The Liu Kuo-sung Reader

Selected Texts on and by the Artist, 1950s–Present

edited by Eugene Y. Wang · Valerie C. Doran · Alan Y. Yeung

Cornerstone of the Nation is the first historical account of the complex alliance of military and civilian forces that catapulted South Korea’s conjoined militarization and industrialization under Park Chung Hee (1961–1979). Kwon reveals how Park’s secret program to build an independent defense industry spurred a total mobilization of business, science, labor, and citizenry, all of which converged in military-civilian forces that propelled an unprecedented model of modernization in Korea.

Drawing on largely untapped declassified materials from Korea and personal interviews with contemporaneous participants in the nascent defense industry, as well as declassified US documents and other external sources, Kwon weaves together oral histories and documentary evidence in an empirically rich narrative that details how militarization shaped the nation’s rapid economic, technological, political, and social transformation. Cornerstone of the Nation makes the case that South Korea’s arms development under Park may be the most durable and yet least acknowledged factor behind the country’s rise to economic prominence in the late twentieth century. Through an analysis that simultaneously engages some of the most contested issues in Korean historiography, development literature, contemporary politics, and military affairs, this book traces Korea’s distinct pathway to becoming a global economic force.

Peter Banseok Kwon is Assistant Professor of Korean Studies at the University of Albany, State University of New York.

February · cloth · 400 pages

6 x 9 · $65.00 • £56.95

History

9780674293823

7 illus., 8 tables

Harvard East Asian Monographs

Harvard University Asia Center november · paper · 288 pages 8 1/2 X 11 · $50.00 • £43.95

In a career spanning seven decades, Liu Kuo-sung (Liu Guosong, born 1932 in China) has singlehandedly reinvented the millennium-old tradition of ink painting. His abstract landscapes and cosmographs subvert established conventions of brushwork and composition to embrace expansive visions of the cosmos. As both practitioner and theorist, Liu serves as a model for generations of artists. He has received the highest artistic awards in the Sinosphere and is the only non-Western painter elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yet his contributions have remained poorly integrated into the global history of modern and contemporary art.

The Liu Kuo-sung Reader, the first anthology in English devoted to the painter, redresses this oversight. The texts gathered here— many of them previously untranslated or unpublished—trace Liu’s journey from his childhood of poverty and migration across war-torn China, to his rise as the firebrand leader of an avantgarde movement in Cold War–era Taiwan and Hong Kong, to his celebrated return to mainland China as a modernist forerunner and educator during the economic liberalization of the 1980s and 1990s. Richly illustrated and arranged in dynamic dialogue, these texts illuminate issues that Liu has confronted throughout his life and that resonate today: the meaning of tradition, the politics of artmaking, and the dynamics of creative freedom.

Eugene Y. Wang is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University and the Founding Director of Harvard FAS CAMLab.

Valerie C. Doran is an independent scholar and curator in the field of Chinese modern and contemporary art, and past associate editor of Orientations magazine. She is currently a Fellow at Harvard FAS CAMLab.

Alan C. Yeung is currently Curatorial Fellow at CAMLab, Harvard University. He was previously Associate Curator at Ink Studio, Beijing.

Art

9781736086407

280 photos

Harvard FAS CAMLAB