinned wisp from the floating world. The nondescript setting focuses our attention on Na as an individual, as though she is asserting (somewhat radically, for the time) that she deserves our attention based on her personhood alone rather than on the external markers of value with which women were associated: a home, a husband, a family. Her ambiguous yet solemn gaze captivates the viewer; she is not light and cheerful in her demeanor, nor is she trying to be.

As with A Day in Autumn and Women at the Seaside, a parallel to the Western canon can be drawn between Self-Portrait and Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein. The two paintings share an analogous compositional strategy, depicting the subject’s seated upper half against bare backdrops that compress the pictorial space. Both works employ condensed palettes of earthy, sober tones and geometrically simplify their sitters’ anatomical and facial features, a hallmark of early Cubism. Stein and Na even hold similar poses and Na’s half-lit face with its angular, strongly lined features shares striking resemblance to Stein’s. Whether or not Self-Portrait directly referenced Gertrude Stein, Na was undoubtedly influenced by Cubist and other modernist aesthetics as a result of both her European travels and artistic training at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Stein’s persona as a thoroughly modern female icon positions Self-Portrait within a transnational dialogue between two modernist interpretations of New Women, further attesting to Na’s proximity to Western ideas regarding both art and feminism.

It is significant that Na has represented herself with the modern Western attire that was associated with New Womanhood. With her choice to assert her New Womanhood through her clothing, Na confronts the scorn attached to these physical attributes and expresses a subtle sense of self-assuredness in her identity as a New Woman. Her austere figure shows none of the promiscuity that characterized derogatory cartoons of New Women. Self-Portrait essentially declares that a woman who practiced yeonae like a man (as Na likely had by this point in time) still possessed individual depth and complexity that deserved thoughtful visual representation. Women’s yeonae was not synonymous with the “depravity” charged by critics of New Womanhood, nor a woman’s singular defining feature.

Finally, the fact that Na has chosen a self-portrait to communicate this visual manifesto of New Womanhood also deserves mention. Self-Portrait is Na’s insertion of her own voice into an art world full of men’s depictions of other women who were stripped of control over their own images. At a time when Korean women were encouraged to self-efface for the men and children in their lives, Na proclaims in Self-Portrait that women should be allowed to have it all: to be fully-fledged members of society in addition to being wise mothers and good wives, to be seen as multidimensional human beings with internal thoughts worth hearing and voices worth heeding. Perhaps at the core of Self-Portrait lies Na’s fundamental belief that her pursuits of art and familial love need not be exclusive:

“I don’t think life is about the choice between family and art. Life is about combining family and art, just as water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen… the expression, ‘Cultivate yourself, manage the family, govern the country, and conquer the world in peace’ should be as true now as in old times.”[xxvi]

That the figure of a woman invested in herself, her family, and her nation all at once – the very basis of New Womanhood – is absent from Lee and Yi’s iterations of modern womanhood speaks to the fundamental importance of the gaze to interpreting Korean modernisms. Self-Portrait makes evident the objectification present throughout depictions of Korean women by male authors, regardless of whether they were Korean or Japanese, nationalist or imperialist. An analysis of these three representative creators only partially unravels the complexities of gender and nationality within the tangle of converging identities that defined the aesthetic sphere of colonial Korea. Yet what is undeniable across the three case studies examined here are the intersecting sexual and racial imaginations that suffused Korean women’s lived realities and seeped into their painted likenesses throughout occupation. As Korea struggled to reclaim a national identity under the yoke of forced assimilation, it was women’s bodies that became the primary battleground for the culture wars that raged in both the artistic and sociopolitical arenas.

The effects of Japanese occupation are still keenly felt in Korea. Studies of twentieth-century Korean art must grapple with the uncomfortable truth that Korean modernism, with its origins in the Japanese imperial scheme, comprises a part of the traumatic legacy of occupation. Yet, as this paper argues, the adoption of modernism by Korean artists was never a passive process; rather, Korean modernists used visual expression to hold up a mirror to the complex sociopolitical currents that defined the Korean experience under occupation. Approaching this question from the perspective of women, particularly Korean women whose bodies and lives have long dwelt at the center of overlapping foreign and domestic imaginations, recenters women’s testimonies within the narrative of occupation that are vital for understanding the ongoing effects of the colonial era.

