Yongkeun Chun

Th thesis explores advertising and commercial art in Korea under Japanese colonial rule. It investigates how styles and techniques of press advertisements and posters changed from the 1920s to the 1945. It also examines how the changes in the perceived modern print media reflect the social, political, cultural, and economic conditions of the colony. By shedding light onto an understudied period, the thesis seeks to reconstruct a historical continuity between contemporary graphic design practices and past visual culture, and suggests a more inclusive perception of Korean design history.

The thesis adopts transnational design history as a methodology. The approach is design historical in that it closely examines and analyses visual artefacts, and traces their production and dissemination within broader contexts of commerce, industry, media, and education. Advertising in colonial Korea was a complicated sphere where socio-economic conditions, colonial assimilation policies, national identities, and the profit motive of both Korean and Japanese companies were entangled. The thesis employs a transnational perspective to tackle these complexities, investigating a broad range of Korean and Japanese sources. Images are analysed as border-crossing entities, and their social and cultural significance is articulated on a more global contextual background, incorporating exchanges across Korea and Japan.

The five chapters of the thesis discuss: the promotion of advertising design as a Korean nationalist project under the impact of ‘cultural rule’ assimilation policies, the ‘advance’ and localised advertisements of Japanese products in the Korean market, the rise of modern consumerism and self-consciously modernist design styles, commercial art education and the professionalisation of the commercial artist, and commercial art as wartime propaganda in a colonial context.

By discussing these topics in relation to what I call ‘displayed modernity’, the thesis contributes to the discourse of colonial modernity and the history of Korea more generally. It also suggests transnational design history as an analytical framework for understanding cultural transmission within asymmetrical power relationships such as a colonial relationship, which may be relevant for historians of other regions and other periods.