2024 DanO-Spring Festival
Ways of Seeing: South Korea’s Social Realism
Friday, June 28th 2024
6-7:30 pm CDT
FREE
St Louis Art Museum: The Farrell Auditorium
As part of the annual Gateway Korea Foundation’s DanO Festival event, Soyang Park, associate professor of liberal arts and sciences, graduate studies at the Ontario College of Art & Design University, will speak about the minjung movement.
In the artist own words.
Seeing is not neutral. To whom does the meaning of the art properly belong? This question was among those raised for the first time in postwar Korean art history by dissident art groups and artists who emerged in support of the popular democratization of the country in the 1980s called the minjung movement. Minjung means (the underprivileged) people, mass, or multitude. Forty years onward from these pivotal years of democratic transition, this talk will help the audience understand the root and development of Korean social realism in art and media, the spirit of which can also be found in the narratives and styles of acclaimed popular entertainment that went global: Parasite (2019) and Squid Game (2021).
Speaker: Soyang Park
Dr. Soyang Park is an Associate Professor of Liberal Arts and Science and Graduate Studies at the Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCAD U) in Toronto, Canada. Park’s research areas include contemporary art and visual culture, critical theories, East Asian cultures and arts, modern and contemporary society and arts, art of memory and trauma, art and politics, gender, sexuality, decolonization, cosmopolitanism, community, politics of affect, and embodiment. Park’s early research focused on the study of a South Korean avant-garde art movement known as Minjung art from the 1980s and its mode of radical reframing of memory (both socio-political and cultural) for an affective social change. Park’s more recent research has focused on exploring the dynamic transformations of South Korean society, media, and culture after the 1990s democratization in relation to the issues of gender, memory, community, mediascape, and social mobilization, as well as the likes in relation to the other East Asian and Asia-Global communities. Park completed a Bachelor of Arts degree in the science of art from Hongik University (Seoul) in 1995, a Master’s degree in the history of art (20th century) in 1999, and a Ph.D. degree in 2004 at Goldsmiths College (University of London, UK). Park was a junior research fellow at the University of Oxford (UK) from 2005 to 2006, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Art and Society and Humanities Studies at Carnegie Mellon University (U.S.) from 2006 to 2007.
Discussant: Hon Nannette A. Baker
Nannette Baker is a retired United States Magistrate Judge. She served as Chief Magistrate Judge in the Eastern District of Missouri from 2016-2021. Before she was appointed to the federal court, she served on the Missouri Court of Appeals in the Eastern District of Missouri for six years, where she was Chief Judge from 2008 until 2009. She was the first African American woman to be appointed to that court. She also served as a circuit court judge in the City of St. Louis before she was appointed to the appellate court. Judge Baker is a graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and Saint Louis University School of Law. Following law school, she was a law clerk for United States District Court Judge Odell Horton in the Western District of Tennessee. She later worked in private practice at two St. Louis law firms. While working in private practice she served as the Chair of the St. Louis Board of Election Commissioners.
In retirement, Judge Baker continues to volunteer in her community. She serves as a Trustee of the Saint Louis Art Museum, on The Board of Directors of The University of Tennessee Alumni Association and with the American Bar Association.
Discussant: Simon Kelly
Simon Kelly is an English curator and art historian and has been the Saint Louis Art Museum’s curator and head of department of modern and contemporary art since 2010. Kelly has published extensively on nineteenth and early twentieth-century French art, as well as American Abstract Expressionism, and has also written on a range of contemporary artists. He has organized over 20 exhibitions during his time at the Saint Louis Art Museum including the recent Monet/Mitchell: Painting the French Landscape and Matisse and the Sea. Kelly worked previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore; and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. He received an undergraduate degree from the University of Cambridge and a doctorate from Oxford University, where he also taught art history.
Ticket information
Tickets for this free program may be reserved in person at the Museum’s Information Centers or through MetroTix. All tickets reserved through MetroTix incur a service charge; the service charge is waived for tickets reserved at the Museum.
What is Dano?
Shin, Yun-Bok
Dano (端午, May 5th of the lunar calendar) is one of the major traditional festivals in Korea along with Sŏrnal (New Years Day, lunar calendar) and the harvest festival Ch’usŏk (August 15th, lunar calendar). Dano usually falls in early to mid June as measured on the solar calendar, a moment when spring turns into summer and when yang energy is at its peak. It represents a significant turning point in agriculture when farmers have just finished seeding and planting. The day thus marks the beginning of the growing season.
Celebrating May 5th by the lunar calendar is a shared tradition among East Asian countries, but the activities differ widely. The Korean celebration includes traditional outdoor and indoor activities including swinging, wrestling, making special cakes containing spring herbs, washing hair with balsam, and giving gifts of fans for use in the coming summer.
The tradition appears in some well-known art works from the Chosŏn Dynasty (1392-1910): in the eighteenth century painting by Shin Yun-bok, and in the “Story of Ch’unhyang”, a famous love story circulated both through written text and through an oral performance tradition called p’ansori.