Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
by
Sohl Lee
Doctor of Philosophy
Supervised by
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York
2014
ii!
!
Dedication
I dedicate this dissertation to my umma appa, Geum Oh Choi and Jong Seob Lee.
iii!
!
Biographical Sketch
Sohl Lee was born in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. She attended Smith College in
Massachusetts, and received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Art History and
International Relations in 2006. A year later, she began her doctoral studies in the
Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she pursued
her research in contemporary art under the direction of Professors Rachel Haidu (the
advisor) and Douglas Crimp (the committee member). In 2011 she received a Master of
Since 2009 she has been curating exhibitions and screenings of contemporary
Korean and Asian artists, and has learned much from in-depth interactions with them.
The experience of curating Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection
The eponymous exhibition catalogue was published in the same year by Hyunsil
During her field research in Seoul (2012-2013), she learned to communicate with artists,
critics, and curators by publishing art criticism in the Korean language, and she will
Abstract
aesthetics” in South Korea from the 1980s—a decade when the country’s pro-democracy
political stage of postcolonial, anti-statist, and anti-authoritarian dissent until its nation-
wide spread effectively forced the dictator to step down by 1987. The heroic participation
of artists as a propaganda unit during this successful march towards democracy in the
1980s is well noted in the country’s political history. Yet the history of art has yet to
consider the exhibition values as well as the formal and aesthetic implications of the
political art of this period—which, by 1985, obtained the moniker “minjung misul” (lit.
“people’s art”). This dissertation begins by addressing this lack, and furthermore it asks
the question about political art after the institution of parliamentary democracy. In other
words, what happened to art when the political struggle was over? In the 1990s and the
2000s, how did South Korean artists constantly reactivate their political engagement with
the shifting realities in the age of globalization and neoliberal urban development, as well
as democracy?
Utterance and Gwangju Freedom Artist Association in the early 1980s; Choi Jeong-hwa’s
postcolonial mimesis of vernacular and commercial urban landscape in the late 1980s to
the 1990s; art collectives Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s pursuit of publicness in
neoliberal urbanization in the late 1990s to the early 2000s; and the democratic
v!
!
understanding of division with North Korea in the art of Oh Yoon, Sin Hak-chul, and
inquiry into the history of political aesthetics in South Korea, a country still reconciling
with its (post-)colonial dilemma and an antagonistic relationship with the “other” Korea
in the North, this dissertation seeks to contribute to, and complicate, how art history has
Rachel Haidu (advisor) and Professor Douglas Crimp of the Department of Art History,
and Professors Eleana Kim and John Osburg of the Department of Anthropology.
Graduate study was supported by the graduate fellowship and stipend from the Program
in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester (2007-2012), the Social
long field research conducted in South Korea (2012-2013), and the Korea Foundation
Graduate Fellowship (2013-2014). Summer research travels and conference trips have
been in part funded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women Studies
(SBAI), the Association for Asian Studies’ Northeast Asia Council (AAS/NEAS), and
Acknowledgement
That this dissertation was complete by July 2014, if I dare say, was a miracle. But
it was not a miracle conjured by a magic wand; it required many people’s attention,
patience and compassion over the past seven years. Most prominently, my advisor Rachel
Haidu was the tour de force behind this dissertation, and my initiation to the field of
contemporary art history. From her, I learned how to think, write, and grow passion in
art. To her, I owe an immense gratitude for her unflagging support throughout the years,
and I can only hope to replicate the same towards my own students. My committee
member Douglas Crimp made my eyes teary more than once in his classes—out of
1962 Dance Diagram turned into Douglas’s insistence on a certain art historian’s lack of
experience in dance and hence his misreading of the work, Douglas shared an experience
from his time as an avid disco dancer: when you dance, you do not know if it is the music
beat or your body that is doing the dance. Somewhere between the numbered footprints
in the slide, Douglas’s critique of the assigned reading, and his shaking of head and hands
while explaining how agency might be experienced, my eyes became teary. Keeping that
feeling with me, I listen to art works and to my bodily responses—what irks and excites
me in them. It is also through our multiple conversations in Rochester and Seoul that
Eleana Kim trained me to navigate the challenges of “working on Korea” in this country:
learning where the streams flow and learning how to swim, freely, in them. I relied on her
to share my excitements and frustrations of fieldwork and was grateful for her always
timely, thoughtful advice. Immense thanks also go to the faculty members of Visual and
viii!
!
