A Place Is Beautiful Ugliness: The Commercial and Political Power Relationship of the Nineteenth Century Represented in Elizabeth Keith's Prints of Korea

by Haely Chang, University of Pennsylvania

English artist Elizabeth Keith made images of colonial Korea using Japanese printmaking techniques in the early twentieth century. Her woodblock prints reproduced her original paintings, but these prints often added elements that described Korea as peaceful and idyllic. This is a curious phenomenon in context: Keith first visited Korea in late March of 1919, when the dust from the violent upheavals of the March 1st Independence Movement was as yet unsettled. Despite the tumultuous political surroundings, Keith’s prints during this period depict the country as “the land of morning calm.”

My project reconsiders this phenomenon in Keith’s artwork through three facets. The first is how this process of adopting paintings for woodblock printing, or their production and (re)production, were not unilateral, but rather a result of negotiation between Keith, the publisher Watanabe Shōzaburō, and his Shin hanga (New Print) coterie making works for a Western market. The second is how Keith’s depictions became more focused on the exotic as they were transformed from painting to woodblock print; in my argument, these prints concentrated on female subjects, idyllic tranquility, and the mystical at the expense of historical accuracy. How these processes ultimately resulted in depicting Korea as a peaceful but static land, located outside of the streams of industrialization, comprises the third part of my analysis. Thus, I propose these prints offered an alternative romantic vision of Korea as outside the diachronic struggles of global capitalist modernity.