The debate over the authenticity of Empress Myeongseong(1851~1895)'s portrait, which has been dragging on without any clear conclusion since the 1990's, is not simply an issue of discovering what she originally looked like. Deeply seated beneath these debates are intense feelings of nationalism and a consciousness of having been victimized that call for a recovery of the last Empress of the Joseon Dynasty, whose assassination by Japan had previously been kept a dark secret. However, in order for the debate on its authenticity to become productive, the mechanism of how portrait photographs were made during the era when her image was made, namely the 1890's, needs to be examined. The issue at hand is not which photograph is real, but rather, why the problem of authenticity of the Empress's portrait has arisen, and how the model image of the Empress kept being reproduced regardless of whether it was truly her or not. This paper aims to investigate how the politics of Empress Myeongseong's representation was applied to the formation process of the modern period's gender order through the images of the Empress produced in the visual medium from the 1890's to the present.
Today, there is no photograph of Empress Myeongseong which has been authenticated. The reality of one photograph taken sometime between the mid 1890's and the Russo-Japanese War being reproduced through such things as lithographs, photograph printing, postcards, and photograph albums and then presented as the Empress, or a court lady of Joseon, reveals the commercialization of Joseon photographs and the male-centric representation custom. In particular, the royal photographs that focused on the king and the prince show that, although Empress Myeongseong had actively taken part in politics, she could not overcome the custom of portrait representation that focused on the tradition of the paternal lineage.
Empress Myeongseong was viewed as both a 'wicked woman who ultimately destroyed the country'by pushing herself into the public sphere called politics, and as the 'mother of the nation who symbolized her people's suffering.'These two incompatible images were formed by Japan and Joseon around the time of her assassination in 1895. The image of the Empress as a wicked woman who destroyed her country, drawn in the popular wood print Nishikie(錦繪) during the Meji period, was intimately connected to the gender-conscious public discourse of the Japan of the Meji period. On the other hand, during the time of the Japanese occupation and after Korea's liberation, the process of rebirth of her image from that of a dangerous woman to that of a symbol of her people's suffering, and subsequent transformation into a Korean Joan of Arc after the 1990's, is closely tied not only to a certain viewpoint of Japanese colonial history but also to a family discourse within Korea that has internalized a strong national ideology. In this, her image can be considered as an example or model of an image of women created through concealment, exclusion, and imagination in the process of modern gender order acquisition.