Reclaiming the City

November 12-13, 2021 | University of Michigan 

All times listed below are US Eastern Standard (Ann Arbor, Michigan) time. 

Friday, November 12

8:00-8:20 AM // Welcome Remarks

Youngju Ryu, Director, Nam Center for Korean Studies, University of Michigan
Jonathan Massey, Dean and Professor of Architecture, University of Michigan

8:20-8:50 AM // Keynote Address

Francisco E Sanin, Professor of Architecture, Syracuse University

9:00 AM-12:00 PM // Politics of Practice I: Architecture and Its Double, Who Makes the City 

Hyungmin Pai, Professor of Architecture, University of Seoul
Redistributing Architecture: Knowledge, Sense, Practice
Helen Choi, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Kookmin University
Can the City be Shared in the Future? 
Sung Hong Kim, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, University of Seoul
Apartment, Land, and Urban Inequality in Seoul
Jie-Eun Hwang, Professor of Architecture, University of Seoul
Capturing Active Evidences in the Urban Development Narrative
Moderator: Sam Jacoby, Research Leader of School of Architecture, Royal College of Art

1:00-2:30 PM // Urban Representations: Visions and Actions

Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia
From Community to Anonymity: Images of the Metropolis in Modern Korean Fiction
Chunghoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History, Seoul National University
Network and the Primitive: Visionary Planning Toward the Year 2000 by Human Environmental Development Institute(HEDI), c. 1970
Kristina Horn, Ph.D. Candidate in East Asian Studies, University of California, Irvine
Reclaiming Seoul through Running Man: South Korean Television and Urban Spaces
Discussant: Jini Kim Watson, Associate Professor of English, New York University

2:40-4:00 PM // Roundtable: Queer Contestations, Domestic and Urban

Yookyeong Im, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Harvard University
The Art of Protest Organizing: Claim to/about The City made by Queer Activists and Conservative Counter-Protesters in Seoul
Ju Hui Judy Han, Assistant Professor in Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles 
Strange Households and Imperfect Families in the Queer Family Sitcom, Ŭratp’ap’a (2021)

4:00-4:20 PM // Daily Closing Remarks 

Saturday, November 13

8:30-9:15 AM // Artist Talk

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, Cheonggyecheon Medley 
Moderator: Ji-hoon Kim, Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Film and Media Studies, Columbia University; Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, Chung-ang University

9:25 AM-12:05 PM // Politics of Practice II: Art, the Collective Project

Space Beam - Un-gi Min
Incheon’s Urban Development and the Cultural Response of Space Beam: Focused on Protecting and Caring for Baedari Village
Listen to the City - Eunseon Park
Feminist Insurgent City Planning: The Anti-Gentrification Movements in Okbaraji Alley and Cheongyecheon and Euljiro in Seoul, South Korea
Rice Brewing Sisters Club - Soyoon Ryu, Aletheia Hyun-Jin Shin, Hyemin Son with Cheol-woo Kim (RTBP Alliance), Chankook Park (Dongdaemun Rooftop Paradise), and Somi Sim (independent curator)
Moving Soil: A Gathering with Rice Brewing Sisters Club
Moderator: Sohl Lee, Assistant Professor of Art History, Stony Brook University

1:00-2:10 PM // Perspectives on Collective Activism 

Jaeyoung Kim, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, University of Oxford
The Fading Light of Urban Regeneration in Seoul
Youjeong Oh, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of Texas Austin
(Re)Claiming the Right to the City: Urban Social Movement against Top-dong Public Water Reclamation
Discussant: Albert Park, Associate Professor of History, Claremont McKenna College

2:20-3:30 PM // Local Territories, Global Power Structures 

Sujin Eom, Lecturer, Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages, Dartmouth College
Dangerous Proximity, Deceptive Appearance: Spatializing Race across the Pacific
Bridget Martin,SBSK Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute, Harvard University
South Korea’s Defense Land Brokerage Scheme: Demilitarized Lands as Speculative Frontier
Discussant: Jin Kyu Jung, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Washington Bothell

3:40-5:20 PM // Kwangju: Agencies of Memory 

Hayana Kim, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University
Occupying the Graveyard: The Gwangju Mangwoldong Cemetery as Affective Space for Democracy
Hosu Kim, Assistant Professor, College of Staten Island
The City of the Disappeared: The Politics of Repair and the Gwangju Democratic Movement
Liz Park, Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art
Mothers in Protest: Connecting Gwangju and Buenos Aires in Han Kang and IM Heung-soon’s collaboration
Discussant: Namhee Lee, Professor of Asian Languages & Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles

5:20-5:40 PM // Closing Remarks 

Helen Hejung Choi is an assistant professor of architecture at Kookmin University. After studying architecture at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Columbia Graduate School and working in New York for six years, Helen Hejung Choi moved to Seoul, Korea and started to work on architecture projects and work as a professor. She was a curator of the 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale and responsible for researching, planning and exhibiting architecture collections of the Culture Information Service at Gwangju Asia Culture Center and is now curator for Cities Exhibition at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Sujin Eom is a scholar of architecture and urbanism whose research is anchored in a historical inquiry into migration and the built environment. She holds a PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies. Eom now teaches and writes in the Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages Program at Dartmouth College. She is currently completing her first book manuscript that situates "Chinatown" as an imaginative and material space within the transpacific history of migration and violence. Her research interests include colonial architecture and urbanism, migration and diaspora, race and racism, Asian American art and architecture, and postcolonial urban theory. Eom is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the International Planning History Society Best Postgraduate Paper Award, the Japan Foundation Fellowship, the University of California Pacific Rim Research Fellowship, and the Social Science Research Council Grant. She has served as the Haas Junior Scholars Program Fellow and the Berkeley Empirical Legal Studies (BELS) Graduate Fellow.