Cultural Studies, Janet Berlo, Jason Middleton, Joel Burges, Sharon Willis, Paul Duro,
The friendship and support from numerous individuals were indispensible for this
project. I thank Bo Zheng, my partner in crime, for all our Skype and real-life
conversations about work, relationships, travel, and the pleasure of “scheming.” Our
passion for socially engaging art practices binds us together. I had the fortune to have
Shota Ogawa as a friend, a co-lecturer, and an inspiration, especially during the final race
towards the finish line. My project received the much-needed encouragements and
insightful comments during the weekly meetings of the dissertation group consisting
Shota, Iskandar Zulkarnain, and myself in 2013-2014. I am grateful for their friendship
and support. The moments shared with Zainab Saleh, Abby Glogower, Rachel Lee,
Yuichiro Kugo, Amanda Graham, Gloria Kim, Jessica Horton, Lucy Mulroney, Berin
Golonu, Tiffany Barber, Becky Burditt, Godfre Leung, Ruben Yepes Munoz, Tara Najd
Ahmadi, Alicia Chester, Youngchae Lee, Kerim can Kavakli and many others in cafes,
the public market, the writing center, and the library, as well as the warm breeze of sanity
brought by my non-academic friends Tammy Kim, Gwendolyn Rayner, and Susan Mars,
helped me survive the harsh winters in Rochester. Over the years, my research trips to
South Korea not only secured the primary materials necessary for the dissertation but also
critics, curators, filmmakers, and others in the cultural field. For our common dreams and
late night conversations over coffee or soju, I thank Hyunjin Kim, Jaeyong Park, Jinjoo
Kim, Yoonsuk Jung, Eunu Lee, Mihee Ahn, Namgyeong Hong, Suki Kim, Heejin Kim,
ix!
!
Sangdon Kim, Younggak Cho, Taeyoon Choi, and many more friends with whom I
remain deeply connected. Countless individuals whose paths crossed with mine so
generously shared their passion for art and writing over the years.
I thank my family—Geum Oh Choi, Jong Seob Lee, Farrah Lee, and Soomin
Lee—for always standing next to me, even though we live thousands of miles apart. And
lastly, this dissertation and the pleasure I gained from writing it would not have existed if
it were not for the artists featured here. I reserve my biggest thanks for them and their
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter Two Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Postcolonial Pop and the Mimetic Art: 84
The Long Decade of Cultural Globalization (1987-1997)
Epilogue 211
Figures 215
Bibliography 257
xi!
!
List of Figures
(Pages 213-254)
[Fig. 2.13] Choi Jeong-hwa and Kas!m sikak kaepal y"nkuso, poster for Bio Installation
Ozone, Bar Ozone, December 1991!
[Fig. 2.14] Choi Jeong-hwa, The Joke, inflatable balloon sculpture, 1997!
[Fig. 2.15] Choi Jeong-hwa, Plastic Paradise, plastic baskets, 1997!
[Fig. 3.1] Sungnam Project, exhibition Sungnam and Environment-Art, installation view,
Sungnam City Hall Lobby, October 19-25, 1998!
[Fig. 3.2] Sungnam Project, exhibition Sungnam and Environment-Art, installation view,
Sungnam City Hall Lobby, October 19-25, 1998!
[Fig. 3.3] Sungnam Project, Slope Measurement, concrete casting, 1998!
[Fig. 3.4] Sungnam Project, screen shot of Taepy!ng dong Arirang, video, 10 min, 1998!
[Fig. 3.5] Sungnam Project, Catalogue, page 2 (left) and page 3 (right), 4-page brochure
on A3 paper, 1998!
[Fig. 3.6] Sungnam Project, Catalogue, page 4 (left) and page 1 (right), a 4-page
brochure on A3 paper, 1998!
[Fig. 3.7] “Goliath” from Sanggyedong Olympic, directed by Kim Dong-won, 1988!
[Fig. 3.8] FlyingCity, Something to Do on the Land of Destruction, 18 min, 2002!
[Fig. 3.9] FlyingCity, Shouting in the Mt. Bukak, 14 min 45 sec, 2002!
[Fig. 3.10] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, January 23, 2002!
[Fig. 3.11] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, January 24, 2002!
[Fig. 3.12] FlyingCity, examples from Psychogeography Workshop, with participants,
kindergarten and elementary students!
[Fig. 3.13] FlyingCity, Psychogeoraphy Workshop!
[Fig. 3.14] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, September 27, 2003!
[Fig. 3.15] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003!
[Fig. 3.16] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003, 9
selected slides!
[Fig. 3.17] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003!
[Fig. 3.18] FlyingCity, Drifting Producers, digital print, 115x75 cm, 2003!
[Fig. 3.19] FlyingCity, All Things Park, installation view, Art Sonje, Seoul, 2004!
[Fig. 3.20] FlyingCity, All Things Park, installation view, Art Sonje, Seoul, 2004!
[Fig. 4.1] Sin Hak-chul, Rice Planting, oil painting, 130x160cm, 1987, repainted in 1993!
[Fig. 4.2] Oh Yoon, National Desire for Unification, Oil Painting, 34.9x138 cm, 1985!
[Fig. 4.3] Sin Hak-chul, Korean Modern and Contemporary History, 130 x 390 cm, 1983!
[Fig. 4.4] Lee Sangho and Jon Junho, A New Day of Reunification at the Foot of
Mountain Pekdu, banner painting, 1987!
[Fig. 4.5] Seung Woo Back, Blow Up, installation view of 40 photographs, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.6] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.7] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.8] Front page, Rodong Daily, Pyongyang, North Korea, September 30, 2011!
[Fig. 4.9] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
1
!
