• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
• /
• v.37 no.3
• /
• pp.357-370
• /
• 2013

The Republican Period of China (1912 to 1949) was when the archetypes of thought (constituting contemporary China) engaged in heated rivalry and were directly influenced by Korea through frequent exchanges. This study analyzes the characteristic of Chinese women's aesthetics towards the human body with a focus on visual materials (such as articles and illustrations concerning hairstyle, makeup, skincare, fashion, and gymnastics) featured in the Chinese women magazines of Fun$\ddot{u}$zazhi (婦女雜誌) and Linglong (玲瓏). This study analyzes these magazines and compares them with Korean counterparts. The movement of the developed and controlled human body was a common characteristic of this period; however, compared to the Chinese, the Japanese colonial period of Korea resulted in an introspective self-examination through excessively objectified eyes. Dress and adornment as the symbol of a new civilization acted as the most remarkable signifier. The overlapping of a western image with a Japanese image led to more resistance in Korea. The criterion for the value of a women's external appearance (that traditionally dualized womanly virtues) collapsed and dress was accepted as an expression of individuality instead of as a social class. The human body was traditionally recognized as a microcosm of the universe that dominated the natural principle of Yin-Yang and the Five Elements. However, the ideal human body was postulated and the aesthetic consciousness of the body changed into an imaginary view of the human body that proceeded to keep the body fit for and gave birth to the concept of supplementing the deficiency of the beauty of the human body with dress and makeup.

• English & American cultural studies
• /
• v.9 no.1
• /
• pp.71-90
• /
• 2009

David Harris argues that mass media suppress counter-hegemonic factors in order to reach audience. According to Harris's theory, the success of the film "Tess" depends on its effective adaptation from Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). Tess (1979), directed by Roman Polansky, casting Nastassia Kinski for Tess, was acclaimed as a professional and commercial success, awarded with various prizes. Hardy's aim at criticizing Victorian English social and moral standard through Tess appears obscure in Polansky's film which focuses on the aesthetics of human body and capital. Polanski's Tess with urban white beauty does not emerge victimized by poverty, which the late twentieth century audience under the capitalist umbrella may abhor. To examine his use of music, sound effect, visual images by means of camera operation—angles, distances, close-ups and frequent movements—light and color, and mythic elements in the film, show Polansky's sharp perception of his contemporary audience's desire and conscientious work upon it.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
• /
• v.39 no.3
• /
• pp.353-368
• /
• 2015

Walter Van Beirendonck expresses a fairy tale world of perverted sexual desire of sadism and masochism, violence, and aggressiveness that breaks from a transient one-time concept as is an essential element of fashion. This study classifies the aesthetic characteristic shown on the design of Walter Van Beirendonck and analyzes the intent of his symbolism and meaning. The attempt has a meaning in exploring a new directionality of fashion by conveying a critical message to this end, contemporary fashion breaks down boundaries with artistic genre and connects a problematic consciousness that exists in life with fashion. The results of study on the aesthetic characteristics of Walter Van Beirendonck are as follows. First, Beirendonck emphasized an interpersonal image about body by giving a question through the deconstruction of image on a perfect body into race, age, and body based on body modification. Second, fetishism appeared as a consciousness that human identity and character can be changed by connecting a fetish element of sexual identity, and sadism and masochism with fashion's imagination. Third, infantilism as an amusement expression of the form metaphorically satirized life of modern people. Fourth, makeup shown on performance or festival of an African tribe was used in the way of mixture or reuse for ethnography to obtain inspiration from ethnography. Fifth, pop art combined a popular culture code as amusement through mass production and mass media. Aesthetics of Beirendonck do not have norm and are bold in using form, color, pattern, print, and styling because Beirendonck reinterpreted critical attitudes about essential problems that human life entails into a motif of his symbolic meaning in amusement. In regards to his design aesthetics, Beirendonck expanded fashion to the scope of Gesamtkunstwerk in a consistent and continued theme combined with philosophical creativity and differentiated from other fashion designers.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
• /
• v.34 no.8
• /
• pp.1364-1377
• /
• 2010