Buce Fulton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia and the Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation. He offers instruction in Korean-to-English literary translation and both traditional and modern Korean literature, where he focuses on close reading and textual analysis with an eye to distinguishing the variety of voices and narrative techniques that constitute a millennia-old literary tradition. His research interests lie in modern Korean fiction and its translation; intertextuality and intermediality in Korean literature past and present; and non-mainstream Korean literature, such as women’s literature, military camptown fiction, and the literature of the Korean diaspora. As a supervisor of graduate students he works closely with Dr. Ross King, providing practical training in literary translation, field mastery, and the reading of Korean texts both modern and premodern. 

Ju Hui Judy Han is a cultural geographer and assistant professor in Gender Studies at UCLA. Her comics and writings about (im)mobilities, faith-based movements, and queer politics have been published in The Scholar & Feminist Online, Critical Asian Studies, positions: asia critique, Geoforum, and Journal of Korean Studies as well as in edited books such as Digital Lives in the Global City (2020), Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (2018), Territories of Poverty (2015), and Q&A: Queer in Asian America (1998). She has been awarded University of California Humanities Research Institute’s Podcast Support Grant for a series on feminist politics in Korea and the Korean diaspora. She is currently working on a book manuscript on “queer throughlines” and co-writing another on protest cultures.

Kristina Horn is a Ph.D. student in the University of California, Irvine's East Asian Studies department with a graduate emphasis in Visual Studies. She received her B.A. in History from the University of Delaware and her M.A. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research addresses the representation of kinship and maternity in contemporary South Korean cinema with a focus on the rise of alternative family structures.

Jie-Eun Hwang is professor at University of Seoul Department of Architecture, and currently directs Beta City Center at Sewoon Campus in the heart of the urban manufacturing district of Seoul. Her research interests include spatial information representation, digital tectonics, design media and interface, open data. As an educator, new media experiments and alternative education are also recent challenges. She pursued various research projects, including: digital twin based urban regeneration platform, participatory mobile augmented reality contents, a spatio-temporal timeline system for monitoring public space, monitoring index development for UNESCO heritage. She co-curated Production City at Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017.  Art galleries: Gallery Factory, Gwangju Design Biennale, Culture Station Seoul 284, and Kumho Gallery, have invited her for media art installations that represent social commons. Recently, she founded a startup venture, TechCapsule, to examine business opportunities of place based content media. 

Yookyeong Im is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology with a Secondary Field in the Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Her areas of interest include legal anthropology, social movements, transnational movement of ideas and values, feminist and queer theories, and semiotics. Her work has been supported by the SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship and the Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fellowship Grant. She is currently writing a dissertation on the emerging centrality of law in queer activism in South Korea based on her ethnographic fieldwork in Seoul. 

Hayana Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern University. She examines the cultural history of advancing democracy in South Korea uplifting the experiences of women activists and artists. Her dissertation, “Embodying Democracies: The Gwangju Uprising and the Politics of Mourning, 1980 – 2020,” investigates how grief intervenes in politics and how performance begets democracy by engaging with the history of the state violence and the people's resistance surrounding the Gwangju Uprising. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Science Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, and Roberta Buffett Institute of Global Studies. Three publications based on this research have appeared or are forthcoming in Asian Theatre Journal and essays in edited collections published with the Cambridge University Press and the Chonnam National University.

Hosu Kim is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and an affiliated faculty of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the College of Staten Island and an affiliated faculty of the Department of Psychology with a focus on Critical Social/Personality and Environmental Psychology at The Graduate Center. In 2020-2021, she is a faculty fellow of the Committee of Globalization and Social Change at the Graduate Center. Her first book, Birth Mothers and Transnational Adoption Practice in South Korea: Virtual Mothering, published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2016. It examines South Korea’s transnational adoption practice known for its most extensive involvement since the mid 1950s with a focus on the very process of becoming birth mothers. She is currently percolating a long-term research project on material processes and cultural practices of social repair at the sites of state and imperial violence in South Korea, Vietnam, and Staten Island.  Her work appears in Cultural Studies ó Critical Methodologies, Qualitative Inquiry, Adoption & Culture, Body and Society and others. 