Introduction
a large public plaza, spilling over to the adjacent roads. [Fig. 0.1] Among the too many
heads to fathom counting, and the too many bodies to neatly frame within the
photograph’s four corners, we see flags and banners flapping. A truck carries a portrait
painting large enough to dwarf the vehicle itself. The individual depicted in this portrait
is the only face that we can see, because the thousands of other faces are almost invisible
from this bird’s eye view. The face depicted has a name, Lee Han-y"l, and the painter is
the carpenter-cum-activist artist Choi Byung-su. Almost a million citizens gathered in the
City Plaza of Seoul on July 9, 1987 to participate in the public mourning procession for
Lee, who was killed earlier that month during one of many protests against the country’s
military dictatorship. Choi had prepared this portrait the night before. On the summer day,
which marked a climax for the pro-democracy social movement that had germinated in
the 1960s and fully arrived in the 1980s, the mourning public proudly marched across the
city alongside the funeral portrait on the moving truck—in hopes of a new democratic
regime to come as well as for the heroic martyr. The central place that Choi Byung-su’s
painting occupied in the protest, and this particular funeral procession’s crucial role in
forcing the dictator to renounce his position and promise a direct presidential election,
democratization. Indeed, this single image, for many Korean cultural practitioners,
encapsulates the political history of art and the history of political art in South Korea.
This dissertation pays homage to this climactic moment in history, when art was
an important participant in Korea’s democratic transition. But this study also excavates
other moments in which art took on political meaning, and more anticlimactic sites in
which artists have reimagined the very meaning of politics in South Korea since the
1980s. More often artists were less heroic than Choi Byung-su and played a more
peripheral role in the country’s push towards a regime change or policy changes. In this
project, therefore, I focus on artists whose radical politics of opposition are less
spectacular than the iconic image of Lee Han-y"l, but no less significant to understanding
the politics of art and the history of political art in South Korea. The chapters discuss
specific moments in South Korean art history and sociopolitical history that bring these
dialectical histories into focus: the conceptualization of dissident reality by artist groups
Reality and Utterance and Gwangju Freedom Artist Association (in the early 1980s);
(in the late 1980s to the 1990s); art collectives Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s pursuit
of publicness in neoliberal urbanization (in the late 1990s to the early 2000s); and the
democratic understanding of division with North Korea in the art of Oh Yoon, Sin Hak-
chul, and Seung Woo Back (from the 1980s to mid-2000s). Together, these four chapters
In this project, I locate and delineate the political and artistic impasses in Korea as
much as the revolutionary fervor felt by the artists and art collectives that have formed its
3
!
vibrant contemporary art landscape. My adjacent goal is to consider the politics of art and
the politics of writing about art together, by self-reflexively investigating the recent
processes by which Korean art has become contemporary. Instead of looking to the
during the 1990s by art museums, galleries, and auction houses in North America and
Western Europe, I ask the question of how Korean art became “contemporary” for the
artists as well as art critics and curators working in South Korea, by accounting for these
particularities preceding and succeeding the 1990s. In other words, the shifting aesthetics
and politics of art—from the 1980s pro-democracy social movement (organized around a
the 1990s and 2000s—become the very sites in which to investigate the notion and
the implicated terms: “contemporary (hy!ndae)”; “Korean (hankuk)”; “art (misul).” But
more importantly, this inquiry is an archeological one that pays careful attention to the
words, objects, aesthetics, feelings, desires, ideals, and failures of artists and cultural
practitioners1 and the socio-political, art historical, and material cultural contexts that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1
Here I am informed by Foucault’s conception of history with innumerable points of
discontinuities and interruptions—“the epistemological acts and thresholds described by
Bachelard” (emphasis original)—that we ought to discover and excavate from beneath the
homogeneous surface of history. “[Forcing] it [the continuous accumulation of knowledge] to
enter a new time,” I seek to establish what Foucault calls “a work of theoretical transformation
4
!
make up the very field of contemporary Korean art—and that these practitioners respond
to and, in turn, carve out.2 Thus, the task of redefining the field begins by carefully
translating such terms as “reality (hy!nsil),” “people (minjung),” and “democracy (minju
ju#i)” that not only persistently appear in artists’ manifestos and shape radical art
practices but also, not incidentally, reflect the country’s tumultuous pathway to
different parts of the world.3 In the realm of modern art, the term “reality” may call forth
the aesthetic tropes of realism which encompass a range of historically specific case
studies and movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: consider the realism of
Courbet, socialist realism promoted by Lukács, Nouveau Réalisme as the French rival of
American pop art, etc. Despite this diversity, realism, broadly speaking, can signify two
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
‘which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this
past as ideological.’” Here, Foucault quotes Althusser’s understanding of history and ideology.
Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon, 1969), 168. Michel
Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 4-5.
2
Here, I am thinking of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus (individual agents) and field
(contextual environment) and the dialectical relationship between the two.
3
The pre-modern traditions of naturalism, or the lack thereof, is beyond the scope of this study on
modern/contemporary art. But what is interesting as a brief comparative note on the pictorial
traditions of landscape painting in Europe and East Asia is that in the Sinocultural sphere the
landscape is never something to be copied from what exists in the nature but always a construct,
an imaginary space with its own internal logical structure. Thus, training for landscape is, rather
than sketching from nature, copying from other masters’ paintings, hence the mimetic
relationship with the older (often dead) masters’ pictorial space rather than with reality.
