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Debbie Han’s Graces: Hybridity and Universality

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2019, (46), pp.191-212
  • DOI : 10.17057/kahoma.2019..46.008
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : November 5, 2019
  • Accepted : December 4, 2019
  • Published : December 31, 2019

Kyunghee Pyun 1

1State University of New York - Fashion Institute of Technology

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Debbie Han is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles. In this essay, I would like to elucidate the meaning of her photo series Graces , created in 2004, in the context of the hybridity and multiculturalism of contemporary art. In my reading, Han’s own life experience as a “1.5-generation” Korean-American growing up in Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s plays a crucial role when comparing her works with those of other immigrant women artists in the U.S. Her Graces series can be read as cultural icons of contemporary Asian societies’ predilection for the Western standard of beauty forcefully imposed on Asian women—and gradually accepted as desirable values internalized by women themselves. By contextualizing Han’s works in the tradition of Korean avantgarde art, concepts of manipulated beauty and conformity, and Korean feminist art, this paper posits that Han’s works tactfully–or sometimes humorously–comment on this pan-Asian phenomenon of corrected beauty, by means of surgical interventions on the one hand, and by the visual language of her rediscovered heritage of the homeland on the other.

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