Kim Brandt, “The Beauty of Sorrow”
-“Yanagi’s attachment to Korean art, and his gently stubborn acknowledgement of a separate and honorable Korean cultural identity, were key demonstrations of his unwavering opposition to the imperialist militarism of the wartime Japanese state.” (9).
- Yanagi along with other Japanese public intellectuals during this period utilized Western concepts, such as “the Orient,” but they attempted to illuminate the value of Asian culture through enthusiasm for “Eastern” forms of artwork. This functioned as a form of resistance to Western hegemony. (10).
-Yanagi’s appreciation for Korean ceramics was dissimilar to that of middle class intellectuals, whose tastes in pieces were defined by contemporary constructed notions of modern, cosmopolitan styles. The signifiers of modern design were based upon Western artistic forms and styles. - Therefore, traditional ceramics used in a tea ceremony symbolized the value of tradition, whereas tea sets which bore non-Asian aesthetic features represented the hegemony of the West. (13-4).
-The practice of the tea ceremony, a symbol of Asian tradition, underwent a number of changes during the early part of the twentieth century as a reflection of changing notions of modernity among middle class Japanese. – “Colonial Korea offered special opportunities to counter the hegemony…” of the West. (14- 5).
-“In successfully revising the canon of Japanese art ceramics, intellectuals and artists like Yanagi and Asakawa were able to wrest some of the leadership in the prestigious field of art ceramics from bourgeois economic elites, who were bidding for dominance from their new power position within the tea establishment.” (20). – Small investments of money in Chosŏn-period ceramics later yielded great financial returns as well as much cultural capital for early collectors. (20).
-The colonial process that allowed Korean art to become more appreciated in the Japanese imperial center also resulted in the preeminent extraction of art from the Korean peninsula. (20). Therefore, was this extraction of artistic manifestations of a “traditional” Asia a process which affected the manner in which Japanese identity was constructed? In other words, did colonization of Korea lead to a reevaluation of what actually constituted Japaense-ness? This would then seem to be a kind of Japanese modernity derived from the coexistence of a modernity derived from the Western model as well as a revival of what was understood as Asian tradition. Indeed, the fabrication and circumscription of the signifiers of earlier Asian culture were essential to the formation of a modern tradition.
-Following his death, Yanagi was recognized as an individual who resisted the imperialist Japanese state by championing Korean material culture. (23-6). – Art connoisseurship as a form of cultural activism.
-Yanagi argued that Korean art should gain global appreciation, yet he also wished for it to be taxonomized as “oriental art.” (27). – Indicated a complex relationship between colonizer and colonized, and it also indicated an acceptance of the European construction of “Eastern” and “Western” regions of the world. But was this done in order to champion the notion of Asian culture rather than accept the Western construction of the East as the Other? In other words, was this taxonomization embraces as a means of emphasizing the unique virtues of Korean and other Asian forms of art? I would argue that this was the case, yet Yanagi did not imply a homogenized view of the East. (29-31).
-“Yanagi suggested that by introducing Japanese to the magnificence of Orient art, he might remind them that the West was not the exclusive province of value…” (29).
-The concept of sorrow or melancholy as a key element of Korean culture and artistic productions was accepted by many Japanese collectors. (32).
-“Orientalist strategies of appreciating Korean objects also assigned great creative power and authority to Japanese consciousness, however scarred or impure.” (35-6). – The Japanese were claiming cultural authority in Asia akin to that of the West. Therefore, the Japanese were attempting to assert hegemony over Korea in a similar fashion to other imperialist nations.
Peter Osborne, "Modernism as Translation"
-“The question of the status of the terms of a transnational cultural theory opens into the question of the status of the philosophical concepts in two ways: 1) as a question about the cultural-historical constitution and hence limits to universality of all thought and 2) as a question about the productive transcendence of thinking beyond both the conditions of its own possibility and the range of its currently empirically justifiable applications.” (54).
-“The concept of modernism is paradigmatic in this regard, as a Western cultural form subsequently generalized at a global level in a hotly disputed process suspended between the imperialism of an obliteration of social difference and the productivity of alternative, conter-hegemonic interpretations and conceptions.” (54).
-“…modernism is in certain respects directly akin to a traditional philosophical concept in designating the cultural affirmation of a particular phenomenological structure of time.” (54).
-“…the concept of modernism maintains a certain legitimate universality as a generic concept of a transnational cultural theory.” (54).
-Translation always involves “imperfect equivalences” of concepts. Therefore, meaning cannot ever be truly translated without some distortion between forms. (55). –Doubt can be applied to translated concepts since some meaning is lost or discounted when they are removed from their original context. Therefore, original forms are often presumed as being pure forms that are inherently different than any translation. But this view often serves to other the original form.
-“There is a dialectic of universal and particular- conceptual determination and empirical particularity- internal to all theoretical concepts as a consequence of their history. In this respect, the idea of translation at work in cultural theory…is less a metaphor than the metonymic register of the interpretive dimension of the process of social intercourse and exchange in general.” (57).
-“…modernism is the cultural condition of possibility of a particular, distinctively future-oriented series of forms of experience of history as temporal form.” (57).
-“…modernism in its most general sense is associated with a particular configuration of temporalizations of history or historizations of temporality.” (58).
-“The translatability of ‘modernism’- the power of modernism as a medium of transculturation, one might say,- indicates the extent to which the concept can be unified, ultimately, only at the level of pure temporal form.” (59).
-“the ‘national’ character of specific modernisms is often national in a dialectical sense only, as determinate negotiations of received national-cultural forms: internally oppositional cosmopolitan projections, only later put to homogenizing nationalistic use.” (60).
-“how the problematic of the modern, concretely applied, can help replace the problematic of ‘national cultures’, with a broader conception of the temporal-cultural dimensions of social relations – social relations through which ‘the nation’ is itself produced as a cultural-ideological effect of various forms of state power.” (61).
Introduction to translation of Yi T'aejun's Eastern Sentiments & Selections from Yi T'aejun's Eastern Sentiments
-Eastern sentiments serves as an exploration of Korea’s past and present during the period of Japanese colonialism. (1). –These essays illuminate how during the colonial period “partiality and fragmentation became modes for understanding historical experience.” (2).
- The anecdotal essay experienced a revival during a period in which there was much debate about literary representations of Japanese occupation. (4). – The novel was of great importance in many colonial contexts because it allowed diverse representations of colonial modernity. (4).
-Essays were popular because of their “fundamentally ironic way of connecting the past to the present and the contradictory space it created for the difficult elaboration of a bourgeois subject in colonial society.” (6).
-“Yi’s choice was to eschew the empirical and chronological narrative of linear history, which was itself a fairly new object of modern knowledge in Korea at the time.” (7).
-“This dilemma of how to relate to the past thus helps construct a division of social space in the present, whereby the realm of the everyday life of the artist is, through its association with the past, supposedly separated from the commercial sphere.” (10).
-“For Yi, being modern meant to have lived several lives and deaths as trend followed upon trend and the constant race to build a new order plunged people into instability.” (12).
-All of Yi’s essays perceive Korea through a Confucian analytical framework. (16).
-“In looking at Yi’s traditionalist practices, we cannot help but notice a certain synchronicity with traditionalisms in Japan, and this raises the question of his location in relation to imperialist discourse.” (19).
“Yi’s intellectual trajectory resonates profoundly with the theory of the evolution of the colonial intellectual proposed by Frantz Fanon. According to Fannon, the native intellectual first proves that he has ‘assimilated the culture of the occupying power’ before deciding ‘to remember what he is’ by immersing himself in the culture of his people.” (21).
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