Reading time: 4 minutes. Image source: Photo by Fausto García-Menéndez on Unsplash
First, on Friday September 29, from 09:00-10:15 Korean Time (Yes—very soon!). The University of San Francisco Center for Asia Pacific Studies welcomes Monica Liu (University of St. Thomas Minnesota) to share her latest research on why Chinese women seek Western men (details; registration):
China has undergone a striking transformation over the past four decades, growing from a poor country to the world’s second-largest economy. Despite its ascendance on the world stage, a significant number of women are still desperately seeking to marry Western men and immigrate abroad. To pursue their elusive dream, these women are turning to global internet dating agencies. From 2008 to 2019, Liu conducted research at three different transnational dating agencies in China, interviewing 61 Chinese female clients, the majority of whom were middle-aged and divorced. In this talk, she will address how emerging inequalities brought on by China’s transition from state socialism toward a global market economy shaped these women’s desires to leave their country. Ultimately, their desires to pursue marriage migration not only reveal their longing for a better life but also cast a revealing light on the pervasive gender, age, and class inequalities that continue to plague modern-day China.
Not at all about “yellow fever,” but actually more about why many of the Chinese women she interviewed concluded that Western men were neither rich nor sophisticated enough to marry, I’ve previously mentioned an interview of Monica Liu at New Books Network about her related book Seeking Western Men: Email-Order Brides Under China’s Global Rise (2022), and have no hesitations at all in thoroughly recommending it!
Next, on Wednesday October 11 at 07:30 Korean Time, IFA Contemporary Asia is presenting Happening Now: A Conversation with Kyung An and Sooran Choi, on the occasion of the exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s, on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum through January 7, 2024 (details; registration):
The air was fidgety in 1960s and 1970s South Korea. While the nation urgently anticipated new breakthroughs from the rapid socioeconomic transformations, Park Chung Hee’s dictatorial grip on the young republic tightened. In response, the new generation of young artists embarked on innovative and often provocative approaches to art making by experimenting with radical artistic concepts and a wide variety of mediums, including but not limited to video, installation, photography, and performance. Featuring approximately eighty works, Only the Young examines the works born out of both individual and collective experimentations, which were bounded not by a single aesthetic, but by their engagement with the dynamic social atmosphere of South Korea and the world beyond.
This discussion seeks to explore Experimental Korean art in the 60s and 70s as a unique moment in Korean history while situating it within the broader discourse of global art history, to question: How has the term “Experimental art” been forged and developed? How do we navigate between the artists’ local distinctiveness, yet avid engagement with concurrent global art movements? How does the exhibition engage with the current sociopolitical climate? The event will begin with a brief presentation and walkthrough by the exhibition curator, Kyung An, Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Guggenheim, followed by a conversation between her and Sooran Choi, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History in the School of the Arts at the University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.
Finally, on Friday October 13, from 19:00 to 20:30 Korean Time, Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni (Professor, Tel Aviv University) will discuss her paper Househusbands and Breadwinning Mothers: (Un)doing, Displaying and Challenging Gender in Japan, which is:
…a study of Japanese heterosexual couples self-defined as “role-reversed couples” (fūfu gyakuten). As the term suggests, these couples are surely not representative of the normative gender division between work and care in Japan. In fact, in the Western Anglo-American context, role-reversed parenting has been recently described as “statistically rare,” but of growing practical and theoretical significance.
The paper will present these couples against a shifting background in Japan, which includes the growing participation of women in the workforce and an ongoing vibrant public discourse about re-defining the role of the father in the family, largely encapsulated in the popular neologism ikumen.
Examining couples who respond, challenge, confront, perform and even negate what they perceive as their ascribed “roles,” the paper will pose the question of doing and undoing gender at its focus, the presentation will aim to challenge or problematize the allegedly too-narrow binary opposition of doing/undoing.
See here and here for further details and registration. (Image, above-right: Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni’s latest book.)
If you reside in South Korea, you can donate via wire transfer: Turnbull James Edward (Kookmin Bank/국민은행, 563401-01-214324)
The Grand Narrative 