Aesthetics of Abandonment: Literary and Visual Culture of Early South Korea

South Korea today is often seen through a triumphalist lens of its economic prosperity, democratic resilience, and cultural clout. Against this backdrop, accounts of the nation’s early history 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 legacies of Japanese colonialism and the pressures of U.S. neocolonialism. While scholars have long traced the Korean War’s effects across the Cold War decades, few have examined its immediate aftermath in depth. This book offers an expansive view of the 1950s cultural field across reportage, cinema, literature, photography, and art. It balances a rich description of how historical conditions shaped these works with innovative methods for reading them as sources of unexpected aesthetic and political power that belong to no single moment.

Chung draws on posthumanist theory, media studies, and postcolonial critique to argue that the familiar frameworks for analyzing this period, such as anticommunist humanism or developmental uplift, cannot fully capture what these works were reckoning with. He shows artists straining against the boundaries of their own media and unlocking forms of vitality that do not fit tidy narratives of recovery or progress. He recasts an era too often dismissed as a decade of ruin by forging the concept of abandonment as ontology: a process of transformation and regeneration by which the abandoned can become something more than abject. The result is a book that speaks to anyone curious about how creativity survives, and even thrives, at the edges of catastrophe.

• 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.