5
!
ideologically driven approaches. One is constituted in the tropes of realism that seek to
render most faithfully what the human eye sees, sometimes to the degree exceeding
natural capacity, as in the case of photorealism, with its emphasis on the mechanisms of
perspective and vision and celebration of traditional artistic ability. Another is less rooted
in achieving accurate and mimetic representation of what exists in the world or the
unvarnished visual truth, but lies instead within an intellectual and politically-driven
project that requires assessing (social) reality and responding critically to it in aesthetic
reality and opposes it through the social critique, with the ultimate goal of forging social
change.4 These two poles of realism are never completely resolved as opposites but are in
suspended tension, as the case of Nouveau Réalisme testifies. That movement, which
sought to develop a new artistic language that would reconstitute the relationship between
art (high versus low) and reality (as mediated by images and spectacle). Nouveau
Réalisme’s “realism” therefore points to the possibility of social critique through the
tropes of referentiality.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
4
Of course socialist realism or realism propagated in the name of Marxist historical materialism
was never uniform, as Eugene Lunn points out. The two proponents of socialist realism, Brecht
and Lukács, differed substantially in their philosophies by the decade of the 1930s. While Brecht
sought a collective subject through mechanical and technical means of experimentation based on
economic production while Lukács fell back onto humanism and idealism of Hegel, and of the
early Marx. Eugene Lunn, “Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of
Brecht and Lukács,” New German Critique No.3 (Autumn, 1974), 12-44.
6
!
There have also been recent attempts to recuperate realism from modern art
history that is centered around abstraction—or the history of modern art as a teleological
step towards more abstraction or with an approving eye on abstraction. As seen in Devin
Fore’s work on 1920s-30s European art and literature (2012) and Alex Potts’s on 1940s-
60s European and American paintings (2013), there is a renewed interest in casting a self-
reflexive look on the history of modern art built on the false polarization of realism
versus abstraction that has systematically associated the latter with the avant-garde and
experimentation and the former with regression and convention.5 Of course, abstraction
being the modus operandi of capitalism, many artistic expressions with abstract
tendencies have shed a “realist light” on the conditions of cultural production, as art
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
5
The heuristic tendency to separate realism and modernism is questioned in this dissertation,
especially the categorization of the two according to the binary of reactionary/traditional versus
avant-garde/innovative. As a study of the returned human figures in 1920s Europe (France,
Germany, and Russia) after the eradication of human presence in modern abstraction, Devin
Fore’s Realism after Modernism narrates, as the author notes, “the struggle to remotivate and
resocialize strategies of representation after modernism’s relentless demotivation of the realist
sign.” Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of art and Literature (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2012), 13. This illuminating study investigates the mimetic relationship, and not a rupture,
between human and machine-driven technological development, as our understanding of man
(with the focus on human body) after industrial revolution and modernization had fundamentally
changed. Mimesis rather than poesis is at the center of Fore’s book. The idea of mimesis is
important for my work too, with its postcolonial connotation that Homi Bhabha’s work puts
forward and that I will elaborate later in Chapter 2; but how I push forward the notion realism
differs from Fore’s direction because of my emphasis on the artists’ perception of “reality” rather
than human “body” or human figuration. In this dissertation, it is reality—as in an idea-
materiality signified and experienced—that is at the center of “realism.” Alex Potts examines
1940s-1960s European and American paintings but his focused interests in the medium of
painting casts its own limit while his slippage between the three terms—of reality, the world, and
the everyday—as encompassing the “phenomena of the world around us” poses conceptual
problem when thinking of post-colonial politics and vernacular culture I intend to examine in this
dissertation. Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in
Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
7
!
historians T.J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh, among others, have argued.6 Realism, as
aesthetic tendency,” while its “anti-formalistic” (and not anti-formalist) character poses a
forceful challenge to the way we have constructed modern and contemporary art history.7
At the crux of the realism debates is the contestation of interpretation, historiography, and
But in the late 20th century, and especially during the 1980s and 1990s, as art
history attempted to “globalize,” the term “reality” acquired new interpretative problems.
When these Non-Western works are grouped together in a sweeping manner, the tone of
celebration is often based not only on their mimetic and derivative relationship with the
artistic language of Western predecessors but also on their ability to reveal something
inherently truthful about the artists’ identity and the sociopolitical concerns of their place
of origin. That is, the social reality of the periphery as is represented in the borrowed
artistic language of the center.8 Such art historical analysis therefore seamlessly merges
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
6
Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale, 1999).
Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT, 2000). Another step in this line of analysis can be seen in the
neo-Marxist interpretation of cultural products as unveiling the base structure of late capitalism,
as seen in the works by David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. See Rosalyn Deutsche’s feminist
critique of Harvey and Jameson in “Men in Space,” “Boys Town” and “Chinatown, Part Four?
What Jake Forgets about Downtown” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1996), 195-256.
7
Potts, 2-4.
