This study interprets how Korean-Japanese(Zainich) women artists represent their nostalgia for their mother country, from the perspective of ‘diaspora’, locating their activities in a historical context. This study is thus based on research into historical data on Korean-Japanese women artists’ activities and their experience of separation after liberation.
During Japanese occupation many Koreans moved to Japan to make money, or were engaged in forced labor as part of the Pacific War. About 1.5 million Koreans returned to Korea between 1945 and 1946. But approximately 600,000 Koreans remained in Japan because Korea’s political situation was unstable, and because Japan limited what a Korean could take home to a maximum of 1,000 yen and a small amount of luggage. Those that remained formed the first-generation Korean Japanese.
First generation Korean-Japanese women were half-refugees belonging to neither Korea nor Japan, and members of Korean-Japanese society dominated by a patriarchal Confucian system, which denied them education and finding their own identity. Korean women artists residing in Japan thus began expressing their experience of nation and people in their 50s, when their commitments as a mother were largely complete. They existed as an ethnic minority in Japanese society, and gender minority in Korean-Japanese society. Their work represents a longing for their motherland to which they could not return. Finding Yoon Gwang-ja, a Korean-Japanese female artist who worked on her ethnic identity has been the great reward of this study. Her constant work is amazing as a woman artist amid a Korean society’s conservative atmosphere and poor economy.
This study is historically meaningful in that it exposes Korean-Japanese women artists’ activities and their works through field research and material surveys in a historical context. It is an opportunity to consider ‘a people’s modernity’ by adding modern experiences of a Choseon people and Choseon women who could not return to the mother country. After Japanese colonial rule many Koreans had to stay outside the motherland. Their experience as diaspora in Japan, China, Russia, and central Asia has to be addressed as part of a modern Korean history beyond national boundaries. This should be considered one of distinctive characteristics of modern Korean history to which we did not pay much attention. It is hoped the orientation of study into the culture and art such Korean people experienced as diaspora will be presented and stimulated.