Christin Yu

My work explores the (re)construction of Republic of Korea (1948 – present day) through Korean patchwork cultures. By examining Korean patchwork as different forms: jogakbo (a patchwork version of the Korean wrapping cloth, bojagi), patchwork fashions and finally, cosmetic surgery cultures as a metaphor for patchwork wrapping as skin, I explore ROK’s post-war reconstruction and national rebuilding, through material and corporeal forms that complicate the category of the Korean woman. By questioning the essentialising gender narratives of South Korean nationalism, I ask what Korean patchwork wrapping cultures reveal about the role of exterior artifice in the cultural imaginary, gender construction and utility. How does patchwork construct Korean womanhood through the decorative and the ornamental? How does Korean patchwork contribute to discourses of the ornament? What kind of agency exists through ornamentation? What does patchwork reveal about women’s labour, womanhood and the role of women in relation to ROK, as the nation-state?

Deploying feminist and decolonial strategies that emphasise reflexivity and polyvocality, my methods include primary object and archive record analysis that practice conventional methods of design history affected by my foregrounded subjectivity. Voices from designers, artists and curators provide expert perspectives contributing to the multiplicity of understanding Korean patchwork, while oral histories from women participating as consumers of Korean cosmetic surgery industry will form complicated, entangled, non-linear approaches to constructing Korean patchwork histories. Finally, I weave through my own personal and familial histories as autoethnographic research as a reproach to academic traditions, which have historically excluded voices of my likeness.

Situating ROK in local histories and ideological frameworks that connect to global geopolitical systems, I regard Korean womanhood through Japanese occupation (1910-1945) as colonial modernity, Cold War ideologies, postcolonial and decolonial readings of US neo-imperial presence (1945-presenting), and histories of gender framed by neo-Confucianism of the Joseon period (1392-1895).