Doctoral Student in Asian Languages and Cultures
About
Kaeun Park looks at histories of modern and contemporary art and visual culture, with a focus on photography in Korea. She received her Master’s degree in Art History from Binghamton University, and her thesis was titled “Reconsidering Everyday Life Photography: Saenghwalchuŭi Sajin in South Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s”. Her thesis analyzes the discourse of “everyday life photography” and the photographic practice it sustained in South Korea during the 1950s and 1960s. She examines the cultural, artistic, and political conditions under which the conception of “everyday life photography” emerged and was promoted, analyzing the ways in which “everyday life” photographs related to Koreans’ experience of “everyday life (saenghwal)” and also opened a space for social critique.
In her Ph.D. dissertation, she examines how South Korea’s territory in the 1970s was newly imagined, visualized, and materialized in the discursive space of “landscape” and how photography played a central role in long-term state projects, namely the National Comprehensive Physical Development Plan (1972-81). Besides working on photography, she is interested in a wide range of topics related to Korean art such as architecture and commercial design during the colonial period, 1970s performance art, and ecological/environmental art practices in the late 1980s, among other things.
Publication
“Reconsidering Everyday Life Photography: Saenghwalchuŭi Sajin in South Korea in the 1950s and the 1960s,” Trans Asia Photography vol. 10, no. 1 (2019)
Languages (other than English)
