• Cartoon and Animation Studies
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• s.39
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• pp.413-450
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• 2015

Although cartoons have been recognized for their great potential and value, they have failed to bloom in Korea. This is because wrong perception and irregular distribution of cartoons have been repeated for the last several years. Presently, however, cartoons are escaping from chronic problems they have had for long and welcoming splendid chances now. From the mid- and late-1990's, there have been large-scale events having cartoons as their theme, and social recognition on cartoons is becoming more and more positive. Their contents are diversified, readers are increased, and they are escaping from stereotypes through harmony with other media. Lately, either large or small exhibitions for cartoons are being planned, and Korean cartoons are going overseas and producing exhibitions there. Particularly, visitors' appreciative eye is getting keener, and they begin to see them not as a genre underestimated as low culture like in the past but as a kind of art on which independent research is being actively conducted. One of the biggest factors that have allowed cartoons to be positioned as visual art is the form of exhibitions that combine them with other genres artistically. Especially the cartoon exhibitions being held these days are aggressively introducing various elements of the cartoon genre through the medium of exhibitions not just as a mere tool of seeing to help understand cartoon writers or works. The genre of cartoons is now regarded as an active subject that can reflect its own unique essence in this rapidly changing cultural environment and extend the range of it itself. The latest cartoon exhibitions are characterized by trans-genre and complex aspects in terms of their direction or organization according to the contents, space, or theme. This trend of cartoon exhibitions implies that they are subdividing, analyzing, and planning various factors not in a horizontal way that was centered around image as in the past. It means that cartoon exhibitions are evolving as a form of mobilizing, combining, and reproducing various methods. Although a number of cartoon exhibitions are being held with a variety of themes, there is still lack of research on cartoon exhibitions concerning their forms and contents. Therefore, this researcher sees cartoon exhibitions as a factor that allows cartoons to escape from negative recognition and examines various cartoon exhibitions, from Seoul International Cartoon Animation Festival to the ones that are recently held, to figure out the meaning of Korean cartoon exhibitions. Furthermore, this researcher will find out the factors of planning and popularity in international exhibitions or personal cartoon exhibitions being presently held and figure out new directions and potentials for Korean cartoon exhibitions based on that. To meet the needs of visitors whose expectations have become even higher, it is needed to try not just previous methods but experimental and original planning as well constantly. To realize that, it is necessary to keep providing a field of opportunity where cartoon works, cartoon writers, and visitors can communicate as in an exhibition. It is expected that this study will trigger research on cartoon exhibitions to be performed multilaterally and produce new discourse on cartoon exhibitions afterwards.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.5
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• pp.43-80
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• 2007

PASKYULA was formed in September, 1923 through the union of artists involved in two art groups: Kim Ki-Jin, Kim Bok-Jin, Yeon Hak-Nyeon who had previously participated in the ToWolHoi, and Park Young-Hi, Lee Sang-Hwa, An Seok-Ju, former members of the BaeckJo. After its founding, the PASKYULA artists had been searching for the social function of art to reform the harsh reality of Minjung and the nation with criticism toward society as well as art world. Their art theory for MinJung could grow relatively ease in relation to changing social and political conditions in the early 1920s. In August, 1925, PASKYULA organized the Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio with the YeomGunSa, and laid the groundwork for Proletariat art movement which was regularized in the late 1920s. From PASKYULA up to the early state of KAPF, the theory of art advocated by Kim Bok-Jin and An Seok-Ju could be summarized as "art for MinJung". At that time, widely ranging discourses on MinJung, however, was spawned in art theory, because many intellectuals-including artists and writers-begun to pay more attention to MinJung, who emerged as one of the social forces after the Samil Independent Movement. Sometimes, MinJung was construed as the target of enlightenment from a negative viewpoint. On the other hand, several intellectuals under the influence of individualism asserted that the discussion itself on MinJung exerted an evil influence on art. In contrast of these cases, the PASKYULA artists including Kim Bok-Jin, An Seok-Ju perceived that MinJung had the potential to change society, and regarded them as "a creator of genuine civilization and art". In the PASKYULA artist's writings, the concept of MinJung was often overlapped with the meaning of the Choson nation suffering under colony. Although their concept of MinJung was transformed gradually into the proletariat as they were under the strong influence of socialism, it did not change that they grasped the realities of the whole Choson Peninsula through the proletarian consciousness. In the early state of PASKYULA, the methodology for social function of art was presented in a twofold manner. First of all, Kim Bok-Jin emphasized on the necessity of education to improve MinJung's way of life through art, and it was embodied by the organization of ToWol Art Workshop and public lecture. Also, he championed "the popularization of art", which was one of methods to distribute art to MinJung. According to the PASKYULA artists, art should be not art for art' sake but art for MinJung. That was why they advocated the convergence of art and MinJung's life. Especially Kim Bok-Jin affirmed a link between art and industry because he considered industry the field inextricably linked with MinJung's life. In this context, his idea could be read as the generalization and equalization within the framework of possession. Kim Bok-Jin thought that the social ramifications of capitalism deprived MinJung of their right to enjoy art, and emphasized the artist' social role to return the right to them. That is, the even distribution of art was mainly discussed than the contents of art in the half of 1920s. By 1925, the contents of art itself became an issue in the PASKYULA art theory, and it was based in realism. Kim Bok-Jin and An Seok-Ju insisted that art should be reflection of real life. At that time, realism acquired the representation of MinJung and the nation's realities not realistic style. In fact, the various Western art styles including Futurism, Constructivism, Cubism etc. were exploited in the PASKYULA's visual images. Western art, target of criticism on theory, was selectively adopted in the works which were produced by Kim Bok-Jin and An Seok-Ju. Kim Bok-Jin's MoonYeUnDong cover design was conceived of as the example in which Western art was adopted with it's ideology under the influence of MAVO, while Western art shown in An Seok-Ju's illustrations served as a decorative function in many cases. Especially, An Seok-Ju attempted the various styles of Western art simultaneously, which may be seen as representing that PASKYULA did not have a firm ideology for their style. Also, it can be read as showing his hasty zeal to overcome Western art rapidly. The wish to establish "art for MinJung" as soon as possible was accompanied with the will to jump over the all steps of Western art though it was superficial. This aspiration of PASKYULA was expressed through the mass media, which had the potential for communicating to MinJung. At this point, there was a significant disparity between PASKYULA and another art groups in the first half of 1920s. However, the PASKYULA's method on the basis of the mass media could not but have a certain limitation because of the medium's properties. Nevertheless, PASKYULA' attempts may be considered to be valuable in sense that they expended the boundaries of Korean modern art into the commercial art questioning the matter of the distribution for art.

