Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence of Modern Korea (review)

Book Reviews123 ways to write about the development of modern Korean brush-and-ink painting, the author's structuring ofeach section and historic periodization work very well. Chung begins her text with a portrayal of the important late-nineteenth-century painter Chang Süngöp and his influences. This section is somewhat bewildering , because Chung employs the kind of storytelling narrative that was common until perhaps the 1950s, and thereby falls into the trap of repeating traditional East Asian stereotyped patterns in profiling a famous artist. All the reader might later remember is that the painter loved wine and women and that he had plenty ofboth at all times. (That is fine with us.) But from here on, the work gets much better. Chung covers all the important stylistic and material changes and how they correlate to political, social, and cultural changes, and offers pointed, convincing explanations. She describes the commercialization ofthe arts that began when the Chosön system ofliterati painters and professional court painters (organized under the Bureau ofPainting) had ended, and comments on how and why Korean brush painting borrowed from the Japanese Nihonga style under colonial rule. For the postliberation era, the author briefly addresses war art; considers how Christian subject matters became popular in postliberation times as an ideological reaction to North Korean painting; points out what decolonization meant in terms ofstyle; and explains the revival of brush painting as a medium for avant-garde art by turning to nonfigurative painting. Chung sums up her work with a note on minjung and feminist artists' attempts to experiment with brush-and-ink painting. The text is clearly organized, and the author's fluid prose, intelligently selected examples ofartwork, and success in summarizing complex issues while explaining the connections between developments in painting style and colonialism, collaboration, and nationalism, all make for an interesting work. The book is certainly no work of original research, as it does not advance new theoretical perspectives. Most of what is presented in Modern Korean Ink Painting can be found in other works, but Chung deserves praise for her concise and pointed synopsis of the subject. To my knowledge, this is also the first such overview in English. The book's dense format and clear prose make it an excellent text for introductory college and university classes that deal with colonial and postcolonial art, culture, and intellectual history in Korea. Reviewed by Frank Hoffmann University of Hamburg Beyond Birth: Social Status in the Emergence ofModern Korea by Kyung Moon Hwang. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Asia Center, Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2004. 481 pp. $50.00 (cloth) In Western studies of Korean social history, there has been a substantial harvest of research on the traditional society. Social scientists working in the modern 124The Journal ofKorean Studies periods have also been hard at work. Yet by and large, scholars specializing in the Chosön period have not looked forward to the modern outcomes of the social patterns on which they have thrown so much light, while those working in the first half of the twentieth century have seldom looked back for the earlier origins of the modernizing society. Conversely, when we consider the vast amount of labor that scholars have lavished on the Kaehwa period (1876-1910, but here expanded to 1864-1930, to reflect Kyung Moon Hwang's preferred time frame), which bridges the traditional and modern societies, one finds the social issues heavily overshadowed by topics in political history, economics, religion, nationalism, modernization, and cultural studies. Millions of Koreans lived during those years and had sure knowledge of their status in the society they had been born into. They were also keenly aware ofthe very different social patterns that were taking shape around them during their later years. Nevertheless, this important transitional experience has been largely missing from our histories. Kyung Moon Hwang's Beyond Birth is an illuminating response to this need. His focus is centered on the Kaehwa period, but he looks back five centuries for its social antecedents and also forward to about the year 1930 for its social outcome. To be sure, he deals only with the leadership strata. But one has to start somewhere...