Designing City of Lights: Neon Crosses and Religiosity in South Korea
Speaker
Kyunghee Pyun
Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York
Wednesday, October 8, 5 pm
UCI HG 1010
Korean Christianity is known for its exuberant entrepreneurial spirit. In the postwar Republic of Korea, conservatives supported the anti-Communism of promoting revivalist and evangelical movements with goals of individual salvation. During the military dictatorship prioritizing economic development and urban migration, the Korean Protestant population miraculously increased: from less than three million in 1967 to more than ten million in 1987. Thus, Korea is known for megachurches like Yoido Full Gospel Church begun with five people in 1958 and now hosting half a million over a weekend. The number of churches, small and large, is also immense: Protestant churches and church-related institutions are 55,104 in 2017, compared to Buddhists at 13,215 and Catholics at 2,028. In major cities, churches are hyper-visible at night as their red neon crosses light up the skyline. Seoul Cross (2017) by Jo Sook-jin is a photography work showcasing a night view filled with churches: the red neon cross on the roof of a church. A red neon cross is like a commercial structure. In Korean Protestantism, technology and art became indispensable components of evangelical entrepreneurship. Church is a spiritual space rather than a space of consumption, desire, and pleasure. However, South Korean churches are commonly related to cafes or bars lit by neon signs. For some viewers, Korean neon signs are reminiscent of motels in Las Vegas, Googie Architecture Style Coffee Shops in Los Angeles, or theaters on Broadway in New York.
This paper argues how contemporary design has been employed to enhance religiosity in South Korean Protestant churches. It also contemplates on how materiality is negotiated and reconciled in the intersectionality of religiosity and technology. Megachurches are equipped with most advanced audio-visual technology and its products. How religiosity cultivates access to and benefits from technology and design would be a main question.
Kyunghee Pyun is professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, and intersectionality of art and design, technology, material culture, and industrial history. Her methodology of combining visual culture with history of technology is applied to books such as Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Teaching Business and Labor History to Art and Design Students (Routledge, 2024); and Teaching South and Southeast Asian Art: Multiethnicity, Cross-Racial Interaction, and Nationalism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). In regard to Korean studies, her scholarship is well summarized in Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation (Routledge, 2022) and Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives of Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2023). Recently she is moving to a new field of home and homeland studies with pioneering works such as Home and Homeland in Asian Diaspora: Transnational Reflections in Art, Literature, and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024) and Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora (Routledge, 2025).