Rewriting the City

Abstract

Department stores, which are in the business of selling more than just things but also selling culture, are spaces of ideological engagement. In this sense, it is an important space to examine the ways in which the social, cultural, and psychological implications of modernity may be revealed. Many colonial period Korean writers found the department store as a real object and an imagined space from which they constructed narratives of colonial modernity and its implications for cities, especially Seoul and colonial Korea. While they have admirably narrated the department store as a place of uneven modernity, Yi Sang, the pen name of Kim Haekyŏng (1910–1937), offers the most tantalizing interpretation and critique of colonial modern conditions inflected through his knowledge of architecture and as a practicing architectural technician. I explore the figure of the department store as it is presented in Yi Sang’s Japanese-language texts published in the journal Chosen to Kenchiku (Korea and Architecture) as well as his most well-known Korean short story “Wings.” I demonstrate that Yi Sang’s encounters with the Mitsukoshi department store expose the contradictions between the global modernist architecture movement and the modernizing architecture projects of Japanese colonial authorities and architects. This awareness is performed through Yi’s poetic confrontation of the Mitsukoshi’s monumental structure as an extension of colonial power’s fantasy and assertion of control.