Jaeyoung Kim is a DPhil candidate in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on an industrial sewing community in Seoul and spatial, socio-economic, and political entanglements surrounding the neighbourhood. Her research interests include daily practices of sharing and gift exchange; local surveillance; dynamics and agency in the declining sewing industry; the complexities of urban regeneration; infrastructure fetishism and bureaucratism in urban planning; senses and embodiment; and spatiotemporality in urban space. Prior to her doctoral research, she completed her MPhil in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology at the University of Oxford, with the highest mark accorded the thesis on Rethinking Boundaries between Work and Life: Visual, Spatial, and Sensory Studies in Sewing Workshops in Seoul.

Sung Hong Kim is a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of Seoul. He was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Washington in 2006 and Provost of the Planning and Research Office at the University of Seoul from 2007 to 2008. Between 2007 and 2010 he organized an exhibition entitled <Megacity Network: Contemporary Korean Architecture> and brought it to Frankfurt, Berlin, Tallinn, Barcelona and Seoul. He curated an exhibition entitled <The FAR Game: Constraints Sparking Creativity> for the Korean Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Biennale. He has authored research papers and books about the architecture and urbanism of Seoul including ‘Seoul Solution’ (2020), ‘The FAR Game’ (2016), ‘Future Asian Space’ (2012), ‘Street Corner Architecture’ (2011), ‘On Asian Streets and Public Space’ (2010), ‘New Imagination of Urban Architecture’ (2009), and ‘Megacity Network’ (2007). Since 2012 he has given lectures by invitation at universities and institutions in Singapore, Atlanta, Tokyo, Xiamen, Ekaterinburg, Surabaya, Beijing, Zurich, Liechtenstein, Panama City, and Jakarta.

Bridget Martin is a geographer researching the evolution of the role of land in the US-South Korea security alliance from 1945 into the present moment. She has published research articles in journals such as Political Geography and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and is currently working on a book manuscript on sovereignty, territory, property, and US military dispossessions in South Korea. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Master of Arts in Politics from The New School for Social Research.

Youjeong Oh is an associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received Ph.D. in Geography at University of California, Berkeley. As an urban geographer, her research centers on urban spectacles, media and tourism, and development and urban social movement. Her first book, Pop City: Korean Popular Culture and the Selling of Place, examines the practices of urban promotion using Korean television dramas and K-pop music. Her second project, tentatively entitled Development, Dispossession, and Desires in Jeju, is about the modern history of development and dispossession on Jeju island, South Korea.

Hyungmin Pai is Professor of Architecture at the University of Seoul. Twice a Fulbright Scholar, he received his Ph.D. from the History, Theory, and Criticism program at MIT. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Washington University in St. Louis and is presently professor at the University of Seoul. He is author of Portfolio and the Diagram, Sensuous Plan: The Architecture of Seung H-Sang, and The Key Concepts of Korean Architecture. For the Venice Biennale, he was curator for the Korean Pavilion (2008, 2014), and a participant in the Common Pavilions project (2012). In 2014, the Korean Pavilion was awarded the Golden Lion for best national participation. He was Visiting Director of the Asia Culture Center (2014-15) and Chief Curator for the Gwangju Design Biennale (2010-11). He is Director of the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism.

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park is an artist based in Seoul, Korea, working primarily in the medium of film & video, photography, and installations. He has screened his highly acclaimed first full-length film, " Cheonggyecheon Medley", 2010, at various international venues, including the Berlin Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, Warsaw Planet Doc Film Festival, Los Angeles Film Festival, Hot Docs, among others. Park’s video installation works have been shown at the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul and Daegu Art Museum, Arko Art Gallery, Opsis Art Gallery, and the 2012 Taipei Biennale. Park followed his debut up with "A Dream of Iron", which debuted at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film featuring a series of visual tableaux filmed at the Pohang Steel Company and Hyundai Shipyard, won the NETPAC Award at Berlinale and subsequently played at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Sharjah Bienniale.

Liz Park is Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. She was most recently Curator of Exhibitions at the University at Buffalo Art Galleries, State University of New York, and was Associate Curator of the 2018 Carnegie International. She has curated exhibitions at a wide range of institutions, including Western Front, Vancouver; The Kitchen, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Miller Institute for Contemporary Art at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; and Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. Her writing has been published by Afterall online, Afterimage, ArtAsiaPacific, Performa magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among others. She was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2011–12 and Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at ICA Philadelphia in 2013–15. Her research interests include mobility and migration as well as representations of violence in the colonial present.

Francisco Sanin is internationally known as an urban designer, noted for his extensive research in the history and theory of urban form. He has taught at Princeton, the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, Kingston and Greenwich Universities in the UK, and the University of Oregon Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts. He has been a visiting professor in schools around the world, including the Korean National University of Arts, Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, UPB in Medellin, Colombia, and Miami University. He was Director of the Syracuse University Architecture program in Florence from 2004 - 2008. Sanin is a practicing architect with work in several countries. He has received numerous awards in architectural competitions and has lectured, curated exhibitions, and published internationally.

