Namhee Lee News Today

LOS ANGELES -- A Volvo Trucks commercial featuring actor Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits, stretching his legs between two reversing trucks with Enya’s “Only Time” playing in the background, is shown to a classroom full of nearly 100 undergraduates at UCLA. Professor Ju Hui Judy Han asks the students what are the first words that come to their minds as they watch the clip. Some say “masc...

Once the capital of the five-hundred-year Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1897) and the Taehan Empire (1897–1910), the city of Seoul posed unique challenges to urban reform and modernization under Japanese colonial rule in the early twentieth century, constrained by the labyrinthian built environment of the old Korean capital. Colonial authorities attempted to employ a strategy of erasure—monumental Japanese architecture was, for instance, superimposed upon existing palace structures—to articulate...