8
To countervail such a perennial problem, art historian Joan Kee chooses to give a close formal
analysis of “what is within the picture frame,” and how the elements within the artwork interact
with one another, or bring meaning when in contact with the viewer, in the first book-length study
of contemporary Korean art in English, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency
of Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
8
!
the formal discourse with the semiotics based on the art’s ability to be referential or
symptomatic of its society of origin. If such a formal discourse (that is, the language of
temporal lag across borders, the locally contingent interpretation of reality (that is, the
language of the different) originates from the desire to equate artworks and the social
conditions of the ethnic group or the nation (only for artworks made by artists with
because the globalization of contemporary art (at least from the perspective of Western
Europe and North America) coincided with the era of identity politics and postmodernism
in contemporary art.10
Taking into account the complex history of realism, and discourses surrounding
reality and art outside the Western metropoles, I then ask: what if artists themselves are
keen on using the term “reality” in their practice so frequently that an overgeneralized
notion of reality that emerged in the 1980s and 90s is invalidated wholesale? How do we
reckon the Korean practitioners’ critical and artistic attempts to interpret and engage with
what they perceived as reality? How do we understand the creatively forged mimetic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
No doubt a similar claim can be made about women artists, and the categories such as “Asian
women artists” pose an interpretative challenge. See Joan Kee’s “What is Feminist about
Contemporary Asian Women’s Art?” in exhibition catalogue Global Feminisms (Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Museum; New York: Merrell Publishers, 2007) for a preliminary investigation on this
topic.
10
One prominent example would be the 1993 Whitney Biennale, self-described as “multicultural
biennale” and vehemently criticized by a critic as simply “politics.” See Roberta Smith, “At the
Whitney, a biennial with a social conscience,” NY Times (March 5, 1993). Christopher Knight
writes, “With identity politics overriding the art world, it was a relief to see shows by artists like
Vija Celmins and Adrian Saxe.” in “1993 Year in Review: Art. It's Called Art, Not Politics,” LA
Times (December 26, 1993). Another well-known example is Les Magiciens de la terre at the
Centre Pompidou (1989).
9
!
relationship between art and reality in South Korea, rather than focusing our attention on
the formal mimicry between Western/global art (avant-garde) and Korean art (the
derivative)? By making discussions of reality a focal point of this project, I reconsider the
artistic will to forge a contingent relationship between art and contemporaneous reality as
a decidedly avant-garde project in its modern sense. To this end, I hope to position this
dissertation as an explicit attempt to rewrite the course of visual analyses of art produced
outside the “West” by way of a politically driven, historically contingent study of South
Korean artistic scene. The members of the collective Reality and Utterance (Hyônsil kwa
par!n) wrote in a 1979 manifesto that they sought to “speak about reality through art.” In
so doing, they not only considered themselves directly engaging with the reality circa
1979 in South Korea but also attempted to move beyond the hegemonic trope of
tansaekhwa (the Korean school of monochrome abstract painting) that they assessed as a
foundation is located in the liberal idea of individualism.11 The “reality” for Reality and
Utterance encompassed the history of Korean modern and contemporary art, in which the
forces of modernism were thought to come from elsewhere (the Western model of art-
making as an origin of inspiration) rather than the here-and-now (the social conditions of
Korean life) that artists could actively respond to and re-shape through their artistic
language.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Joan Kee’s sophisticated study of the tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement
complicates the minjung practitioners’ sweeping generalization of the Korean practice of abstract
painting, by first and foremost focusing on the rhetoric and promotion of such painting in
conjunction with the material and social stakes that the painters have claimed as having
influenced their production. See Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency
of Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
10
!
The struggle to reconcile the aesthetic avant-garde with the political avant-garde,
and, more importantly, to reactivate and redraw the line between the two, began rather
unambiguously when the artists, intellectuals and cultural activists aligned with the
minjung social movement. The motto for minjung literature and visual art movements
was to find a way to give form to the aesthetics of reality that is contiguous with the
realism goes back as far as the 1920s, amid the political struggle against Japanese
colonial rule (1919-1945). For the leftist artists of Korean Proletariat Federation of
Artists (KAPF) and other progressive writers living through both Western and Japanese
imperialism in the Korean peninsula, realism was far from simply epistemological. It was
always ideological and social. Realism was understood as the sole artistic means with
which to express the materialist worldview and the artist’s critical subjectivity. Thus for
realism and socialist realism, while all of the terms referring to realism such as sasil ju#i,
hy!nsil ju#i and ri!lij#m carried a slightly varied meaning depending on the speaker.13
Over the following three decades (1930s-1950s), however, a series of events and
intellectuals starting from 1932, the national partition in 1945, the subsequent founding of
the South Korean nation based on a staunch anti-communist ideology and under
North in the 1950s—all contributed to a long hiatus in the practice of such realism in
South Korea.14 It was only in the 1960s that the return of realism was vividly felt in the
realm of literature, with the poet Kim Chi-ha being one of its ardent proponents.15
four art students from Seoul National University, was one of the earliest post-Korean War
(that is, post-1953) markers in which an explicit connection between art and reality was
Though Reality Group (1969) prematurely stopped its activities after its plan for
an inaugural exhibition was censored and obliterated, the impact of the collective’s
manifesto survived over time, eventually inspiring, in part, the founding of Reality and
and conceptual potential during the 1980s through their publishing of manifestos and
Korean War, etc.).16 Another art collective, the Gwangju Freedom Artists Association,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
Theodore H. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier
(Columbia University, 2012)
15
Kim’s ideas were influenced by the Third World Theology movement in South Korea. See Kim
Chi-ha’s Gold Crowned Jesus and Other Writings (1978).
