Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia: The Modernization of Dresses and Cultural Cross-dressing

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This book project assembles innovative research on the themes of dress reform ca. 1850s-1940s in East Asia. Professor Pyun’s lecture explores Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages of dress, body, and gender identity in the larger contexts of trade, power, modernization, and socio-political discourses. Essays in this volume illuminate, with an unprecedented scope and from a transcultural perspective, the intersections between art history, fashion history, history of consumption, political and economic history, and cultural studies.

In the process of modernization East Asian clothing underwent conspicuous changes. The Meiji government in Japan ordered a westernized revision of attires for military and government officials. Cultural leaders also responded with their own interpretations of modern identity through hybrid fashion. In late Qing and early Republican China, changing dress styles that incorporated imported tailoring and fabrics reflected the transition from the millennia-old dynastic system to modern nationhood. King Gojong of late Joseon Korea, under Japanese influence, deemed the adoption of new attires essential to modernization and decreed a series of dress reforms from the 1880s on.  But the forced removal of traditional marks of status and manhood such as broad sleeves and the topknot met with vehement opposition from ministers to the ordinary people. In the twentieth century, the mass media started to play a strong role in disseminating new designs that closely followed socio-political trends.

The modernization of dress in East Asia also coincided with the diaspora of Asian immigrants to Europe and Americas in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century. The lecture will present some examples of cultural cross-dressing by Asians and non-Asians during the Gilded Ages in the US.

Author Bio

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Kyunghee Pyun is an Assistant Professor in the History of Art Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. Her research is published in the following papers: “Asian Art in the Eyes of American Collectors: Antimodernism and Exotic Desire”; “A Journey through the Silk Road in a Cosmopolitan Classroom”; and “Collectors of Asian Crafts in North America: Passion for Porcelain.”

Her forthcoming book, Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia focuses on modernized dress in the early 20th-century Asia and will be published by the Palgrave Macmillan in 2018. As a liaison for Fashion Institute of Technology, she also worked with the National Museum of American Indian for a symposium, Native/ American Fashion: Inspiration, Appropriation, and Cultural Identity in conjunction with Native Fashion Now held at the National Museum of American Indian, Smithsonian Institutes and at two other museums in the US in 2016-2017.

She co-organized an international conference entitled Documenting Korean Costume: Primary Sources and New Interpretations funded by the Academy of Korean Studies and hosted at the Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, Long Island on 24-25 March 2017 (Organizers: Jinyoung Jin and Kyunghee Pyun). This is developed into a book project and being reviewed by several publishers.

She was a Leon Levy fellow in the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection and works on a book project entitled Discerning Languages for Exotic: Collecting Asian Art. She serves as a member in the Diversity Council at Fashion Institute of Technology and created an interactive website to teach diverse techniques of Asian art called the Bamboo Canvas funded by the State University of New York, Innovative Instructional Technology Grant in 2016-2017 (tier 1 for up to $10,000) and 2017-2018 (tier 3 for up to $60,000).

She received her B.A. in archaeology and art history from Seoul National University and M.A. & Ph.D. in history of art from New York University.