• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.1
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• pp.175-209
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• 2020

This paper examines how the cinematic representation of the Japanese military "comfort women" stimulates 'imagination' in the realm of everyday life and in the memory of the masses, creating a common awareness and affect. The history of the Japanese military "comfort women" was hidden for a long time, and it was not until the 1990s that it entered the field of public recognition. Such a transition can be attributed to the external and internal chronopolitics that made possible the testimony of the victims and the discourse of the "comfort women" issue. It shows the peculiar status of the comfort women history as 'politics of time'. In the same vein, the cinematic representations of the Japanese military "comfort women" can be found in similar chronopolitics. The 'comfort women' films have shown the dual time frame of the continuity and discontinuity of the 'silence'. In Korean film history, the chronotope of the reproduction of "comfort women" can be divided into four phases: 1) the fictional representations of "comfort women" before the 1990s 2) documentaries in the late 1990s as the work of testimony and history writing, 3) melodramatic transformation in the feature films in the 2000s, and 4) the diffusion of media and categories. The purpose of this article is to focus on the first phase and the third phase in which the issue of 'comfort women' is represented in the category of popular fiction films. While the "comfort women" representations before 1990 were strictly adhering to the framework of commercial movies and pursued the sexual exploitation of "comfort women" history, the recent films since the 2000s are experimenting with various attempts in the style of popular imagination. Especially, the emergence of 'comfort women' feature films in the 2000s, such as Spirit's Homecoming, I Can Speak, and Herstory, raise various questions as to whether we are "properly" aware of issues and how to remember and present the "cultural memory" of comfort women. Also, focusing on the cinematic representation strategies of the 2000s "comfort women", this article discusses the popular politics of melodrama, the representation of victims and violence, and the feature of 'comfort women' as meta-memory. As a melodramatic imagination and meta-memory for the historical trauma, the "comfort women" drama shows the historical, political, and aesthetic gateways to which the "comfort women" problem must pass. As we have seen in recent fiction films, the issue of "comfort women" goes beyond transnational relations between Korea and Japan; it demands a postcolonial task to dismantle the old colonial structure and explores a transnational project in which women's movements and human rights movements are linked internationally.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.16
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• pp.225-256
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• 2013

As the great catastrophe in the modern and contemporary history of China, the Cultural Revolution(CR) is an object, which must have sutured the past of darkness. At the same time it is a continuous event and also a scar of memory. In other words, for history is "a dialog between the past and the reality"(E.H.Kar), CR intervenes in the reality and, on the contrary, the reality recomposes CR. From this point of view, CR is a historical event, which so far is not ended, and it is an object of memory, which is still being composed at the moment. As the saying: "Poetry is greater than history"(Aristoteles), artistic works more intensively reflect the past. The works related to CR can not be an exception. And CR is endlessly exposed in the contemporary Chinese fine arts and the works of the contemporary Chinese artists-Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and others are proved to be those who suffer from the trauma of CR and who feel no liberty from CR. For example, CR probably is a symbol showing the "identity" of the Chinese artists. And the diversity of the symbol is the experience and pattern of the dialog between artistic works and CR (i.e., intervention in reality). For example, with withering of grand-narrative and appearance of micro-narrative, the CR critical works of Guan Zhoudao were the root of the Chinese fine arts in the late 70s and early 80s. In the contemporary cultural situation, the literary works about CR actively analyzed the history (CR) from the personal point of views and explained in the way of monolog and micro-method led the 1990s' works. In this way they tried to recompose the history "randomly", like looking at reality with their own eyes. In this process, CR is continuously exposing new features and the real facts are appearing before us as unfamiliar phenomena. This is a way of combination and "reappearance" of contemporary arts and reality. In conclusion, the purpose of this article is to make it possible to see a section of the contemporary Chinese fine arts through the study of the icon image of CR and to analyze the way of fine arts recomposing the history and the intervening in the reality. In this sense, the author has entitled the article "Icon and Form". It means how to reshape (the present) the typically formed icon of the CR (the past).

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.26 no.2
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• pp.87-122
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• 2020

This study explores the method of representation of traumatic history in 2D horror game Detention developed by Taiwan game production company Red Candle through an analysis of its method of storytelling. Unlike conventional public media, video/digital games are based on interactivity, in which game players engage in the narratives. Thus, the relationship between players and the history in the game world may also change. This research investigates how the players build their way of remembering and recognizing the past in a different relationship. Detention, which was well received, not only in Taiwan but also around the world upon its launch in 2017, is set in a middle school during the martial law era in Taiwan in the 1960s. In the game, the main character encounters her lost memories in the process of following clues and game rules, and finally realizes she is implicated in the 1960s' event. Detention was cinematized after the success of the game. The film achieved enormous popularity both in terms of box office success and criticism. In this paper, the strategy of the game's storytelling is introduced in comparison to the film's approach in the representation of historical events. In particular, the paper explores elements such as the interactivity of the game medium, narrative fragmentation, quests, hints and cues, and the horror genre, that asks users to understand history beyond the game world differently from the point of view of other media. Though this study, it can be considered that the digital game is a medium exploring history in a serious manner. In particular, Detention invokes the matter of game-mnemonics as well as cine-mnemonics. Compared to plentiful research in cine-mnemonics, game-mnemonics has not been extensively studied to date. Therefore, through the analysis of Detention, this paper explores the relationship between digital games, history and memory.

