Book chapter
Rewriting the City: Yi Sang, Architecture, and the Figure of the Department Store
The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, pp.257-270
Routledge, 1
2022
DOI: 10.4324/9780429328411-26
Abstract
Department stores, which are in the business of selling more than just things but also selling culture, are spaces of ideological engagement. In this sense, it is an important space to examine the ways in which the social, cultural, and psychological implications of modernity may be revealed. Many colonial period Korean writers found the department store as a real object and an imagined space from which they constructed narratives of colonial modernity and its implications for cities, especially Seoul and colonial Korea. While they have admirably narrated the department store as a place of uneven modernity, Yi Sang, the pen name of Kim Haekyŏng (1910–1937), offers the most tantalizing interpretation and critique of colonial modern conditions inflected through his knowledge of architecture and as a practicing architectural technician. I explore the figure of the department store as it is presented in Yi Sang’s Japanese-language texts published in the journal Chosen to Kenchiku (Korea and Architecture) as well as his most well-known Korean short story “Wings.” I demonstrate that Yi Sang’s encounters with the Mitsukoshi department store expose the contradictions between the global modernist architecture movement and the modernizing architecture projects of Japanese colonial authorities and architects. This awareness is performed through Yi’s poetic confrontation of the Mitsukoshi’s monumental structure as an extension of colonial power’s fantasy and assertion of control.
Architecture and literature became crucial sites from which intense debates surrounding modernization and modernity took place during the period that Japan ruled Korea. By the early 1930s, central Seoul’s landscape was punctuated by European-style architecture, but Mitsukoshi Department Store captured the interest of many and came to symbolize the beguiling modernity and cosmopolitanism at work. Therefore, the architectural archetype of the department store presents the dialectical reality of colonialism and modernity or colonial modernity. The internal structure that organizes the department store through displays of novelties and exchange is extended into the domestic and private spaces of everyday life in “Wings.” Through the poem and the short story, Yi Sang critiques the way in which human relationships increasingly become associated with modes of capitalist exchange, just as false values were assigned to flood of new imported products according to their novelty and putative modernity.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Rewriting the City: Yi Sang, Architecture, and the Figure of the Department Store
- Creators
- Jina E. Kim
- Contributors
- Heekyoung Cho (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- The Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, pp.257-270
- Edition
- 1
- Publisher
- Routledge
- DOI
- 10.4324/9780429328411-26
- Number of pages
- 14
- Alternative title
- Rewriting the City
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 2022
- Academic Unit
- Communication Sciences and Disorders
- Record Identifier
- 9984721227702771
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