Fragments and Borders: (re)constructing South Korean identity through patchwork

This work explores the (re)construction of the Republic of Korea (ROK, 1948-present) through Korean women's patchwork culture, recording and recovering neglected stories of women's domestic labour. Written histories of the patchwork handicraft, chogakbo, began to proliferate during the 1970s, coinciding with South Korean institutional reforms of cultural heritage policy. Reiterating qualities of frugal tenacity and constructive minimalism, such narratives trace the cloths in a linear trajectory to the Choson dynasty (1392-1910), where they were and are said to act as the representational voices of forgotten and unknown women. Furthermore, the linear histories served to reinforce notions of authentic 'Koreanness' during a period that sought to differentiate national identity from the Communist regime of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK, North Korea).

This project troubles linearity and authenticity by deploying feminist, postcolonial and decolonial methods that explore polyphonic perspectives of Korean women's patchwork culture. Using a framework that positions postcolonialism within localised and transnational South Korean histories, necessarily considering the period of Japanese colonialism (1910-1945) and US imperial presence (1945-present), iterations of traditional forms, modern adaptations, diasporic interpretations and corporeal manifestations reveal the multiplicity and complexity of Korean womanhood beyond definitions of authentic and static (South) Korean nationhood, with specific histories of neo-Confucian and non-Eurocentric modes of reading female agency. Using patchwork in institutional archives, I explore the very processes of establishing perceptions of chogakbo, both nationally and internationally. Material objects enrich and challenge written histories through analyses of material technologies, forms and compositions. I regard souvenir objects to examine how repetition, reiteration, industrialization and mass consumption and production work to reinforce establishing versions of national identity. Worn patchwork fashions aim to explore the boundaries between object and bodies, and the utility and function of patchwork wrapping. Finally, these questions and themes will be investigated through patchwork skins, wherein the proliferation of ROK's cosmetic surgery culture will be examined as corporeal manifestations of patchwork. Using oral histories, this work aims to foreground questions of womanhood, beauty and ornamentalism through perspectives that challenge reductive perceptions of agency, capital identities and colonial histories.

Patchwork is the amalgam of different pieces, reflecting an accumulative temporality through mending, piecing and stitching. This research uses the adaptive, growing potential of patchwork form to radically reconsider prescribed notions of Korean womanhood, and offer an original lens to addressing urgent global questions regarding colonialism, Cold War legacy and women's histories. I aim to shed new light on the material processes underpinning colonial subjectivities and transnational identities, using stories collected from objects, alongside perspectives of makers, designers, curators and archivists and oral histories to build dialogical and relational histories.