16
For Reality and Utterance, hy!nsil is both the truth (the reality of hardship under military
dictatorship) and the veil that hides the truth (the media spectacle and government’s
12
!
which ingrained its geographical origin of Gwangju in its name and began the practice of
hy!njang misul (lit. “art of the site” or protest site), developed a notion of reality around
the term hy!njang, which is less abstract and more contingent upon time and place than
the term hy!nsil.17 The dissident artists like the members of Reality and Utterance and the
reality and radical politics on the same page when envisioning their visual productions
amid the era of the pro-democracy social movement, revived and reinvented the
discourse around reality and realism in South Korean art history. It is thus from the 1980s
that “reality” serves as one of the key concepts driving Korean art to stay vital, engage
with the aesthetics of politics, and envision utopian ideals, over the ensuing three
decades.
These two terms of reality, I argue, remain relevant after their introduction in the
1980s, driving artists to develop new visual languages of their time and situation.18 The
genealogy of reality and realism that I seek to draw in this dissertation is conspicuously
absent in the existing writing of contemporary Korean art, mainly because art historians
and critics writing in English first and foremost ask what the adjective “Korean” might
mean for the formal and technical aspects of the given art works. When seen from a
particular location that belongs to the imagined community that is the nation, the link
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
propagandistic representation). Here, the “veil” is the medium through which the truthful reality
exists, and is thus an important material for artistic appropriation.
17
The term hy!njang, when used in the context of art connotes the site of protest, but in the
context of crime investigation, it could mean a crime scene. Over all, its focus is more on the
event and act placed at the site than the physical composition or history of the site in question.
18
To be more historically accurate, reality and realism were re-introduced and re-deployed in the
1980s from their earlier development in the colonial period. But I argue that the colonial use had
a more literary focus than the visual one.
13
!
between art and the nation might become less relevant. What is more relevant is the
multi-faceted and ever-changing features and pretenses of one’s reality that one reacts to
and one attempts to take part in—and that are not automatically associated with national
traits. I therefore trace the afterlives of hy!nsil (reality), which incubates a desire for
structural analysis of society that is also material, and hy!njang (site), which signifies
place in a given site, in order to unravel the artistic desire to reconcile with the local, the
national, and the global within the place of their production in the 1990s and the 2000s.
Even though the subsequent generations of artists do not verbalize these terms, the
artistic activities that give utmost attention to the visual, audiovisual, and spatial politics
of Korea.
The history charted in this dissertation project begins in 1979, the year in which
two of the period’s most significant art collectives—Reality and Utterance and Gwangju
Freedom Artists Association—founded what would become known, a few years later, as
“minjung misul.” In this project, I use the mixed tactics of transliteration and translation
to call minjung misul “minjung art,” for the purpose of preserving the historical
connotations of minjung (i.e. the political subjectivity signified by the conjoined Sino-
Korean characters min for commoners and jung for masses) that is complex and unique to
Korea. In its use in the context of the minjung social movement, the term minjung
14
!
nationalism than universalist claims of and affinities with subalterns and proletariats.19
The history and cultural use of the category “minjung art” too resists simplification,
forcing me to seek multiple relationships that do not wholly endorse or criticize. Even
during the 1980s the term minjung art was not uniformly used but was one of many terms
denoting dissident art: minjok misul (national art), minjok minjung misul (national
people’s art), saeroun misul undong (new art movement), among others. Only in 1985,
when an exhibition of dissident artists in their twenties entitled Power of the Twenties
Generation (20 dae #i him) was targeted with systematic government oppression (leading
employing “minjung misul,” give a push to the widespread dissemination of the term.
Artists at that time resisted such a sweeping categorization, perhaps fully knowing its
danger: the term minjung art survived the artists themselves, most of whom remained
More importantly, the term minjung, ideologically charged and rooted in the
development of social movement, has overpowered and suppressed the complex histories
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Terms that share affinities with minjung are “renmin” in the Chinese socialism, “subaltern” in
the South Asian-driven Subaltern Studies, “people” in the American Revolution, or “homme”/
“citoyen” in the French Revolution Although minjung and renmin may share similarities with the
pre-modern understanding of common people (like paeks!ng in Korean and laobaixing in
Mandarin) bounded within a ruling dynasty, both terms are also cosmopolitan in their imagination
of equality across borders. In this sense, historian Namhee Lee associates minjung with the
construct of subaltern as those whose power and language to speak for themselves is previously
taken away yet whose location is always one of propinquity to the dominant power. The historical
subjectivity of minjung is thus called upon during 1970s and 1980s South Korea to rise up against
the system of oppression. I develop the universal idealism of people in the American and French
Revolutions in the context of democracy—through Bhabha’s understanding of democracy’s
universal ideals.
