Reconsidering the Body in Korean Modern Art: Ku Ponung's Body, World, and Art

This dissertation proposes to consider Ku Ponung (1906–1953) as an artist, critic, poet, illustrator, book publisher, antique collector, and art educator, and thereby illuminate important aspects of colonial modernity in Korea. It examines the prominent yet controversial personality of Ku Ponung in the context of various art historical questions and social and political aspects. The discourse of modern individualism became most intensive around 1930 during the period of Japanese colonial rule, simultaneous with attempts to define a collective Korean identity. The pursuit of Korean modernity became further complicated during the Pacific War from the late 1930s through the liberation from the colonial rule in 1945 to the Korean War in the early 1950s. This study attempts to investigate the various questions of Korean modern art by employing perspectives on the biological, social, political, and artistic notions of the body of which the interpretation and representation encountered significant changes under the new paradigm of modernism. Using the conceptual frame of the "body," it interprets several layers of meaning in Ku Ponung's life as an artist, from the literal meaning of the human body to its metaphorical notions.;Chapter I defines the theoretical foundation of modernism which is inevitably related to westernization and colonization and explains the increasing concern with the body in Korean society and the art world during the early twentieth century. Chapter II on "the deformed body" focuses on Ku's early life, his physical problems as a hunchback, his self-image in a modern urban world, and his relationship with his family and friends. Chapter III on "the resisting body" discusses Ku's education in Japan and his activities after his return to Korea when, as an outsider, he resisted social norms imposed by the colonial government and the mainstream art world. Chapter IV on "the fused body" explores Ku's efforts to reconcile Korean tradition with Western and Japanese modernism and to break the boundaries between different art genres in his pursuit to create a Korean version of modern painting. Chapter V on "the colonial body" reevaluates Ku's collaboration with the Japanese government during the period of intense militarism by examining his conception and appropriation of the body in the context of political and social metaphors.;By examining Ku Ponung's conception and representation of the body in the context of his times and spatial surroundings, this dissertation expects to overcome prevailing systems of linear evolutionary periodization, stylistic division, and political dichotomy and to contribute eventually to a reconsideration of the history of Korean modern art within a new conceptual framework.