Chunghoon Shin is an assistant professor of Art History and Theory of Art at Seoul National University. He received his BA in Archaeology and Art History from Seoul National University (1999), his MA in Art History from Seoul National University (2005), and his PhD in Art History from the State University of New York at Binghamton (2013). His publications include “Korean Art and the City After Minjung Art,” “Reality and Utterance in and against Minjung Art,” “1970 Osaka Expo Korea Pavilion: State Architects Yearning To Be Contemporary,” “Winning the Hearts and Minds of Korean Artists: The US, the Cold War, and Korean Art,” and many more. His publications were featured in exhibition catalogs and journals, such as Journal of Architecture; Journal of Architectural Education; Collision, Innovation, Interaction: Korea Art from 1953; University of California Press, and many more. 

Listen to the City is an art, urbanism, research activism collective started in 2009. They consist of urban researchers, designers, filmmakers, and activists. Their works have diverse forms of tactics that could change according to the theme. They are interested in how "Listen to the City" can listen to the people or beings neglected by society. Their goal is to transition from an unsustainable city to a sustainable one. Sustainable transition is not just about equality, environmental justice but also about culture and gender. Therefore, feminist standpoint and feminist epistemology are critical to planning our activities. They are interested in how art and creativity can transit the unsustainable neoliberalism system to a sustainable one. Their main role is to reveal the contradictions in the city and create the field of discussion through empowering people without a voice, so they assist marginalized people to make their voices. 

Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC) is a collective of sisters (Soyoon Ryu, Aletheia Hyun-Jin shin, Hyemin Son) who works with “social fermentation” as an artistic form. They see fermentation as not only a biochemical transformation but also an open-ended process that traverses visual art, performance, cooking, creative writing, oral history, ecological thinking, and auntie wisdoms. Also by bringing in the element of “social” in various forms, they experiment with ways to connect the sensorial with the relational. While operating on a yearly membership, they aim to collaborate beyond the boundaries of a collective. This is done by hosting open-ended platforms, where rice eaters from many regions, dwellers of the past, present, and future, and other various human and non-human beings can meet and create synergistic networks.

Space Beam started out as a local art study group in 1995, and have performed various activities like hosting seminars, publishing art magazines, and planning exhibitions. In a need to secure space for regular meetings and activities, it opened its studio in Guwol-dong, Incheon in January, 2002.

Since then, Space Beam has tried to establish the unique identity of local culture as an alternative art space under the motto of publicity, locality, and autonomy. It intervenes in the course of production, circulation, and consumption of discourse on local art and sets the stage for open meetings and productive communications while struggling with the centralized culture & arts system.

In September 2007, it moved to an abandoned rice wine brewing building located in Baedari, Changyoung-dong, Incheon, where Incheo n's modern history and culture still remain. Now we are trying to play a critical role in building a desirable urban community through sharing local issues and performing various activities under the context of locality.

Politics of Practice I: Architecture and Its Double, Who Makes the City 

Hyungmin Pai, Professor of Architecture, University of Seoul

Redistributing Architecture: Knowledge, Sense, Practice

In contrast to the architecture of the West – a self-centric and continuous tradition of ideas, practices and monuments – Korea’s modern architecture emerged in the latter half of the twentieth century as an unstable, fragmented body of knowledge and practices. During this period, its primary purpose was the delivery of basic services for the physical construction of an explosive growth economy. At the beginning of the 21st century, after decades of the anxious pursuit of modernity, Korean society now faces the challenges of climate change and social inequality, fundamental conditions shared with most of the world but for which it is again poorly equipped to meet. Hence, even before its modern institutions and disciplinary systems have matured, Korean architecture experiences a process of redistribution, if not dissolution. This process is not to be lamented. The agency of architecture lies not in its status as a separate discipline but as part of its own dissolvable redistribution into new ideas, material, conditions.

Helen Choi, Assistant Professor of Architecture, Kookmin University

Can the City be Shared in the Future? 

In 2017, the inaugural Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism took place with the theme ‘commons’ that brought mixed feelings of anticipations and uncertainties. Some uncertainties came from the event being the first ‘urbanism’ Biennale hosted by the Seoul City government, where the tradition of its governance focused more on the planning approach. For the governing body focused on physical ‘shaping’ of the city, the issues of commons were too abstract and tend to become less ‘visible’ when it comes to the productions, propositions, and solutions. On the other hand we witness daily accumulation of the cities confronting water shortage, air pollution, heat waves, floods, rising of sea levels and more, the kind of urban problems that are tricky to be bound by ownership, subject, and/or rights. Indeed these unknown and less manageable vectors are becoming a significant source of urban life today. I will discuss one of the Biennale’s main exhibitions that I curated, Commoning Cities, which addressed the 21st century version of urban dilemmas in relation to the year’s theme commons. The exhibition worked with representatives coming from more than 50 cities to cover issues that are both place-specific and universal, including extreme climate conditions, scarcity of resources, privatization of commons and the loss of inner-city manufacturing.

Sung Hong Kim, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, University of Seoul

Apartment, Land, and Urban Inequality in Seoul

There is an issue in South Korea that has actually eclipsed the Coronavirus pandemic in importance, and that is the soaring real estate prices. This issue became a game-changer in the 2021 Seoul Mayoral election and it could prove to be an Achilles’ heel for both the left and the right in the 2022 Presidential election. The epicenter of this crisis of rising land and apartment prices is central Seoul and the affluent district to the south known as Gangnam.