20
Fifteen Years of Minjung Art (Seoul: National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, 1994)
15
!
diversity and multiplicity of “minjung art.”21 Korean art history and criticism’s
uncomplicated understanding of minjung art can be summed up as being divided into two
scenarios: one chooses not to engage at all with minjung art, either arguing for its lack of
artistic value (for example, claiming that it is formally unchallenging, authorless political
repressive regime. Equally steeped in preconceived notions about minjung art, these two
views have reproduced themselves, relegating more nuanced views to the margins of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21
The major scholarships on minjung art in the Korean language were embarked on by minjung
art critics themselves in the 1990s. Among them Choi Yeol and Sung Wan-kyung’s writings are
most lucid and insightful. Sung Wan-kyung, Minjung misul mod!nism sigaky!ngu (Minjung Art,
Modernism, Visual Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999) and Choi Yeol, Hankuk hy!ndae misul
undong #i y!ksa (The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement) (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994).
Also a short essay on minjung on English was written by a Korean cultural studies scholar Frank
Hoffman. See Hoffman, “Images of Dissent: Transformations in Korean Minjung art,” Harvard
Asia Pacific Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 44-49. The analyses of minjung paintings by
Korean Studies literature scholars and anthropologists (Nancy Abelmann and Theodore Hughes)
most often fall into trap of reading the paintings as if they are texts, that is, focus exclusively on
the allegorical reading at the expense of a material and formal analysis. Other available resources
on minjung art are curatorial essays commissioned for solo shows or group shows that are often
less historically rooted. Among the two doctoral dissertations on minjung written in English,
Soyang Park’s engages with theoretical readings of paintings (especially with trauma theory)
while Hyejong Yoo’s historical readings consider the artworks as symptoms of the society under
oppression. See Soyang Park, Postcolonial Visual Culture Theory: memory and haunting in the
minjung democratic art movement in the postcolonial space of South Korea during 1980s (Ph.D.
dissertation, Goldsmith, 2005). Hyejong Yoo, Democracy as the legitimate "form" and "content":
Minjung misul in dissident nationalism of South Korea (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University,
2011). My project responds to the interpretative shortcomings that I see in these existing
literatures, by interrogating the location of political articulation invested by the minjung
practitioners and by exploring the mechanisms of both production and dissemination of visual
works.
22
Here, I refer to discussions by minjung practitioners Sung Wan-kyung and Choi Min-hwa, and
also more recent critics and scholars like Park Chan-kyong and Beck Ji-sook.
16
!
of artists and new ways of making art that emerged during the minjung social movement
than that I am in the category of minjung art per se. By starting this dissertation in the
early 1980s (1979-1984), with what can be more accurately called politically-driven art
of the “pre-minjung art” period, I seek not only to complicate the history of minjung art
but also to challenge the category itself.23 It is my view that the “minjung” in minjung art
should not be taken for granted as merely signifying the artists’ political consciousness in
the most generic way, or as describing art that simply coexisted with the minjung social
movement. To this end, the focus of Chapter 1 is on excavating what politics meant for
the artists experiencing, and participating in, the very socio-political activities
underpinning their artistic activities, while the subsequent chapters (on the 1990s and the
2000s) articulate the power of visual language to shape, influence, and carve out the
political subjectivity that was for the 1980s cultural activists identified as minjung. What,
then, are the qualities of minjung that survive over time in the post-minjung age?
My close visual analyses of art works are first and foremost informed by the
of Korean Studies. The Korean Studies discourse around minjung in the disciplines of
history, anthropology, sociology, and literature confirms that minjung cannot be pinned
down to a particular body of people. Rather, it was an ideal, with special signifying
power aimed at enunciating future change. Various scholars writing about the minjung
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
To be more precise, the site of intervention for me is the history of such categorization
(“minjung art”) and the subsequent use—and misuse—of the term in the field of art history and
others.
17
!
cultural movement (in music and literature respectively), like Sunyoung Park and Chang-
the future tense, rather than a concrete depiction of Korean people (bound by class
historian Kenneth Wells, “refers less to such a group [of proletariats] than to a quality
which, it is claimed, can be found in the past, is active in the present, and will determine
Korea’s future… [not by] virtue of their doing something [but by] virtue of their being
multiple temporalities laden in the subjectivity of minjung and its “culturally defined
populist idealism” calls for a rise of consciousness across different classes against the
subjectivity that Marxist feminist cultural scholar Chung-moo Choi (herself a minjung
South Korean post-coloniality for the first time.27 Informed by the 1981 ground-breaking
study of the Korean War and the immediate post-war period by Bruce Cumings, Choi’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
A short article by Frank Hoffman on art and a dissertation of Sunyoung Park on literature all
have this as assumption. Frank Hoffman, "Images of Dissent: Transformations in Korean
Minjung art," Harvard Asia Pacific Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 44-49. Sunyoung Park,
Realism in Korean Modern Literature (UCLA, PhD dissertation, 2003).