Although the human body is a biological subject with definite and distinctive physical features, its actualization and perception differs among societies. The aesthetics of the human body are based on diverse cultural perceptions that must be considered prior to design development. This study establishes the foundations of newly adopted concepts of beauty that are presumed to have been established in the first half of the twentieth century that continue to affect our mindset even now. The research includes human figures in the articles of women's magazines and cosmetic advertisements in the early $20^{th}$ century. The results are as follows: First, the change of perception in the human body: Instead of being a subject of preservation, the body has become a subject of sculpture with emphasis on health in the 1920's and on beauty in the 1930's. The recognition of the importance of the body has created intensive attention on physical training and an increased sense of hygiene. The body exposed to the public perceives itself through the eyes of others that alter one's own perception of oneself as well as become a target of evaluation. There is an additional emphasis on the exotic eroticism of a passive subordinate. Western culture became the standard for modernization along with the dissociation of traditional standards and values. Through the effect of education and western thinking, the awareness of women's rights and self-appreciation was developed. Second, ideal beauty can be summarized as follows: Unprocessed natural beauty was extolled as ideal in the 1920's, but the 1930's, it highlighted big eyes and an aquiline nose that are the characteristics of western women. Taking care of one's appearance was recognized as an important value for every social class. Cosmetics and skin care treatments promised soft and white skin. In contrast to western cosmetics, dark and shiny hair was highly favored. Exercising and traveling, differing seasonal and regional skin treatments were also widely accepted. In its initial stages, the research had originally assumed that the beginning of the twentieth century would be a time in which traditional concepts of beauty and new, westernized aesthetics coexisted. However, as the research progressed, it was clear that the idea of beauty had already adopted occidental ideals by that time. Thus, it seems necessary to continue the study on the shifting paradigms of beauty that must have occurred in the nineteenth and late twentieth century.

• Journal of the Korea Fashion and Costume Design Association
• /
• v.4 no.3
• /
• pp.43-54
• /
• 2002

Some factors had influence upon the grotesque image formation expressed in fashion: for instance, thanatos, religions, fin de siecle (end of the century), the aesthetics of ugliness, subculture group's resistance and technology development, etc. Those factors have formed a grotesque while exchanging influence each other, and have following features: First, the thanatos, which is destructive and aggressive instinct of the inner world of human being, creates frightening object and motif to form the images of grotesque. Second, from religious point of view, the church made the Devil a tool for maintenance of power: They manipulated physical body and give a damage to it to sublimate it in holy existence, so that they could feel catharsis. Third, there was fin de siecle (end of the century) to let people have negative life attitude, such as uneasiness on following century, eschatology, skepticism and nihilism, etc. Fourth, the ugliness having unpleasantness and disharmony occupies governing position when our society becomes corrupted and uneasy, and the aesthetics of ugliness discloses the inconsistency of ideal and beautiful life in the grotesque images. Fifth, subculture groups, i.e., the lower classes, homosexual and the youth's group, etc, form the grotesque images by political and ideological resistance, complaints and specific identity, etc concerning governing culture keeping traditional ethics consciousness. Sixth, recent technology development has destroyed a boundary between human being and machinery, and bio-technology development has created transplant operation, plastic operation and other human body transformation operations, and genome research, etc has raised human being's identity.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.60 no.10
• /
• pp.133-145
• /
• 2010

The study used four basic formats classified based on the four principles on costumes discussed in the paper 'Human Beings and Arts Phenomena' by Oskar Schlemmer who studied the relationships between stage space and the human body as an analysis tool with regard to analyses on the abstraction of human body in contemporary dance costume. Abstraction of human body expressed in costume for contemporary dance is as follows: Expansions caused by unclear boundary between spaces and costumes, and the principles of three-dimensional abstract spaces based on a geometric cube change heads, trunks, arms and legs to achieve expansions. Similar mechanical shape is a type of shape made in a succession of functional principles of human body in relationships with spaces. As mechanical mechanism is added to the geometric transformation of a specific part of human body, mechanicalness is contained in it. Motion organisms are geometric simplification of moving traces in a space based on conversion into mechanical organisms based on principles of motion, and as mechanical rotation, consecutive speed caused by refraction and directionality are suggested, mobility is achieved. Immaterial shape is based on change into a metaphysical form, and it is converted into animals, plants or a third life that symbolize body parts. It has metaphysical significance in each body part and extends sensibility. As a result of the study, development into abstract succession and a techno art mode has been confirmed. Combination of geometric cubic figures with the organic human body and configuration of the human body pursued by Oskar Schlemmer's geometric abstraction through the proactive accommodation of mechanical aesthetics has been succeeded and expressed in the contemporary dance costumes.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.57 no.4
• /
• pp.581-598
• /
• 2011