There is no single short-term housing solution that would satisfy everyone in the Korean megacity. A slow but resilient approach involving the piecemeal construction of public housing within the city is the only plausible long-term solution. However, as anti-communist and anti-socialist sentiments continue to remain high, the meaning and perception of what is ‘public’ in regards to land and housing can cause sharp ideological divides amongst Koreans. And so while the political debate rages on, the continued development of mass apartment complexes through the Housing Redevelopment and Housing Reconstruction projects deepens the intra-urban gap. Antithetical to the city government’s intentions, public housing programs are disproportionately realized in disadvantaged areas and can rarely penetrate into areas with better infrastructures. Thus a discontinuous pattern of contrasts between ‘collectivism’ and ‘egotism’ gets more deeply embedded into the spatial fabric of the city. While the high-end design opportunities appeal to entrepreneurs and politicians who exploit the symbolic prestige they provide, sound architectural principles are increasingly marginalized in large-scale urban projects.

The ideas were adopted and modified from "High Density Dilemmas: Apartment Development vs. Urban Management Plan in Seoul"; Seoul Studies, (The Seoul Institute), Vol.19, No.4. December 2018, pp.1-19; “Architectural Challenges in a City of Collectivism,” In Collective City, 2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Seoul Metropolitan Government, 2019, pp.66-73.

Urban Representations: Visions and Actions

Bruce Fulton, Young-Bin Min Chair in Korean Literature and Literary Translation, University of British Columbia

From Community to Anonymity: Images of the Metropolis in Modern Korean Fiction

Modern Korean fiction, both kŭndae and hyŏndae, offers a wealth of detail charting the transition in urban lifestyle from multi-family dwellings to nuclear families and more recently to single-occupancy dwelling. Paralleling this structural transformation is a profound change in world-view in which urban denizens see themselves no longer as part of the human fabric of a shared community based on direct in-person interaction but rather as loose ends connected primarily by electronic devices. This essay will offer glimpses of the bustling Kwanggyo district of Seoul in Pak T’aewŏn’s “The Barbershop Boy” (Ibalso ŭi sonyŏn, 1936), the surreal and disorienting experience of the first modern apartment dwellers in Ch’oe Inho’s “Another Man’s Room” (T’ain ŭi pang, 1971) and Pak Wansŏ’s “Identical Apartments” (Talmŭn pang tŭl, 1974), symptoms of urban environmental degradation in Cho Sehŭi’s “City of Machines” (Kigye toshi, 1978), the demolition of squatter neighborhoods in Hwang Sŏgyŏng’s “A Dream of Good Fortune” (Twaeji kkum, 1973) and Cho Sehui’s “ A Little Ball Launched by a Dwarf” (Nanajangi ka ssoaollin chagŭn kong, 1976), futuristic commercial skyscrapers in which executions are carried out through a chain of discrete and impersonal telephone communications in Chang Ŭnho’s “First Day at Work” (Ch’ŏt ch’ulgŭn, 2014), and ghost neighborhoods awaiting renovation in Kim Soom’s One Left (Han myŏng, 2016). Throughout these works I trace the evolution of the anomie that characterizes life in the Seoul metropolitan area in the new millennium, a life branded by many as Hell Chosŏn.

Chunghoon Shin, Assistant Professor of Art History, Seoul National University

Network and the Primitive: Visionary Planning Toward the Year 2000 by Human Environmental Development Institute (HEDI), c. 1970

This paper explores the futuristic urban visions in the Future Exhibition Hall of the Expo 70 Korean Pavilion. Taking the form of maps, sketches, drawings and maquettes, the technological and forward-looking visions derived from a series of invited talks and interdisciplinary discussions, which were organized on October and November 1969 by the Human Environmental Development Institute(HEDI), where architect Kim Swoo-Geun and his team designed the exhibition contents. This paper shows that the ‘futurology seminar’ provided the Korean architects with a significant arena, in which Western and Japanese technologically oriented urban and architectural discourses were introduced, discussed, and inflected into a Korean context. It also argues that the design processes took on an important role for Kim Swoo-geun’s architectural maturity, as represented by his promulgation of “the third space,” “ultimate space,” “womb space,” “negativism,” and others during the 1970-80s.

Kristina Horn, Ph.D. Candidate in East Asian Studies, University of California, Irvine

Reclaiming Seoul through Running Man: South Korean Television and Urban Spaces

Running Man (RM) has become not only the longest running variety television show in Korea, but also one of the most popular television shows in Korea. This paper will examine how the show incorporates aspects of play, playfulness, and psychogeography as a means of de-rigidifying the functionalism of the urban landscape of Seoul. Although RM still takes place within the moral conventions of Korean society, as Miguel Sicart’s theorization of playfulness suggests, their play provides a form of “occasional freedom and distance” from these conventions within the format of the show. Therefore, it presents a way of reimagining the urban landscape–from within the capitalist spectacle– that allows for forms of unconventional pleasure and leisure. Through the use of play within retail and tourist spaces, RM momentarily subverts the boredom and alienation of the urban landscape and allows for a reimagining of new forms of pleasure from within the city itself.

