기사로 보는 한영숙의 자취와 작품 = Han Yeong-suk’s Trajectory and Works based on Newspaper Articles

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims to trace her life and works through articles of daily newspapers by moving beyond previous research on Han Yeong-suk that has primarily focused on hereditary folk dance. The period of analysis spans from 1938, when the first newspaper article on her can be identified, to 1969, when she was officially recognized as a holder of Intangible Cultural Heritage for Seungmu (Monk dance). The analysis reveals that Han Yeong-suk’s entry into dance was shaped by environmental and genealogical conditions rather than by a sense of personal vocation. Within her relationship with her grandfather, Han Seong-jun, dance functioned not only as an artistic practice but also as a medium of affirming her lineage-based identity. At the same time, this symbolic weight of bloodline generated tensions with her emerging artistic self-awareness. Her frequent appearances in Akgeuk and Changgeuk troupes (Music-and-Theatre Troupe) in the early to mid-1940s can thus be interpreted as a tragic historical experience formed under the constraints of the period, particularly in the aftermath of Han Seong-jun’s death, when she lost her artistic center. From the mid-1950s onward, Han Yeong-suk came to re-recognize traditional dance as her vocation, strengthening her artistic subjectivity and establishing an independent artistic world centered on Seungmu. The sharp increase in newspaper coverage during the 1960s, in conjunction with state-led policies promoting folk arts, reflects a process in which Han Yeong-suk’s position was redefined within the changing social status of traditional arts. As a result, her trajectory as represented in newspaper accounts reveals a complex identity as both an inheritor of hereditary folk dance and an independent female artist, demonstrating the process through which she forged her own world of dance at the intersection of tradition and modernity, inheritance and creation.