The first comprehensive survey to explore the rich and complex history of contemporary Korean artStarting with the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula in 1953, this one-of-a-kind book spotlights the artistic movements and collectives that have flourished and evolved throughout Korean culture over the past seven decades - from the 1950s avant-garde through to the feminist scene in the 1970s, the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in the 1990s, the lesser known North Korean art scene, and all the artists who have emerged to secure a place in the international art world.

Starving ghosts, anguished farmers, and grieving mothers. Floating heads, gaunt bodies, and masses of bodily fluids. Such are the visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects that characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by figures like migrant workers, tenant farmers, and everyday families proliferated. Yet at the time such representations were criticized as excessively grotesque and insufficiently political by leftist intellectuals, and they have subsequently been overlooked by scholars in favor of socialist realism and its dynamic proletarian heroes.The Sensational Proletarian, by contrast, focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the lower-class body. Kimberly Chung traces the emergence of "the sensational proletarian" as a central figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean efforts not only to grapple with modernity, imperialism, and capitalism, but to do so using the new political ideology and imaginary of Marxism. This book brings to light the centrality of sensational cultures in the development of class politics in Korea, an integral relationship that continues throughout modern and contemporary Korean cultural history.

The first comprehensive survey to explore the rich and complex history of contemporary Korean artStarting with the armistice that divided the Korean Peninsula in 1953, this one-of-a-kind book spotlights the artistic movements and collectives that have flourished and evolved throughout Korean culture over the past seven decades - from the 1950s avant-garde through to the feminist scene in the 1970s, the birth of the Gwangju Biennale in the 1990s, the lesser known North Korean art scene, and all the artists who have emerged to secure a place in the international art world.

Starving ghosts, anguished farmers, and grieving mothers. Floating heads, gaunt bodies, and masses of bodily fluids. Such are the visceral sensations, exaggerated affects, and suffering subjects that characterized leftist Korean cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s. In popular fiction, print cartoons, reportage, and other emergent forms of mass culture, scenes detailing the spectacular bodily harms endured by figures like migrant workers, tenant farmers, and everyday families proliferated. Yet at the time such representations were criticized as excessively grotesque and insufficiently political by leftist intellectuals, and they have subsequently been overlooked by scholars in favor of socialist realism and its dynamic proletarian heroes.The Sensational Proletarian, by contrast, focuses on these textual and visual representations to tell the story of how new affects and everyday experiences introduced by imperial capitalism and colonial modernity were mediated through the lower-class body. Kimberly Chung traces the emergence of "the sensational proletarian" as a central figure of colonial Korean print culture and reads its varied manifestations as emblematic of Korean efforts not only to grapple with modernity, imperialism, and capitalism, but to do so using the new political ideology and imaginary of Marxism. This book brings to light the centrality of sensational cultures in the development of class politics in Korea, an integral relationship that continues throughout modern and contemporary Korean cultural history.