The Photographs of Gwangju and Art for South Korean Democracy: Short-Circuiting Seoul, Reaching Afar to Germany, Japan, and the United States – Sohl Lee, Moderated by Alex Kitnick 

At the end of the global Cold War, South Korea’s new martial law-regime instituted in 1980 suppressed a citizen’s uprising in the city of Gwangju, resulting in the loss of an estimated 2,000 lives in the span of a week. While the access to the truth of the Gwangju Uprising (now widely known as “5.18”) was limited for most citizens of South Korea at the time, those living in Germany, Japan, and the US could view photographic images and documentary footage from Gwangju almost immediately after the uprising and its resultant massacre. The extent of the transnational pathway through which the images of Gwangju traveled is testament to the South Korean pro-democracy movement’s transnational nature, a significant aspect too often overlooked. The case study of these select photographic images and their exhibition venues call for a transnational history of photography, one that takes into account the sites of decolonial imaginations in solidarity albeit across multiple time-space demarcations. The speaker will also situate the talk within the larger landscape of art and visual culture for South Korean democracy, to which this case study contributes. 

Bio
Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History in the Department of Art at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her first book project, Reimagining Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement and the Birth of Contemporary Korean Art, traces the multifaceted process by which a particular decolonial aesthetics of politics emerged during South Korea’s democratization movement. Her current research tackles the global history of North Korean art and visual culture at the intersection of socialist international friendship, Third World solidarity, and decolonization projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.