• Journal of Popular Narrative
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• v.25 no.4
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• pp.159-190
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• 2019

This paper aims to examine to the political unconsciousness of social movies that have caused social repercussions in the 2010s, and to study the social imagination of Korean films at that time. Korean Movies such as (2013), <1987>(2017) and (2017) reflect the ethos of civil society based on common sense and justice. The epic structure was the same as that of ordinary citizens, who move toward a public space (court, square) after awakening their political correctness. More than anything else, the fact that such films were based on "a historical fact" could have been a strategy to avoid censorship in the era of the blacklist. In these social films, courts and squares have become places for democracy. The conservative government of the time was tired of anti-government resistance and the politics of the square. Thus, films from directors and producers blacklisted were difficult to produce. That's why the court in the movie during this period could become a symbolic proxy for the "legitimate" reenactment of the politics of the square, which was subject to censorship and avoidance by the regime of the time. Meanwhile, the square has gradually become the main venue for political films that advocate "historic true stories." The square of the 1980s, which appeared in the movies, will be connected to the Gwanghwamun candlelight square that audiences experienced in 2017. Furthermore, it was able to reach the concept of an abstract square as an "open space for democracy." At the foundation of these works is a psychological framework that equates the trauma of the failed democratic movement of the 1980s to the trauma of the failed progressive movement of the 2010s. Through this study, we were able to see that social political films in the 2010s were quite successful, emphasizing "political correctness" and constitutional common sense. But they also had limitations as "de-political popular films" that failed to show imagination beyond the censorship of the blacklist era.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.14
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• pp.125-158
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• 2012

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, there was the three-year period of United States Army Military Government in Korea. In 1948, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, and Republic of Korea were established in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula. The Republic of Korea is now a modern state set in the southern part of the Korean. We usually refer to Koreans as people who belong to the Republic of Korea. Can we say that is true exactly? Why make of this an obsolete question? The period from 1945 when Korea was emancipated from Japanese colonial rule to 1948 when the Republic of Korea was established has not been a focus of modern Korean history. This three years remains empty in Korean history and makes the concept of 'Korean' we usually consider ambiguous, and prompts careful attention to the silence of 'some Koreans' forced to live against their will in the blurred boundaries between nation and people. This dissertation regards 'Koreans' who came to live in the border of nations, especially 'Korean-Japanese third generation women artists'who are marginalized both Japan and Korea. It questions the category of 'Korean women's art' that has so far been considered, based on the concept of territory, and presents a new perspective for viewing 'Korean women's art'. Almost no study on Korean-Japanese women's art has been conducted, based on research on Korean diaspora, and no systematic historical records exist. Even data-collection is limited due to the political situation of South and North in confrontation. Representation of the Mother Country on the Artworks by First and Second-Generation Korean-Japanese(Zainich) Women Artists after Liberation since 1945 was published in 2011 is the only dissertation in which Korean-Japanese women artists, and early artistic activities. That research is based on press releases and interviews obtained through Japan. This thesis concentrates on the world of Korean-Japanese third generation women artists such as Kim Jung-sook, Kim Ae-soon, and Han Sung-nam, permanent residents in Japan who still have Korean nationality. The three Korean-Japanese third generation women artists whose art world is reviewed in this thesis would like to reveal their voices as minorities in Japan and Korea, resisting power and the universal concepts of nation, people and identity. Questioning the general notions of 'Korean women' and 'Korean women's art'considered within the Korean Peninsula, they explore their identity as Korean women outside the Korean territory from a post-territorial perspective and have a new understanding of the minority's diversity and difference through their eyes as marginal women living outside the mainstream of Korean and Japanese society. This is associated with recent post-colonial critical viewpoints reconsidering myths of universalism and transcendental aesthetic measures. In the 1980s and 1990s art museums and galleries in New York tried a critical shift in aesthetic discourse on contemporary art history, analyzed how power relationships among such elements as gender, sexuality, race, nationalism. Ghost of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s by Lisa Bloom is an obvious presentation about the post-colonial discourse. Lisa Bloom rethinks the diversity of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender each artist and critic has, she began a new discussion on artists who were anti-establishment artists alienated by mainstream society. As migration rapidly increased through globalism lead by the United States the aspects of diaspora experience emerges as critical issues in interpreting contemporary culture. As a new concept of art with hybrid cultural backgrounds exists, each artist's cultural identity and specificity should be viewed and interpreted in a sociopolitical context. A criticism started considering the distinct characteristics of each individual's historical experience and cultural identity, and paying attention to experience of the third world artist, especially women artists, confronting the power of modernist discourses from a perspective of the white male subject. Considering recent international contemporary art, the Korean-Japanese third generation women artists who clarify their cultural identity as minority living in the border between Korea and Japan may present a new direction for contemporary Korean art. Their art world derives from their diaspora experience on colonial trauma historically. Their works made us to see that it is also associated with postcolonial critical perspective in the recent contemporary art stream. And it reminds us of rethinking the diversity of the minority living outside mainstream society. Thus, this should be considered as one of the features in the context of Korean women's art.