The Family as Feeling: Bodies in Pain and the Re-embodiment of Edward Steichen’s Universal Everyday in Postwar South Korea

• In Event: East Asian Intervention in the Cold War: Breaking the Cultural Codes of Race, History, Genre and Gender

Abstract

This paper examines the ways in which modes of melodramatic affect served to destabilize various masculinist, moralist, ethno-nationalist and global humanist discourses in South Korea during the post-Korean War 1950s. I begin my account with the 1957 arrival in Seoul of Edward Steichen’s MOMA exhibit The Family of Man under sponsorship of the United States Information Service (USIS). The purpose of the exhibit, which consisted of 503 photographs from around the world, was to promote a universal sense of everydayness that dissolved away potentially divisive and conflict-inducing awareness of race, nation and class and to interpellate viewers as subjects of a global family. Soon after Steichen’s exhibit came to Kyŏngbok Palace, Tonga Ilbo began running a series of sympathetic human-interest profiles called “In'gan'gajok" (“The Human Family”) which included the trials and tribulations of orphans, widows, reformed criminals, sex workers, “international” couples, among other types of marginalized figures in postwar South Korean society. Far from being merely crude items of sensationalism and scandal, the profiles succeeded in evoking genuine sympathy and emotional investment from the newspaper readership. By privileging narrative over image, sentiment over legality, specificity over generality, the individual profiles positioned these marginalized figures front-and-center as subjects of public compassion and contemplation and as living emblems of trauma from the Korean War (1950-1953). The paper goes on to situate the portrayals of these marginalized figures within a broader formation of visuality linked to the discourse of everyday life (saenghwal) which was increasingly concerned with demarcating the boundary between zones of domesticity (linked to a wholesome blend of the modern and the traditional, consumption and frugality) and zones of foreignness (linked to corruption, sensorial excess, and decadence). In the final section, I show how the trope of the suffering female body, which recurred throughout the Tonga Ilbo series, was deployed to mobilize popular sentiment around the on-going crisis of South Korea’s sovereignty vis-à-vis the United States.

Author

• Jae Won Chung, Columbia University