The Department of Art and Art History and UMW Galleries present the opening exhibition of Marginalized Histories of Korean Women Thursday, Oct. 24 from 5-7 p.m. in Ridderhof Martin Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Suzie Kim, Assistant Professor of Art History, and features the work of Youngjoo Cho, Dohee Kim, Sumita Kim, and Wonju Seo. The Marginalized History of Korean Women symposium will be held the following day, Oct. 25. Please see the UMW Marginalized Histories of Korean Women Exhibition and Symposium Flyer for more information.

Entwined within the recent political history of Korea—Japanese colonial period (1910–45), liberation from it, the division of the Korean peninsula into north and south at the end of World War II, the Korean War (1950–53), the New Village Movement by the former president Park Chung Hee in the 1970s, the Gwangju Uprising (1980), and the democratization of the south in the 1980s—are Korean women whose histories have been often ignored or marginalized for contradicting conventional values of marriage and family, and the messages of political regimes. It is possible to expose the silenced histories of women in a society with deep roots in traditional Confucian ethics if we follow Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s vision of decolonizing feminism and acknowledge the complexities that characterize the lives of women in countries other than the West. The focus of the exhibition will be on accounts of Korean women in daily life, in fluid historical conjunctions, and in latent opposition to collectivism.

This exhibition presents four contemporary Korean artists, Youngjoo Cho, Dohee Kim, Sumita Kim, and Wonju Seo. Their art epitomizes the intersection of personal and collective histories of Korean women, and illustrates contemporaneous conversations against militarism, patriarchy, and nationalism.