Why We Invited Hwansun Joo to the K-GSP Forum
An editor’s note on art, memory, and the diasporic gaze
I first encountered Hwansun Joo’s work the way many good things arrive in life: by accident. Scrolling through the Facebook page of Lee Je-hyung, the LEGO photographer whose brick-built tributes to Korea’s independence fighters had been quietly informing my own research and writing on creative business education since 2020, I came across a portrait that stopped me cold.
It was a face without eyes.
[FIGURE 1: Hwansun Joo’s work, eyeless portrait of an independence activist]
A portrait by Hwansun Joo from his series on Korean independence activists. The artist’s deliberate rendering of figures without eyes invites the viewer to reckon with a history we have not fully seen. Image courtesy of the artist.
Original source: https://www.joongang.co.kr/article/25144301
The subject was an independence activist, one of the many who had given everything for a country they would not live to see free. The eyeless rendering was not stylization for its own sake. It was an act of mourning, and an act of insistence. Look at what we have failed to see. Look at who we have allowed ourselves to forget. I find it difficult, even now, to describe the weight of that first encounter. The portrait carried the grief and grit of these figures so directly that words felt inadequate.
Hwansun Joo’s Self-portrait
During a trip to Korea, I managed to acquire one of Joo’s renderings of the Declaration of Korean Independence. It has hung on the central wall of my room since I returned to the United States. On the harder days of life abroad, I look at it and remember not only the well-known patriots of the Shanghai Provisional Government, but the many who labored in the diaspora itself, often in obscurity, often in America, and who history has too easily set aside.
[FIGURE 2: Hwansun Joo, Declaration of Korean Independence (March 1, 1919)] Hwansun Joo’s rendering of the March 1st Declaration of Korean Independence. The work hangs in the editor’s home as a daily reminder of those who labored, often in obscurity, for a freedom they would not live to enjoy. Image courtesy of the artist. The Taegukgi bears the portraits of thirty of the thirty-three national representatives. The three who later defected to pro-Japanese collaboration were deliberately omitted. © Hwansun Joo, February 26, 2026
Original source: https://www.ohmynews.com/NWS_Web/View/img_pg.aspx?CNTN_CD=IE003586394
I did not expect, then, to learn that Joo himself would emigrate to the United States. His wife is American, and his work in Korea had drawn pressures that raised concerns for his family’s safety. I was relieved for him, and at the same time, I worried. Painting Korean independence fighters from unfamiliar soil is no small undertaking. I wanted, somehow, to help.
As the founding editors and I shaped the K-GSP Forum, a question kept surfacing in our conversations: how much of the Korean-American story do we ourselves not yet know? The history of foreign allies who fought alongside Koreans for independence, often more fiercely than Koreans themselves, struck us as one of those gaps.
I remembered then that Joo had been painting precisely these figures, the Americans and others whose names rarely appear in our textbooks.
The founding editors responded with immediate enthusiasm. Joo, generously, accepted our invitation.
In the issues to come, we will share his work, study it, discuss it, and let it sharpen our own questions about who we are as a Korean diaspora.
Art does not give us answers. It gives us a place to stand while we look more honestly at where we came from, and at what we owe the people, named and unnamed, who made our presence here possible.
We are grateful he has joined us.
Jeonghwan “Jerry” Choi, Editor-in-Coordination
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