• (The) Research of the performance art and culture
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• no.22
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• pp.123-155
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• 2011

This study aims to closely read Kim Jong-il's "About Stage Drama Arts" and disclose the new reality as evaluated by him. The study took the method by which to compare Kim Jong-il's theory on drama and North Korea's drama theory in the 1950s, and the findings of this study revealed that it was irrational to grant the adjective "new" to Kim Jong-il's drama theory. This is because tradition inheritance and newness cross each other. First, his tradition inheritance aspect was found in his playwriting method. In playwriting method, Kim Jong-il's argument about characters and language is an extension of the 1950s drama theory, and his theory on JongZa(seeds) is the transformation of the concept proposed in the 1950s. Also, the expression means of dramas and drama arts is dialogue, and his guideline to focus on the art of conversation rather than on acting is interpreted to be a reduced concept of drama arts, compared with the 1950s drama theory. On the other hand, his newness aspect can be clearly discovered in the materialization of stage. The fixed stage background, without dark change, shifts to another situation as it is, and this stage setting is clearly distinguished from the previous stage setting. The attempt is worth highly evaluating to allow the stage to reflect actors' emotional flows and let them act. Also, the attempt is distinctively distinguished from previous drama theories to allow the chorus' positive involvement in dramas so as to directly deliver characters' emotions to the audience and to trigger the audience' response as intended by creators. From the perspectives of drama evaluation, Kim Jong-il's theory and practice regarding stage and music is understood to maximize the audio-visual effects. Therefore, Kim Jeong-il's drama theory, as he argues, is not a completely new theory, but a transformational inheritance of existing drama theories, and a creation theory with focus on expansion of spectacles.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.24 no.3
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• pp.1-19
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• 2018

Large amount of data is now available for research and business sectors to extract knowledge from it. This data can be in the form of unstructured data such as audio, text, and image data and can be analyzed by deep learning methodology. Deep learning is now widely used for various estimation, classification, and prediction problems. Especially, fashion business adopts deep learning techniques for apparel recognition, apparel search and retrieval engine, and automatic product recommendation. The core model of these applications is the image classification using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). CNN is made up of neurons which learn parameters such as weights while inputs come through and reach outputs. CNN has layer structure which is best suited for image classification as it is comprised of convolutional layer for generating feature maps, pooling layer for reducing the dimensionality of feature maps, and fully-connected layer for classifying the extracted features. However, most of the classification models have been trained using online product image, which is taken under controlled situation such as apparel image itself or professional model wearing apparel. This image may not be an effective way to train the classification model considering the situation when one might want to classify street fashion image or walking image, which is taken in uncontrolled situation and involves people's movement and unexpected pose. Therefore, we propose to train the model with runway apparel image dataset which captures mobility. This will allow the classification model to be trained with far more variable data and enhance the adaptation with diverse query image. To achieve both convergence and generalization of the model, we apply Transfer Learning on our training network. As Transfer Learning in CNN is composed of pre-training and fine-tuning stages, we divide the training step into two. First, we pre-train our architecture with large-scale dataset, ImageNet dataset, which consists of 1.2 million images with 1000 categories including animals, plants, activities, materials, instrumentations, scenes, and foods. We use GoogLeNet for our main architecture as it has achieved great accuracy with efficiency in ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC). Second, we fine-tune the network with our own runway image dataset. For the runway image dataset, we could not find any previously and publicly made dataset, so we collect the dataset from Google Image Search attaining 2426 images of 32 major fashion brands including Anna Molinari, Balenciaga, Balmain, Brioni, Burberry, Celine, Chanel, Chloe, Christian Dior, Cividini, Dolce and Gabbana, Emilio Pucci, Ermenegildo, Fendi, Giuliana Teso, Gucci, Issey Miyake, Kenzo, Leonard, Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Marni, Max Mara, Missoni, Moschino, Ralph Lauren, Roberto Cavalli, Sonia Rykiel, Stella McCartney, Valentino, Versace, and Yve Saint Laurent. We perform 10-folded experiments to consider the random generation of training data, and our proposed model has achieved accuracy of 67.2% on final test. Our research suggests several advantages over previous related studies as to our best knowledge, there haven't been any previous studies which trained the network for apparel image classification based on runway image dataset. We suggest the idea of training model with image capturing all the possible postures, which is denoted as mobility, by using our own runway apparel image dataset. Moreover, by applying Transfer Learning and using checkpoint and parameters provided by Tensorflow Slim, we could save time spent on training the classification model as taking 6 minutes per experiment to train the classifier. This model can be used in many business applications where the query image can be runway image, product image, or street fashion image. To be specific, runway query image can be used for mobile application service during fashion week to facilitate brand search, street style query image can be classified during fashion editorial task to classify and label the brand or style, and website query image can be processed by e-commerce multi-complex service providing item information or recommending similar item.