In Search of the Real/Ideal Beauty

Abstract In this paper I investigate why Mei Lanfang (1894–1961), the male performer of female characters in Peking opera, and images of modern Chinese beauties were featured in the prolific career of the neo-traditional Korean painter Kim Eunho (1892–1979) both during the colonial period in the 1920s and 1930s and in the postwar period in the 1960s and 1970s. I examine how a male Chinese actor renowned for his performances was recuperated as a subject of ideal beauty and the ways in which those two questions became intertwined in Kim's late painting career. I argue that in order to reclaim his early role in shaping the genre of modern “paintings of beautiful women” (K. miindo), Kim strategically returned to the trope of Chinese beauties to rehabilitate his legacy as a modern “East Asian-style painting” (K. tongyanghwa) painter, but also to assert his own subjectivity as an artist as he grappled with his history with and longing for empire. The reappropriation of Mei Lanfang in postwar Korea both nostalgically recalled the Orientalized and pan-East Asian ideal of beauty from the colonial period and also made claim on the ramifications of Korea's postcolonial positioning. In Kim's portraits, Mei's performance of femininity thus transcended cultural and political boundaries as it harkened to a shared but more remote past between Korea, Japan, and China.