This thesis is a decolonial feminist exploration of the representation, materials, and histories of Korean women told through Korean patchwork, theorising patchwork as a radical form to reimagine (material) histories of Korean women and women of the Korean diaspora. As an amalgam of different pieces that unifies once separated fragments, patchwork is identified as a material object, decolonial methodology, and metaphoric and corporeal lens that contributes polyphonic voices to histories of Korean women, while troubling nationalist agendas in the (re)construction of the Republic of Korea (1948 to 2023). Beginning with, but not bound to the patchwork wrapping cloth called jogakbo, I explore the possibilities of decorative, ornamental wrapping, by mapping new connections between jogakbo, patchwork in contemporary Korean fashions, and the Korean plastic surgery industries through the processes of cutting, sewing, mending, wrapping, healing, and becoming.

Locating and situating the practices of collecting jogakbo under General Park Chung Hee’s cultural reform policies, this dissertation reveals how tradition and authenticity were evoked to build the written histories of the patchwork form. As the democratic uprisings of the 1980s led to the democratisation of the government, jogakbo came to represent folk cultures, while symbolising ‘Korea’ to global communities. By foregrounding these nationalist agendas, I draw on a multiplicity of perspectives to complicate these narratives, excavating new material relations between jogakbo as a wrapping cloth, patchwork fashions and the corporeal processes of plastic surgery cultures, while foregrounding these practices as women’s work.

Three chapters of the thesis unfold to map Korean patchwork in archives, asking how Korean patchwork as jogakbo was constituted in national memories; the development of patchwork as style-fashion-dress in South Korea and for Korean diasporic communities abroad; embodied patchwork practices through (Korean) plastic surgery cultures, specifically exploring the experiences of blepharoplasty for Korean women and women of the Korean diaspora. This thesis builds and tests patchwork as a decolonial methodological approach, using material object analysis, archive research, interviews, and oral histories, and autoethnography, to produce a cross-disciplinary practice that pieces fragments of knowledge, and memories of being as a conceptual writing of history.

Necessarily understanding ‘Korea’ and South Korea through the framework of coloniality and colonial modernity, Fragments and Borders highlights the multiple encounters that shaped the formation of the country through institutional and national memory. By illuminating the transcultural and global connections and constellations of Korean womanhood through patchwork, I complicate and trouble the constitutive practices of Korean womanhood through these polyvocal approaches, while imagining the possibilities for the Korean woman through an alternative ontology of ornamental existence. In doing so, this thesis contributes to decolonial feminist studies, Korean diasporic studies, and Korean design and material histories by highlighting new possibilities for Korean womanhood by understanding patchwork as a form of mending and becoming.