Focusing on the contemporary Korean art historical and cultural context, this paper raises issues at the autonomic bias under the construction of the discipline of Art History. Art History is taught based on the reproduced, or digitalized images. The institutionalization of the history of art was possible only after the invention of photography. Because an artwork could be reduced to an reproduced image, it could be collected, organized, and arranged as a 'style.' Yet the 'subject' behind the autonomous eye that organizes the images and makes it as a history of style, is typically western and male, in the sense that it is, in fact, phallogocentric agent. This subject as 'a pure eye' produces knowledge that subjugate works of art, the object of the Art History. As the discipline of art history is constituted on the basis of the structure of "identification / misidentification," we can say that it is quite an "imaginary" discipline in the sense that it is fixed on the image(s) of art works.
However, as I investigate the so-called "post-colonial" nationalist cultural product, especially the paintings on the subject of Korean modern history, I find out even stronger gender bias that colonizes the image of women. The discourse of nationalism which gained hegemony in the context of the post-World Cup 2002, still allegorizes women as the victims of imperial power, and in the mean time it even enjoys the male fantasy on the display of brutally fragmented female body. It is not so much a "pure eye" that govern the autonomous art history, but "political eyes" that claim the liberation, yet it is dominantly phallic toward victimized women. As I look through the gender glass, I can argue that the idea of "history" in this context has been possible only through the phallic fantasy toward the imaginary women.
An artwork cannot be reduced to a surface structure or to a real material object. It is a result of certain performative behavior of human being. The history of art cannot be constructed by autonomous art will nor by certain principles. It is ongoing process of interpretation and gendered perspective should be recognized as a variable that influence that interpretation. If we fix ourselves on the image itself, we cannot cross the border between the imaginary and the symbolic, nor can we arrive at the other side of the looking glass. In that case, the art historical looking glass always reflects its own image, which it claims as autonomous, yet always vertical and diachronic. The postcolonial situation allocates more prudent and cautious readings on the phenomenon of the return of the repressed.