Roundtable: Queer Contestations, Domestic and Urban

Yookyeong Im, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, Harvard University

The Art of Protest Organizing: Claim to/about The City made by Queer Activists and Conservative Counter-Protesters in Seoul

Based on ethnographic research for more than two years, this paper will explore how both queer activists and their counter-protesters navigate the art of protest organizing to claim their rights to urban public spaces in Seoul. Despite the heterogeneity in terms of who and what can produce the space, it became ever more difficult for them to either queer or own the “public space” in its material forms during COVID-19. During this time, the idea of illegality has been relative and relational in various urban protests. It is not an entirely new phenomenon but a revealed truth about the city as the locus of political activities. Engaging with the overarching themes of legality and urban protest, I will address the following questions during the presentation: 1) How are activists’ claims to the city are interconnected with their claims about the city? 2) How do their claims-making play out in protests as a speech/semiotic genre? 3) Given the changing importance of various media and strengthened restrictions over mass protests during the pandemic, did the particularity of the “COVID time” intensify the difference between material and representational practices regarding how activist practices produce the political space? If so, how?

Ju Hui Judy Han, Assistant Professor in Gender Studies, University of California, Los Angeles 

Strange Households and Imperfect Families in the Queer Family Sitcom, Ŭratp’ap’a (2021)

Promoted as Korea’s first queer family sitcom, Ŭratpapa (으랏파파, 2021) is a collaboration between Il-Rhan Kim (김일란), the influential documentary filmmaker and co-founder of activist documentary collective PINKS, and Ibanjiha (이반지하, 김소윤), a celebrated writer and performance artist. The three-episode miniseries, released on YouTube in March 2021, features a situation comedy involving a middle-aged butch lesbian physical education teacher and her housemates. Packed with inside jokes and pointed references to contemporary gender and sexual minority dynamics, the series is a remarkable departure from the conventions of tragedy and melancholy that have long dominated queer and transgender storylines. In this presentation, I focus on how Ŭratpapa engages with the household and the family as interrelated loci of queer urban politics and how it produces complex queer and trans throughlines that are imperfect and contradictory, both familiar and strange.

Artist Talk

Kelvin Kyung Kun Park, Cheonggyecheon Medley 

The Cheonggye stream runs through the center of Seoul. Today a popular urban recreation area with clear water, promenades and leafy plants, the Cheonggyecheon was, until only eight years ago, a filthy rivulet under a busy freeway. In the years following the Japanese occupation and during the Korean War, part of the area around the stream was taken over by merchants who made use of the military war scrap, thus helping to lay the foundations for the country’s economic recovery. With the renaturalization of the stream, the neighborhood is now threatened by gentrification.

In Cheonggyecheon Medley, the artist Kelvin Kyung Kun Park bows before the tradition of this city district. A recurring nightmare and a letter to his dead grandfather, who ran a scrap metal business, are the hooks in his complex, well-conceived and multilayered documentary film. Ultimately, however, he lingers over the people who work the metal: the foundrymen, cutters, welders and so on, his patient observation showing us how the iron shapes the workmen no less than the workmen shape the iron. With his first film, Park has created a documentary milestone.

Politics of Practice II: Art, the Collective Project

Space Beam - Un-gi Min

Incheon’s Urban Development and the Cultural Response of Space Beam: Focused on Protecting and Caring for Baedari Village

In 2007 Incheon City was carrying out a national project as part of the successful creation of the Free Economic Zone. In order to speed up the flow of logistics, the construction of an industrial road unilaterally linking Songdo in the south and Cheongna district in the north was carried out unilaterally. However, Baedari Village, a treasure trove of historical and cultural assets, was cut in two. If the construction proceeded as planned, the residents of Baedari would not only suffer various noise, pollution and dust damage, but it would also threaten safety and cause serious walking obstacles due to regional disconnection. In response, a number of civic and cultural groups and activists in the region, including residents of neighboring areas of the planned road section, joined together to fight against it. In the meantime, a development plan to completely demolish the area and build a shopping mall and apartments was promoted. Hearing this news, 'Space Beam,' an alternative art space, acted to prevent this plan by moving from its original location in Incheon to an out-of-operation makgeolli brewery building in Baedari Village. Space Beam is known for taking the lead in protecting and caring for villages that are in crisis. In particular, we tried to transform and replace the values of history and culture, life and ecology, and community against the logic of speed and efficiency, and development that have dominated our society and city while approaching and intervening rather than simply fighting against it. The residents lead these actions to exercise their rights and ownership of the city. Now 14 years later, they decided to build the industrial road underground and it was excluded from the development plan. Another conflict situation is developing as Don-gu, the administrative agency of the region, mobilizes their administrative power. They've thrown away their wait-and-see attitude by securing a considerable amount of financial resources in order to create a tourist destination, which is another logic of capital. However, the Baedari Village residents have mixed interests regarding these actions and are not responding with the same unity as before. In the midst of this, some spaces and activists including Space Beam, are continuing discussions and experiments for alternatives to cities and towns.

