What is it about?
This essay, written in Korean and English, analyzes the artworks of Lanhei Kim Park from the 1930s, which reveal her rich diasporic experiences in Manchuria, Japan, Korea, and the US. Known as the first Korean American woman artist, Lanhei Kim Park also belongs to the first generation of Korean women Western-style painters, alongside Na Hye-sŏk and Paik Nam Soon. This study aims to locate Kim within the global context of twentieth-century Korean art history and its intersection with the formation of American art and burgeoning American visual culture.
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Why is it important?
Despite its historical importance, Lanhei Kim Park and her art have not been discussed as a single academic subject. By bringing to light the plurality of diasporas such as the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean diasporas in the US that shaped Kim's art world and her Pan-Asian racial identity, my research reorients the Korea-centered or ethnocentric narratives of modern Korean art history.
Perspectives
My heartfelt thanks go to Mei-Lan Shaw, a daughter of Lanhei Kim Park, who shared her artworks with me; to Valerie J. Matsumoto at UCLA, who introduced Lanhei Kim Park to academia back in 2008; and to Kyunghee Pyun at FIT, who organized a panel for the Association for Asian American Studies, where I first developed my research on Lanhei Kim Park to present at the 2022 annual conference. I sincerely thank my fellow scholars, especially Soo Kyung Shin, Sunhee Jang, and the anonymous reviewers at the Association of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art History. Thanks to their kind invitation, I was able to present a more advanced version of my research at their spring conference in 2024. Without their support, I would not have been able to develop my research to this extent. Last but not least, I would like to thank the Seoul National University Museum for providing high-resolution images of Kim's prints.
Dr Victoria Young Ji Lee (이영지)
State University of New York Korea
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Lanhei Kim Park’s Transnational Identity and Multiple Diasporas : Artworks of the 1930s, Journal of Korean Modern & Contemporary Art History, July 2024, Association of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art History,
DOI: 10.46834/jkmcah.2024.7.47.59.
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