For many, today’s image of South Korea is shaped by a triumphalist narrative that celebrates its economic prosperity, resilient democracy, and world-renowned culture industry. Against this backdrop, historical accounts of early South Korea tend to focus on its shortcomings, depicting a society reeling from national division, fratricidal war, and stalled reconstruction. In Aesthetics of Abandonment, however, Jae Won Edward Chung reveals these years as a significant period of dynamic creativity and generative disagreement, as Korean artists and writers navigated the complex legacies of Japanese colonialism and the increasing pressures of U.S. neocolonialism. While numerous scholars have examined the impact of the Korean War on the nation’s society and culture throughout the Cold War decades, few have offered a sustained examination of its immediate effects. This volume provides a comprehensive view of the 1950s cultural field across reportage, cinema, literature, photography, and art, providing both a rich contextualist analysis of how the works from this period were conditioned by historical forces and a rigorous yet theoretically lively reading that shows how such works can carry aesthetic and political force that exceed the narrow ideological constraints of anticommunism and postcolonial nationalism.

How did the ruins of the Russian Legation come to embody layers of contested historical time? How does the experience of watching an outdoor screening of a Hollywood film in the Korean countryside expose the limits of Americanization? What did the earliest expression of literary posthumanism in Korea look like? How does analyzing the painting and photography together help us move beyond the entrenched categories of local color, abstract art, pictorialism, realism, and modernism? What does the crisis of the family articulated across the post-armistice popular press, fiction, film, and art reveal about the humanist alibi of Edward Steichen’s monumental exhibition The Family of Man and the violence of sovereignty? Aesthetics of Abandonment explores such questions and more by forging a concept of abandonment as an ontology: a process of transformation by which the abandoned can become something more than abject through new vitalizing forms of embodiment across media.

• Jae Won Edward Chung, Author

  Jae Won Edward Chung is assistant professor of Korean literature in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.