Rice Brewing Sisters Club

Moving Soil: A Gathering with Rice Brewing Sisters Club

In this gathering, Rice Brewing Sisters Club and their friends (Chankook Park, Chul Woo Kim, and Somi Sim) weave multiple threads of ongoing artistic practices and community organizing into the narratives of soil, land, and their movements. Thinking of soil as at once a marker of place and a heterogeneous mixture, and land as at once a region, city, nation-state, and territory, we hope to introduce a platform where varied scales of and approaches to locality (soil) converge (into a land). We also hope to shed light on both the possibilities and frictions that creative projects bring to these sites and their communities.

Perspectives on Collective Activism 

Jaeyoung Kim, Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology, University of Oxford

The Fading Light of Urban Regeneration in Seoul

Changsin-dong, which has been promoted as the largest industrial sewing community in Seoul, has received significant attention as the “leading area of urban regeneration.” With the commencement of urban regeneration in 2014, numerous researchers, organizations, and social enterprises began to settle in the neighborhood at the beginning of urban regeneration. However, based on my 15-month ethnographic fieldwork, most of the young social entrepreneurs, organizations, and academics who flocked into Changsin-dong began to leave after the official termination of the business period of urban regeneration in 2016 because they gradually lost their sustainability. Despite urban regeneration’s emphasis on community-based, bottom-up approaches to overcome the limitations of capitalist developmentalism, hierarchical power relationships between governmental administrations and local cooperatives are revealed over the entire course of the project. Following this, governance of the state is transformed into “government through the community,” (Rose 1996) with the objective of “community-based” urban regeneration. Here, I point out that these insidious maneuvers may be omnipresent in everyday lives. In this paper, I will critically examine the background surrounding how urban regeneration was fueled and what consequences have been raised to date, and ultimately look at the complexities and limitations of urban regeneration that might end up in the form of the instrumentality of community.

Youjeong Oh, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, University of Texas Austin

(Re)Claiming the Right to the City: Urban Social Movement against Top-dong Public Water Reclamation

The Top-dong movement was an extensive residents’ resistance mobilization against the Top-dong public water reclamation in Jeju in the late 1980s. Starting as female divers’ struggle for subsistence, the Top-dong movement grew into collective actions to capture unfair developmental profits and an island-wide activism to assert self-determination. By revisiting the Top-dong movement, this paper conducts two-tiered analyses. First, how urban development projects create colonial conditions to hosting communities by dispossessing land, public resources and the means of subsistence, commodifying them for surplus, and extracting profits out of local place. Second and in response, what kinds of urban rights residents strive to defend against the development regime. The Top-dong movement revolved around specific right claiming: female divers’ collective rights to public water that were dismantled by the reclamation project, local residents’ right to command developmental gains since the profits were made only through dispossession of local communal resources, and islanders’ right to participate in the decision-making process with respect to local development issues. I argue that the historically-situated, place-based right to the city movement to contest the extractive and exclusive capitalist utilization of urban space performs decolonial work. 

Local Territories, Global Power Structures 

Sujin Eom, Lecturer, Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages, Dartmouth College

Dangerous Proximity, Deceptive Appearance: Spatializing Race across the Pacific

This paper traces how “Chinatown” evolved into a collectively imagined space that shared racial imaginings and ideas across the Pacific in the early twentieth century. Looking at the transpacific field of Chinatown literature—detective fiction, travel writing, exposé journalism—the paper examines the ways in which the Chinese “race” was translated and spatialized in colonial Korea. Written by a range of people from urban adventurers and exposé journalists to public health officials and social reformers, the Chinatown literature served as the medium through which the dangerous proximity of the Chinese race was imagined in spatial terms. How did Anglo-American settler imperial imaginaries make their way to colonial space in East Asia? In what ways were such imaginaries understood and received in the colony to reproduce another form of violence? Specifically what aspect of racial imaginings was transported to the colony? Further, what did the travel of racial imaginaries inform us about colonial space? By analyzing the transpacific circuits through which racial “truths” were routinely exchanged across continents, this paper delves further into the role of imaginaries, not merely in the production of, but rather in the concealment of colonial violence.  

Bridget Martin,SBSK Postdoctoral Fellow at the Korea Institute, Harvard University

South Korea’s Defense Land Brokerage Scheme: Demilitarized Lands as Speculative Frontier

Over seventy US military bases in South Korea have closed since 2004, and at least a dozen more are slated for closure soon. While the release of US military lands might appear to index a broad tendency toward decolonization and spatial liberation, this is not necessarily the case. Released US military lands are almost all the property of the South Korean Ministry of National Defense. Instead of releasing these lands to previous civilian owners or occupants, the ministry quietly transfers most remote military bases to South Korean military while it places urban military bases on the domestic real estate market. To generate its own non-tax revenue stream to fund its multi-billion-dollar security commitment to the US, it acts as a land broker and treats demilitarized lands as a speculative urban frontier available for the taking by large developers and investors and. Meanwhile, local governments engage in a competitive politics of localized deregulation in order to attract these investors and developers to these sites. This presentation calls for a conception of demilitarization that looks beyond the horizon of state enclosure and commodification and toward a future in common. 

