Fashioning the National Body through Patchwork

A mystic curator, ‘manga kewpies’ and fantastical super-pigs are pieced together in this history of Korean patchwork. Commonly known in South Korea as jogakbo, the national histories of the form arise from a period of cultural preservation under government policy. The written record of the textile that is composed of fragments sutured together can be traced to the authorship and conservation work of Huh Dong Hwa (1926-2018), a private patron of the arts, whose collection of Korean textiles and embroideries were posthumously donated to the Seoul Museum of Craft Art. The sewn together forms now signify narratives of Korean womanhood labouring under the disciplining confines of neo-Confucian society during the Joseon period. As a result, the form has come to also symbolise the national body. This lecture explores how these ornamental objects and surfaces move through multiple significations, reinforcing and complicating the nationalist histories of Korean women.