• Journal of the Korea Furniture Society
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.91-101
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• 2001

This study explored the trend of postwar period American furniture design and analyzes the contexts of the trend. To be more specific, this study categorized the types of the styles or "looks" of furniture which were dominant in postwar period America: the machine look ; the handicraft look ; the biomorphic look. The background and the context for each look were traced back and analyzed both diachronically and synchronically. Based on the analysis, this study provided two conclusions. First, postwar period American furniture design is in many ways indebted to the World War II, because the war itself and postwar economic revival produced high demands for furniture, which consequently produced a variety of looks of furniture. Second, the furniture design in this period is attributed to commercialism and consumer-oriented design policy formulated in the mid 1920′s when American design established its own identity separating from European avant-gardism.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.1-25
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• 2017

This essay investigates how the industrialization of the US food system was closely linked to US foreign policy, gender issues, and the rise of consumerism in the Cold War era. While many scholars in American studies and women's studies over the past few decades have paid increasing attention to the interrelationship of gender politics and the media industry in shaping US domesticity, they have seldom studied how and why reading gender issues in relation to environmental discourse in general and the industrialized US food system in particular can help us better understand the complex relationship between environmental and social problems that we are facing today, both collectively and individually. In this context, this essay shows how US national politics have not only created the ideal of American domesticity that promotes traditional gender roles and consumerism at the expense of gender equality, but also negatively affected women's somatic and mental health writ large. By closely examining the cultural implications of Nixon's and Khrushchev's Kitchen Debate in the 1950s alongside newspapers, photographs, advertisements, and Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963), I argue that reading Cold War consumer culture in relation to the US food system leads readers to see the invisible links between gender politics and today's environmental and social problems in comparative and global contexts.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.1-31
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• 2018

It is needless to say that America's indiscriminate artillery and chemical attacks have worsened the conditions of Vietnam's tropical rain forests, causing war-torn combat troops and civilians to suffer more from the participation and aftermath of the Vietnam war. Around two decades after the Vietnam War, American and Vietnamese writers dealing with the destruction of the human and nature of the Vietnam War and the following traumatic experience commonly report the horrors of inhumane warfare, but some differences among them appear in the reception of the ecocide consciousness. For American writers who had been involuntarily involved or who had stayed in the back area as interpreters and counter-intelligence force, the Vietnam War was often a kind of exotic "addicted adventure" which their American hometown could not provide. But apart from overcoming postwar post-traumatic stress by writing of healing which was shared with American war writers, Vietnamese writers have been able to overcome the scars of war as the communal memorial, which Jonathan Shay emphasized as the necessary comforting ritual by community members showing the sign of honor and care. On the other hand, American war writers were on the side of "separate peace," as Jeong stressed, and the Vietnam War to them was more racist like the case of "body count." Nevertheless, it is fortunate that the hideous experience of war could turn them all into the creativity pool, just as the 5,000 square mile of bomb creators have been used as the postwar fish ponds.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.16
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• pp.107-137
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• 2013

This paper examines a number of Korean artists-Whanki Kim, Po Kim, Byungki Kim, Lim Choong-Sup, Min Byung-Ok and etc-working in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on their motivations to head for the U.S. and their life and activity in the newly-emerged city of international art. The thesis was conceived based upon the fact that New York has been one of the major venues for Korean artists in which to live, study, travel and stay after the Korean War. Moreover, the United States, since 1945, has had a tremendous influence upon Korea politically, socially, economically, and, above all, culturally. This study is divided into three major sections. The first one attends to the reasons that these artists moved out of Korea while including in this discussion, the long-standing yearning of the Korean intelligentsia to experience more modernized cultures, and American postwar cultural policies that stimulated them to envision life beyond their national parameters, in a country heavily entrenched in Cold War ideology. The second part examines these artists' pursuit of abstraction in New York where it was already losing its avant-garde status as opposed to the style's cutting edge cache in Korea. While their turn to abstraction was outdated from New York's critical perspective, it was seen to be de rigueur for Koreans that had developed through phases from Art Informel in the 1960s to Dansaekhwa (monochromatic paintings) in the 1970s. The third part focuses on the artists' struggle while caught between a dualistic framework such as Korea/U.S, East/West, center/margin, traditional/modern, and abstraction/figuration. Despite such dichotomic frames, they identified abstract art as the epitome of pure, absolute art, which revealed their beliefs inherited from western modernism during the colonial period before 1910-1945. In fact, their reality as immigrants in America put them in a diasporic space where they oscillated between the fixed, essentialist Korean identity and the floating, transforming identity as international artists in New York or Korean-American artists. Thus their abstract and semi-abstract art reflect the in-between identity from the diasporic space while demonstrating their yearning for a land of political freedom, intellectual fulfillment and the continuity of modern art's legacy imposed upon them over the course of Korea's tumultuous history in the twentieth century and making the artists as precursor of transnational, transcultural art of the global age in the twenty-first century.