This month's cover illustration is an interior of a traditional Chosŏnjok, or Cháoxiǎnzú, house featured in the film The Yellow Sea (2010, dir. by Hongjin Na). The kitchen is on the ground level, a little lower than the heated floor in the rest of the house. It can be covered by wooden panels to convert the area to either a living room or a bedroom. This hybrid space is called “chŏngjugan” 鼎廚間. The house style was unique to farms in the Hamgyŏng-do region, and later transplanted into Manchuria and beyond during the massive Korean dispersion into China during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This still cut was extracted by author Suk Koo Rhee from the movie, and is used with permission.
This issue breaks from recent tradition in that its eight main pieces are all standalone research articles. There are no symposia or other...
