JoongAng Ilbo | From Selfies to World Travel, Hanbok Goes Anywhere
JoongAng Ilbo's feature on the hanbok boom spreading through social media, fashion, personal style, and travel introduced Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung's 2016 solo exhibition 'Naesoong Amusement Park,' which drew 67,402 visitors over 27 days. The article gave prominent coverage, in its 'Hanbok is Fashion' section, to Kim's self-portrait-like 'Naesoong' series, which boldly depicts a woman in semi-transparent hanbok riding a scooter or eating tteokbokki near Gangnam Station.
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Two, Hanbok is Fashion
Hanbok is no longer confined to being a tradition that must be preserved. It has been reinterpreted as art, as fashion, as culture, entering our everyday lives.
Last year, world-renowned fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel fashion show, held at Dongdaemun Design Plaza, filled its runway with clothes inspired by hanbok, drawing attention to hanbok as a new fashion form. Last year, idol Suzy and 2NE1's CL shot hanbok pictorials, becoming a topic of conversation not just in Korea but abroad as well.
Korean painter Kim Hyun Jung's (28) exhibition 'Naesoong Amusement Park,' held in Insa-dong last April, drew 67,402 visitors over its 27-day run. Considering that a general exhibition drawing even 10,000 visitors is considered a success, this is a remarkable box-office result.
Her paintings feature a young woman dressed in slightly see-through hanbok. She rides a delivery scooter with her hanbok skirt flying with bold movement, and eats tteokbokki at Exit 11 of Gangnam Station. It is a kind of self-portrait projecting artist Kim, who has loved hanbok since childhood and still wears it three days a week in her daily life.
[Photo: Kim Hyun Jung's Korean painting 'Naesoong: A Fantasy of Tteokbokki' (2016).]
Her exhibitions, which she has held since 2010, draw many visitors dressed in hanbok. Some send her photos of themselves in hanbok, posed exactly like the figures in her paintings, taken at the very locations depicted. Artist Kim said, "I also live my life wearing hanbok, and the people who come to see my paintings also feel free to wear hanbok. Visitors say that since they're coming to see paintings of hanbok, it feels more natural to wear hanbok themselves."
Today's younger generation embraces hanbok as fashion. At Minjok Leadership Academy, where hanbok is the school uniform, it has recently become trendy for students to inherit uniforms from upperclassmen. Graduate Lee Se-eun (19) said, "Everyone likes the hanbok uniform, but since the colors differ by grade, students want to inherit uniforms from seniors to build a 'collection' of different colors." Vice principal Choi Kwan-young of the school said, "A few years ago we tried to switch to Western-style uniforms, but the students opposed it, so we kept the hanbok uniform as is."