Kwangju: Agencies of Memory 

Hayana Kim, Ph.D. Candidate, Northwestern University

Occupying the Graveyard: The Gwangju Mangwoldong Cemetery as Affective Space for Democracy

Located in Gwangju, the Mangwoldong Cemetery is one of the most important battlefields for democracy in Korea. It is where the bereaved mothers of the Gwangju Uprising, or the May Mothers, fought for the right to mourn their deceased children, resisting the military regime’s interdiction on mourning. In this paper, I examine how these mothers spearheaded what I call jesa activism—a commemorative activism that turned an otherwise private and familial ritual into a spectacular anti-dictatorship protest—to argue that the May Mothers staged jesa activism to produce an affective space for democracy. During jesa activism, not only did mothers foreground their grief in demanding justice, but countless citizens also came in solidarity to bear pressure to the state through their communal acts of mourning. The result was a production of the country’s most dangerous space of insurgent melancholia to beget democracy. To demonstrate this, I draw on extensive oral history interviews with the May Mothers, providing detailed illustrations of their activism. The May Mothers show that a society becomes more democratic when politics derive from grief—an expansive grief in which deaths previously erased and disavowed by the state find a space to arise into communal memories. 

Hosu Kim, Assistant Professor, College of Staten Island

The City of the Disappeared: The Politics of Repair and the Gwangju Democratic Movement

The 1980 Gwangju Democratic Movement has continued to shape the city of Gwangju. From the 5.18 national cemetery to the discovery of bullet holes in Chun-Il building, from the establishment of the Gwangju Trauma Center to the restoration of municipal buildings, the legacy of the Gwangju democratic movement has been one of the most powerful political, economic, and cultural drivers shaping the city’s landscape. Among these efforts to repair the ruptured bodies and hearts of Gwangju, I am interested in how the disappeared are inhabited, investigated, and imagined via the following sites: (1) the empty, reserved graves for the disappeared in the 5.18 cemetery, (2) local media events around a photo taken of a disappeared child on the last day of the Gwangju uprising and the search for his whereabouts, and (3) the artistic and ecological exploration of the putative burial sites in “Good Light, Good Air,” (2020) a documentary film by Im Heung Soon. This paper aims to entertain a panoply of multiple interpretations of the missing and argues that the missing do not represent a state of emptiness or absence but instead comprise a rich epistemological terrain upon which a politics and ethics of repair is contested and re-imagined in a more-than-human world. 

Liz Park, Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, Carnegie Museum of Art

Mothers in Protest: Connecting Gwangju and Buenos Aires in Han Kang and IM Heung-soon’s collaboration

“After all, while the victors of history have long erected monuments to remember their triumphs, and victims have built memorials to recall their martyrdom, only rarely does a nation call on itself to remember the victims of crimes it has perpetrated. Where are the national monuments to the genocide of American Indians, to the millions of Africans enslaved and murdered, to the kulaks and peasants starved to death by the millions?”

—James E. Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory against Itself in Germany Today,” 1992.

For the 2018 Carnegie International, I worked as associate curator with artist and filmmaker IM Heungsoon and writer Han Kang to present a collaborative installation of new works born of their shared interest in the historical traumas of the Korean peninsula and the role of women in political movements. The survey exhibition, hosted every five years at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, brought together contemporary art from around the world and thus provided a setting for them to think more broadly about their own work in the context of shared global politics and struggles. IM—known for his documentation of the struggles of South Korean women laborers in the film Factory Complex (2014)—and Han—author of Human Acts (2014), which provides a multi-perspectival narrative of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising—began discussing the connection between Han’s native city of Gwangju and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Both had visited Argentina on a previous occasion and were struck by the movement of mothers who publicly protested the disappearance of their children during the Videla dictatorship (1976–1981) by regularly marching in Plaza de Mayo at the heart of the city. The pair immediately drew connections between Mothers of Plaza de Mayo with May Mothers, a group that formed in light of the indiscriminate massacre of Gwangju residents by the military, led by then de facto leader Chun Doo-hwan. For these two leading cultural figures in South Korea, the activism of mothers in Buenos Aires provided an opportunity to reframe the historical trauma of Gwangju Democratization movement. They specifically drew on the concept of the mirror to attain new perspectives and proceeded to pursue questions about memory-keeping and history-writing. When history is at once a living memory, and when a closure from a violent past remains a distant promise, how do we preserve the memory of what has passed? Mothers in protest, as IM and Han demonstrate through their work, have a critical role in bringing what cultural theorist bell hooks terms “homeplace” into the public to actively build a space where individuals can “confront the issue of humanization” and keep alive the memories of those who remain unaccounted for in the wake of military dictatorships. The space of domesticity where women create both self-affirming and political spaces of struggle is not only a project of healing and collectivizing, but is also an immense undertaking that redefines memorialization and monument-building in a given city. The instability of memories and human frailty, as embraced by IM and Han, become the foundation of a different kind of public memorial that has the capacity to endure, shape-shift, and be passed down generations.

¹ bell hooks, “Homeplace: A Site of Resistance,” Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 41–49.