The Korean War was one of the most significant events in modern Korean history. Despite the April 2018 Inter–Korean Summit and many other negotiations between the two Koreas, no peace treaty has ever been agreed upon, so the war is technically ongoing. The paradox is that the “hot war” of the 1950s has already been consigned to a history that the younger generation of South Koreans in their twenties and thirties have no great interest in or knowledge of. The pains, scars, and traumas inflicted upon the generations immediately following the war have been ignored and forgotten by South Korean society, while national acts of remembrance have largely been in the service of the ruling administrations over the subsequent five decades.
Dong-Yeon Koh's The Korean War and Postmemory Generation: Contemporary Korean Arts and Films is a timely publication, as questions of “commemoration, apology and historical responsibility”Footnote 1 have become increasingly salient both politically and academically. Reticence about exploring the history and cultural memory of the Korean War is receding, and over the past three decades, there has been a greater readiness for artists to review this painful aspect of the country's experience. This is true for cinema, too: particularly in the twenty-first century, a large number of films relating to the Korean War have been produced.
Koh's monograph looks beyond the early postwar literature and review of individual films that has been the main focus of study. Instead, Koh looks at how Korean media arts and culture have had a broader cultural impact in reviving historical awareness of the Korean War and collective remembering within South Korea. Koh makes a valuable contribution to the current discourses of memory studies, Korean and East Asian studies, particularly history and arts. She also identifies inconsistencies in official policy regarding remembrance and forgetting.
In the introduction, Koh asks her key question: “How has shifting historical context shaped the production of art and culture in post war South Korean society? In particular, what has happened to the younger generation of Koreans whose understanding of the Korean War has been consistently restricted and mediated by secondary sources?” (p. 1)
In the following five chapters, she critically investigates artistic output in various media. She begins chapter 1 with photographs created in the last two decades by Heungsoon Im, Onejoon Chae, and Suyeon Yun—the younger generation of artists in South Korea who were mostly born in the 1960s onward and are referred to as the “postmemory generation.”
Koh reviews the government's policies and efforts to remember, forget, and (re)visit the Korean War and the civilian massacres such as the Jeju April 3 Uprising with Im Heung-soon's film Jeju Prayer (2012) and the photography book Jeju Notes (2011), while juxtaposing the countermemories of installation pieces, in particular, with installations of sounds and smells of the war by postmemory-generation artists (in chapters 2, 4, and 5).
The various forms and theories of memory, such as affective memory and other countermemories, are discussed in Koh's book. The most important theoretical approach is inspired by Marianne Hirsch's investigation of the postmemory generation, which was not faced with the historically tragic Holocaust but relied on their artistic production and imagination based on the secondary sources of the war.
Hirsch's notion of the “dynamic nature of historical representation” that “postmemory's connection to the past” is forged by the younger generation's “investment, projection, and creation”Footnote 2 (p. 6) is this book's leitmotif. Koh makes extensive use of the theoretical framework of “postmemory generation” developed by Hirsch, which reviews the experience of the generations who came after those who actually experienced the event and were relatively free from the trauma. On the one hand, this is a useful approach for understanding the Korean War's meaning to recent generations. But, on the other hand, it raises the question of whether Koh might have been better off developing her own theoretical framework. Does a theory developed from European experiences transfer easily to an East Asian or Korean one?
The naming conventions used in this book appear to be outdated—“Chung-Hee Park and Doo-hwan Chun administrations” or “Ilsung Kim”—as their English transliterations (i.e., Park Chung-Hee, Chun Doo-hwan, and Kim Ilsung) are more commonly used. In addition, readers who are looking for comprehensive reviews of the Korean War films will be disappointed, as only two autobiographical documentary films dealing with family tragedies—My Father's Emails (Jaehee Hong, 2012, released 2014) and Dear Pyongyang (Yonghi Yang, 2005, released 2006)—are discussed in this book. Since four other chapters are devoted to Korean arts, it raises a question about the appropriateness of the book's title.
Koh focuses not just on the representation of the history of traumatic experiences, but how the South Korean post memory generation artists, using fragmentary materials, “repositioned and restructured their relationship with repressed historical tragedies and victims” (p. 210), often with open endings and without closures and definitive answers.
Koh suggests that her monograph is intended to be a starting point for important debates on how the arts should represent and interpret the Korean War. I can start by disagreeing with her critical comments on Park Chankyung's postmemory generation's attitude to the Korean War (p. 213). In my opinion, Park's media aesthetics on shamanism can also be useful to engage with the forgotten past, places, and people of the Korean War as commemoration and apology.
Overall, this book is enriching, enjoyable, and timely. In a global surge of Korean popular culture, this book raises questions regarding remembering and commemorating. It highlights the issues around the communication of historical knowledge between generations, and the challenges of hearing all the narratives arising from the Korean War, including the victims, the heroes alongside the post memory generation.
