Red and the Record: Archive Ecology and the Historiography of Color in Korea

The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which Korean historiography has informed the meaning of the color red across material, political, and cultural registers. The paper traces the history of red from its regulated use in Joseon royal clothing to its mass adoption during the 2002 FIFA World Cup, and argues that scholarly claims about red's symbolic significance frequently relied on extrapolation and assumptions.

This review draws on Korean institutional sources, secondary scholarship, and digitized primary archives to map two dominant interpretive lenses: red as a commodity structured by state control and scarcity, and red as a semantic signifier rooted in folk belief and shamanic tradition. By doing so, this paper finds that, while the material history of red is relatively well-documented, symbolic claims about red’s cultural meaning rely heavily on elite records, which leaves non-elite perspectives underrepresented. Further, the paper further considers how Korea's archive ecology, shaped by wartime destruction, Japanese colonial seizure, and selective digitization, has constrained what can be claimed and by whom.

To draw a comparison between hemispheres, Spain and their historical ties to red appears as a historical counterpoint, revealing the absence of commodity-centered analysis in Korean scholarship. The review concludes by proposing three directions for future research: greater engagement with non-elite sources such as household compendia like Gyuhapchongseo, a more rigorous interrogation of the evidence standards underlying symbolic claims, and closer attention to how selective digitization has shaped which topics scholars are able to study at all.