Untold modernity: Kim Swoo-Geun's Korean Pavilion at Expo 67 and its neocolonial echo

This paper reframes the Korean Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal through a postcolonial lens, challenging its dominant reading as a proud expression of Korean modernism. Designed by Kim Swoo-Geun during Cold War diplomacy, rapid industrialisation and lingering neocolonial legacies, the Pavilion is often praised for blending tradition with modernist form. However, this study argues that its architectural language — formally indebted to Japanese modernism and the Metabolist logic — embodies a passive neocolonial condition in which architectural modernism is reproduced without epistemic autonomy. This analysis addresses a notable gap in Korean architectural historiography, which has rarely interrogated substantial colonial inheritances, and situates this structure within an overlooked postcolonial critique. With the Pavilion slated for full restoration to its original form in 2027, the project urges a critical postcolonial re-evaluation of its ideological significance. Drawing on postcolonial theory and Korean scholarship critiquing fractured Korean modernism, it contextualises the Pavilion not as a celebratory icon, but as a conflicted neocolonial artefact. Through selective engagement with both Korean and global precedents, it foregrounds these entanglements, recasting it as a site of confrontation — a space for staging epistemic rupture and reimagining modernism on autonomous Korean terms.