The case studies examined here likewise make plain the association between female bodies and expressions of power – political and cultural, hard and soft – that appears time and time again across global artistic traditions. As we have seen, the very act of a Korean or Japanese man painting a Korean woman removed her agency in such a way that benefited the author’s “ideal” Korea. The forms women took in Lee, Yi, and Na’s works may have been specific to colonial Korea, but they belong to a common historical thread uniting the experiences of the Korean New Women with those of women everywhere who fought against layers of resistance to determine the course of their own lives.

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Footnotes:

[i] Na Hye-seok, “The ideal woman,” in New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook, ed. Hyaeweol Choi (New York: Routledge, 2013), 28-29.

[ii] Pyong Gap Min, “Korean ‘Comfort Women’: The Intersection of Colonial Power, Gender, and Class,” Gender and Society 17, no. 6 (2003), 938–57.

[iii] Youngna Kim, “Introduction to Modern Korean Art in the Colonial Period,” in 20th Century Korean Art (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2005), 20-21.

[iv] Youngna Kim, “Korean Avant-Garde Groups in Tokyo in the 1930s,” in 20th Century Korean Art (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2005), 124-151.

[v]Jungsil Jenny Lee, “Modern Korean ARt in the Japanese Colonial Period,” in A Companion to Korean Art, ed. J. P. Park et al. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 412-413.

[vi] Chelsea Foxwell, Making Modern Japanese-Style Painting: Kanō Hōgai and the Search for Images, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 2-6.

[vii] Joan Kee, “Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea: A Research Experiment,” Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 (April 2018).

[viii] Youngna Kim, “Modernity in Debate: Representing the ‘New Woman’ and ‘Modern Girl,’” in 20th Century Korean Art (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2005), 66.

[ix] “Inaugural editorial from Sin yŏja,” in New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook, ed. Hyaeweol Choi (New York: Routledge, 2013), 29-30.

[x] Theodore Yoo, The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910-1945 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 58-94.

[xi] Ibid., 81-94.

[xii] Youngna Kim, “Lee In-sung’s ‘Local Colors’: Nationalism or Colonialism?,’” in 20th Century Korean Art (London: Laurence King Publishing Ltd., 2005), 109.

[xiii] Norma Broude, ed., Gauguin’s Challenge: New Perspectives After Postmodernism (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).

[xiv] Chung Yeon Shim, “‘Vernacular Modernism’ in Modern Korea: Lee Quede’s Hyangtosaek,” in Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation, eds. Kyunghee Pyun and Jung-Ah Woo (New York: Routledge, 2021), 79-88.

[xv] Kim, “Lee In-sung,” 114.

[xvi] John Szostak, Painting Circles: Tsuchida Bakusen and Nihonga Collectives in Early Twentieth Century Japan (Boston: Brill, 2013), 227-28.

[xvii] Kim Brandt, Kingdom of Beauty: Mingei and the Politics of Folk Art in Imperial Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

[xviii] Ibid., 29-35.

[xix] Penny Bailey, “The Aestheticization of Korean Suffering in the Colonial Period: A Translation of Yanagi Sōetsu’s Chōsen no Bijutsu,” Monumenta Nipponica 73, no. 1 (2018), 66-68.

[xx] Chung, “‘Vernacular Modernism,’” 79-88.

[xxi] Kee, “Modern Art in Late Colonial Korea.”

[xxii] Ibid.

[xxiii] Na Hye-seok, “A confession about my divorce: To Ch’ŏnggu,” in New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook, ed. Hyaeweol Choi (New York: Routledge, 2013), 123-137.

[xxiv] Ibid., 123-137.

[xxv] Na Hye-seok, “Starting a new life [excerpt].” In New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook, ed. Hyaeweol Choi (New York: Routledge, 2013), 147.

[xxvi] Na, “A confession,” 136.

AUTHOR BIO

A. Seungmin Fruman

A. Seungmin Fruman is a senior at Swarthmore College majoring in Art History with a minor in Asian Studies. Their scholarly interests include critical studies of museums and postcolonial perspectives in art history, with a particular focus on Korean art. In addition to their academic work, Seungmin is involved in campus initiatives to build community and solidarity through arts-based advocacy.