Inside the Heritage Library’s Shin Yong-Ha Exhibition

From May 15 to September 20, Seoul National University Heritage Library is holding the commemorative exhibition VERITAS LUX MEA: The Scholarship and Collection of Shin Yong-Ha. The exhibition features curated books, maps, charts, and various archival materials, allowing visitors to trace the intellectual trajectory of a venerated scholar whose work monumentally shaped Korean sociology and Korean studies.

Glass Wall Looking into the Visible Storage for the Old Book Collections

As the exhibition pamphlet notes, Shin is remembered as "a master of Korean studies who pioneered the path of Korean sociology" and "an unparalleled intellect of our time." The exhibition draws on the Central Library's Hwayang Shin Yong-Ha Collection, named after Shin's pen name, which was established in 2017 and comprises 8,631 donated volumes. Together, these materials trace Shin's critical engagement with Korea's independence and civil rights movements, his activism on Dokdo, his readings of Western texts, and his wider contributions to Korean sociology.

A Tower of Shin Yong-Ha's Scholarship

Born during the turbulent years of Japanese colonial rule and later shaped by the violence of the Korean War, Shin came of age amid the major upheavals of modern Korean history. His participation in democratic movements, including the 1960 April Revolution during the First Republic of Korea, helped shape his early interest in sociology and in the question of nationhood that would come to define his scholarly career. In his essay "My Scholarship, My Writings," Shin famously writes that "The focus of my academic research has consistently been the 'question of Korean national identity.'" Accordingly, the library displays various publications in which Shin examines Korean society through structural and historical frameworks, including A Study of Modern Korean Social History (1987) and A Social History of the Civilization of Gojoseon (2018).

Through his translations and scholarly engagement with Western texts, Shin helped make major works of European philosophy, political thought, and social theory available to Korean scholars. Among the Western canonical texts on display are the 1569 edition of Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, edited by the Louvain theologians; John Stuart Mill's 1897 edition of On Liberty; the 1782 Geneva edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's complete works; the 1891 fourth English edition of Karl Marx's Das Kapital; and many others.

Poster for the Shin Yong-Ha Exhibition

Further, an important part of the exhibition is the range of old Japanese maps Shin unearthed, in which Dokdo is marked in ways that recognize its connection to Korea and to Korean administrative knowledge. As a long-disputed territory currently administered by South Korea, Dokdo carries deep political significance, particularly because the issue remains bound up with the colonial history of Japan's rule over Korea and the unresolved grievances surrounding that past. What makes these maps especially striking is that they are Japanese in origin yet place Dokdo within Korea's historical and administrative sphere, reinforcing the Korean position that Dokdo is not a disputed possession but a matter of settled sovereignty.

Commemorative Postcards for Visitors

Postcards are also available on-site for visitors to take freely. In addition, the exhibition also hosts a weekly event: ten visitors who share their exhibition experience online using designated hashtags will be selected each week to win a special commemorative postcard set.

As the exhibition remains open through September, visitors are invited to encounter these important records of the past and the spirit of intellectual inquiry they preserve.

Written by Jung Hyun Kyung, SNU English Editor, [email protected]