James Turnbull

In the spirit of today’s title, let me direct you straight to the moment I first learned about the awesomeness of Uemura Shōen: Shoen successfully turned her passion to creating a life worth living through her paintings. In the Snow series) mentioned above by Wakakuwa: I include the full images, rather than the much more numerous, higher-quality close-ups of the women’s faces, because of what I read about the importance of the paintings’ empty spaces at Japan Objects: One of the most distinctive characteristics of Japanese painting when contrasted with its European counterpart is the use of empty space. And my frustration with locating the full images among all those close-ups was a foreshadowing of what I’d read about Shōen online later, which seemed to place her work very much on a continuum with other Bijinga (literally, “paintings of beautiful women”). “outsider” status as a woman enabled her to acquire a deeper understanding of her female models and employ different approaches from male artists—a quality which, the curators argue, elevates her paintings by portraying women not just as objects created through the lens of the male gaze, but as thinking, feeling subjects who invite us to admire their inner beauty as well as their outward attractiveness.

In the most recent survey of 155 major web portals, social media services, and online news sites conducted by the Korea Internet Advertising Foundation (KIAF) in 2016, 94.5 percent of the middle and high school students surveyed were found to have been exposed to sexualized ads. Also, the ensuing work-culture there could be certainly be described as male-dominated too: To assert that “sex sells”—the axiom that no one doubts in advertising and perhaps few do in society at large—was the usual way to deflect my criticisms of sexualized portrayals of women in much of Korean advertising, and women repeated that adage as eagerly as men. Given what we know about Korean ads, and that Korea has the biggest gender gap in the OECD, and comes 121st out of 193 countries in the ratio of female legislators to males, then there’s absolutely no reason to suppose that Korea’s toxic, patriarchal work culture hasn’t also infected the Korean ad industry. The issues raised in this post may even be well-recognized problems within the industry already too, but are intractable due to the influence of Korea’s patriarchal work culture as alluded to earlier, one big influence being the rigid hierarchy and visions of women and male-female relations learned before entering the industry from that vast socialization experience known as universal male conscription.

“In the 18th century, it was often assumed…that women were incapable of rational or abstract thought. Women, it was believed, were too susceptible to sensibility and too fragile to be able to think clearly

Seen in a samgyeopsal restaurant one day. It reads: Come in right away! Is gendered cheese a thing in Korea though? For dieting purposes certainly, but in main meals? With rice even? I don’t like the combination myself