Han Sang Kim (IVSA 2025 Conference Director, Vice President of IVSA)

 This essay represents the culmination of thoughts I have long intended to articulate, yet hesitated to express due to the political turbulence in both South Korea and the United States, which has directly and indirectly affected the IVSA 2025 conference. Now, with barely a day remaining before the conference opens, Korea's constitutional crisis has weathered its most perilous moment, while the United States remains in considerable turmoil. Nevertheless, feeling that I cannot postpone this reflection until after the conference, I offer these brief thoughts.

 As the first IVSA (International Visual Sociology Association) conference to be held in East Asia, the local committee needed to take careful consideration of how to reflect this significance in our basic design. The designer commissioned by the committee proved to be remarkably inquisitive, discovering archival records of late 19th-century Koreans who had encountered shipwrecked American sailors and documented their attempts to replicate the alphabet—the foreigners' script—as they understood it. Using these Korean interpretations of alphabetic forms as inspiration, the designer created the calligraphic foundation for our conference's visual identity. Upon first seeing this calligraphy, I must admit I was startled. The immediate thought arose: "Won't this be criticized as self-Orientalization?" Yet simultaneously, a counter-voice emerged within me: Is it valid to brand this as Asian self-Orientalization from an American perspective, without considering its context?

 Indeed, such criticism materialized. When we adopted this calligraphy as our official design and posted our first promotional materials on social media, cynical comments from U.S.-based scholars began to appear. A senior white female anthropologist specializing in Japanese studies declared the design inappropriate, and despite explanations of the 19th-century context, she persisted with harsh criticism, calling it "still cringy." A Korean-American scholar, educated at prestigious American universities, condemned it as "Oriental" with profanity-laced invective ("AF").

 I understand this context. As Professor Yu Li of Loyola Marymount University—a long-standing member of our association who will present at this conference—has expertly demonstrated in her research, there exists a deep history in the United States and other Western multicultural societies of the so-called "chop suey" font, which has stereotyped representations of the Asian and perpetuated racist imagery. While chop suey fonts were sometimes employed by Asian immigrants themselves as a means of marketing Asian cuisine or emphasizing Asian identity, they inevitably became complicit with specific prejudices that non-Asians held about Asia, serving as instruments that further marginalized and othered Asian immigrants and their cultures. Thus, within the context of the past five years of changes in American and Western discourse—where representations of Asians have become a highly active subject of cultural-political debate—chop suey fonts are undoubtedly problematic representational forms.

 However, I wish to question whether it is appropriate to engage solely in semiotic iconographic criticism without considering regional context and the context of visualization in the politics of representation. The script created by 19th-century Koreans who encountered and were interrogated by shipwrecked Americans, drawing alphabetic characters as they understood them—for whom was this intended? One thing we can state definitively is that the target audience was certainly not Americans. Since it was meant to introduce the Americans' language to Koreans, the intended audience was most likely Koreans themselves.

 What motivated the designer who discovered this historical narrative and created English lettering for an international event in Korea using this script? Was it for self-Orientalization? What we can definitively say is that this designer's interest lies in creating 'calligraphy' independently and not hesitating to excavate historical documents for this purpose. What is needed here, then, is dialogue. As long as the International Visual Sociology Association Conference is not being held in a Koreatown in the US, it would be problematic to immediately condemn it within the framework of American representational politics.

 Consider the Black Panther franchise films. This series holds great significance because it features a Black actor in a superhero role traditionally occupied by white males, with most of the cast being Black and much of the narrative set in Africa. However, watching this series also raises questions: In this film set in a fictional African kingdom, why does everyone focus on African-American narratives, speak American English, and serve American racial justice? As someone once observed, Wakanda is not Africa. Naturally, this is a Hollywood film financed by American capital and starring African Americans, but why is it understood as representing all Black people worldwide? One of the major problems I encounter in researching race issues is that discourse and academic discussions about race and racism depend excessively on American regional contexts. While the global influence of American academia and intellectual fields is undeniable, we cannot simply apply the racial politics, knowledge production, and classificatory systems that occur in the American region to other parts of the world wholesale.

 Therefore, I maintain a cautious stance toward directly importing and applying the various semiotic norms of racial representational politics understood through American standards. Their cultural discourse has increasingly diversified and become more complex as the subject of academic, political, and cultural-political discussions in the United States and the West regarding representations of the Asian has become increasingly active over the past five years, particularly around chop suey fonts, which are indeed highly problematic representational forms.

 Nevertheless, I believe it is important to ask whether it is appropriate to conduct only semiotic iconographic criticism in the politics of representation without considering regional contexts and the contexts of visualization. The script drawn by 19th-century Koreans who encountered shipwrecked Americans and attempted to document their alphabet as they understood it—who was its intended audience? What we can clearly state is that it was not Americans. Since it aimed to introduce the Americans' language to Koreans, Koreans were most likely the expected audience. The designer who found this story interesting and created English lettering for an international event held in Korea using that script—what motivated such a design? Self-Orientalization? What we can clearly say is that this designer's interest lies in independently creating 'calligraphy' and not hesitating to excavate documents for this purpose. If so, what is needed here is dialogue. Unless the International Visual Sociology Association Conference were being held in a Koreatown in the US, it would be problematic to immediately criticize it within the framework of American representational politics.

 We hope our conference's basic design will serve as a catalyst for questioning such imbalances in the intellectual field. Naturally, our purpose is not self-Orientalization. Had we sought attention, we would have designed using K-Pop or K-Culture, which are currently at their peak. More important than gaining attention is asking questions, raising problems, and saying that what seems natural is not necessarily so.