Abstract

This article examines the shifts in the conceptualization of pungsok and the disparate implications of pungsokhwa during Korea’s modernization process. The term pungsok has often been translated into “customs” and pungsokhwa into “the painting of everyday life and customs of ordinary people.” By contrast, this article argues that the concept of pungsok is neither monolithic nor neutral, and thus its representation pungsokhwa continued to be reused and reframed to accommodate the heterogeneous desires of different historical conditions. Pungsokhwa came to be grown as a genre classification out of the specific condition in the late eighteenth century and evolved into the industry terminology as an art commodity. Remarkably, the advancement of modernity in Korea was deeply in conjunction with the relationship with western powers and Imperial Japan. This article illuminates that the multiplicities of pungsok and pungsokhwa came to function as an ideological mechanism for the imperialistic and nationalist discourses in the complex international encounters from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s. This study foregrounds the procedure that the nomenclature pungsok and pungsokhwa gained currency in line with the intelligible political, social, and economic forces and imperatives, along with increasing transnational interaction as a consequence of imperialistic interventionism and globally disseminated modernization process. This study also provides the platform to reconsider the relationship between modernity and tradition. By way of the mutability of pungsok and pungsokhwa, this article draws attention to the fact that the tradition prevails in visual representation as an ongoing presence, not as a confrontational existence in modern art practices.