The recent revival of phenomenology and aesthetics is deeply connected to the development of neuroscience which studies the nervous system and the brain with particular regard to cognition and memory. How are those fields gathered into building up the basis for the communication not only between human beings but also between humanity and its environment? This paper examines the human mind considered unseparable from the body, with reference to Merleau-Ponty's two major works: Phenomenology of Perception (1962) and The Visible and the Invisible (1968). While reading these texts, I investigate the way he overturns the Cartesian cogito and establishes the body as the ground of perception. According to him, human perception is chiefly obtained through the body rather than consciousness. Influenced by William James, who produced the unique concept of cognition and memory through his experiments with the brain, Merleau-Ponty extends Heideggerian Desein to the field of the embodied mind. James also anticipates Bergson, who regards memory as the product of interaction between consciousness and matter (or the body). The intervention of the body which stores the past experiences makes it impossible for us to capture the present moment in itself. This failure, however, is viewed as positive by Merleau-Ponty because the human body is not only a medium of social interaction, but also that of ecological communion.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.38
• /
• pp.369-392
• /
• 1998

In order to identify and describe the central core of fashion desire, the concept of“anti-aesthetics”and“open fashion”were analyzed based on the discourses of postmodernism dis-cussed in the field of sociology, culture, art and philosophy. In this paper, first, the new perspectives of fashion related to modernism and postmodernism were proposed, open concept, anti-aesthet-ics which is ephemerality but eternal ideology. Key principles of postmodernism as anti-aess-thetics mean the philosophy of nihilism proposed by Nietzsche indeterminency, the endd of original art(the death of art), the sublimity provided by Lyotard, and the pluralism to release human from the closed way of thinking, value, ideology. Second, the old and classical definition of fashion,“the differentiation of class”proposed by Veblen and Simmel has been changed into the“differentiation of taste”in postmodern condition. Third, the dichotomous system, that is, ration vs emotion, soul vs body, male vs female, culture vs nature, and so on has been deconstructed and disolved in the postmodern fashion phenomenon using the technique of anti-formalism, such as pastich, parody, bricolage an kitsch for the expression of sublimity and freedom of human.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.15 no.6
• /
• pp.168-178
• /
• 2015

This article analysis the aesthetics of metal-body of (1989) and its metamorphosis of dehumanization through visual desires expressed by body images. This paper suggests theoretical analysis based on aesthetic views to understand the underlying meanings. The research categorizes three types of images; surreal image, grotesque image and eros image from the metamorphosis of dehumanization and transformation throughout the film. As the surreal image, the metamorphic process of transformation, demolition, derangement, illusion, and human desire continues to reflect the evil side of a human in everyday life. It also visualizes the images of exaggeration through weakness and bizarre side of metal-body. The grotesque image of body metamorphosis displays and symbolizes double-sides of bizarre and weak side of human in the everyday environment when malformation reaches its peak when Tetsuo finally shows his transforming figure. Finally, the eros image is analogized as a man's inner self and self-destruction in surreal world and a grotesque figure when overwhelming desire of transforming into rebirth of a perfect metal-body, Tetsuo. The surreal image, grotesque image, and eros image portraits human desires inner and outer-self into visualized image and that represents the means of excessive desire for dreaming of world domination with merging non-organic medium of metal and organic body to create a perfect body-image.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
• /
• v.55 no.6 s.96
• /
• pp.125-140
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this study is to define the special characteristics of the neoclassic style in eighteenth to nineteenth century fashion. Researching into philosophy and aesthetics in eighteenth to nineteenth century, the characteristics of the neoclassic style in fashion is considered the clarity of form, the utility of function, and the sensuality combined with body. The results of this study are as follows: The clarify of form is found in geometric form based on anatomical truth of the human body in relation with rational and scientific thoughts. The utility of function is found in simple and suitable construction considering purely practical purpose of dresses. The sensuality combined with body is found in natural silhouette dress alluding naked body in connection with Rousseau' naturalism. Understanding aesthetic value of the neoclassic style will help to develop fashion designs associated with neoclassical forms.