25
Kenneth Wells, “The Cultural Construction of Korean History,” South Korea’s Minjung
Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. ed. Kenneth Wells (University of Hawaii,
1995), p.11
26
Wells, 12.
27
Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea” in The
Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997), 461-484.
18
!
Japanese colonialism was never achieved by the anti-colonial movements (at that time
active in Korea as well as abroad) but was given by the Allies’ victory over Japan in 1945,
placing Korea once again under the occupation of a foreign power, this time a Cold War,
anti-communist one. Choi therefore identifies the remnants of Japanese colonial brutality
and the reality of Cold War American occupation as direct causes for the delay in the
nation’s true liberation, which finally began with the minjung movement’s anti-colonial
politics. This liberating force holds ample political potential, which I analyze as having
been realized in more recent art practices even though the artists featured in Chapters 2-4
My initial interests in minjung art and the minjung period only began when I
“posûtû minjung misul” in Korean and designating an array of artistic practices with
political dissent in the recent years, it is a term first proposed by critics in the late 1990s,
and became, by 2008, increasingly prominent and equally controversial, garnering the
most hostile disapprovals from the very artists who were theorized as practicing “post-
minjung art.” As the famous account at a workshop sponsored by the 2008 Gwangju
Biennale tells it, the critic-artist Park Chan-kyong’s presentation entitled “Conversation
with ‘Minjung Art’” provoked a heated Q&A session during which Lim Minouk, one of
the “post-minjung artists” per Park, stood up in the audience and asked why Park would
19
!
resurrect the father (i.e. minjung art) she had never known.28 For Lim, her artistic practice
has the least to do with minjung art and its narrow definition of politics. This incident
effectively reveals the dilemma of critics/historians in writing the history of Korean art
from the decidedly political perspective, and that of artists in making political art after the
minjung revolution. Lim is uncomfortable with the nationalistic paradigm and patriotism
that minjung still signifies today, which compels her to deny any discursive or political
association between minjung art and her works which, for her, seek to cross national and
ethnic boundaries through a nuanced play of space, sound, and intersubjectivity. Indeed,
Lim represents many artists working in Korea today and analyzed in Chapters 2-3 who
would be quick to disassociate their work from the formal aesthetics of both minjung and
modernist abstract painting, as well as the nation-bound discourses surrounding both art
The “post-minjung discourse” in Korean art criticism originates not from artists
but from some critics who became wary of the lack of a politically-conscious art scene
(i.e. the field as a whole) in democratic South Korea (from 1987 to the present),
especially when another wave of social upheavals were burgeoning across the country,
starting around 2008.30 This new decade of “post-minjung art discourse” was preceded by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Park Chan-kyong, “‘Criticality’ in Korean Art and the ‘Interests’ of Artists: Minjung Art and
the Present” in Journal Bol. Vol.10 (2008), 33-45. Minouk Lim, Interview with the author.
29
The exception is Park Chan-kyong, who is an artist as well as a critici and who believes in
reinventing our understanding of minjung art, a critical and historical objective that this
dissertation also shares with.
30
The evidence of considerable importance that the post-minjung discourse displays can be found
in the back-to-back discussion and argument in March, April, and June, 2010 issues of Art in
Culture, one of the most rigorous art criticism journals in South Korea. The proponents of “post-
minjung” art discourse include Park Chan-kyong, Beck Ji-sook, Kim Jong-gil, and Lee Young-
wook among others.
20
!
the decline of political demonstrations for democracy in the 1990s which led to the
demise of political art on the street that had previously flourished in the late 1980s. Along
with the social movement, the dynamic discourse about art, reality, and democracy began
to dwindle too, as Park Chan-kyong and many others have lamented since the late 1990s.
What, then, should happen in circa 2008, when there is a resurgence of social movements,
not about the presidential election but still concerning the power of democracy that
discourse is therefore less about art-making than about making the art field as a whole
But by linking today’s art with dissident art of the 1980s on the sole basis of the
shared desire to speak social critique through art, the so-called “post-minjung discourse”
dissident spirit and heroic bravery at the expense of intelligent discussions about the
artworks themselves. The negligence of the form represses any discussions of 1980s
political art’s fixation on two-dimensional pictorial space (oil on canvas, collage, banner
painting as medium. The existing discourse therefore emphasizes repetition (of “political
criticality” or “political spirit” in artists’ intentions) and suppresses difference (in artistic
or formal languages). More importantly, the current discourse has yet to develop a careful
analysis of the conditions of exhibition and reception that have affected the aesthetic,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Hye-jong Yoo, “The Candlelight Girls’ Playground: Nationalism as Art of Dialogy, The 2008
Candlelight Vigil Protests in South Korea.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual
Culture 15 (Fall 2010).
http://minjung.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_15/articles/yoo/yoo.html.
21
!
cultural, and political significance that the artworks generated during the 1980s, or could
generate today.32
minjung art,” I see its discursive value in linking the current period of Korean art (the
2000s and on) to critiques of post-colonialism and post-modernism (of the 1980s). I
or ideological break but rather as a discursive space in which we can locate the artists’
ambivalently shifting relationship with the history and ideals of the minjung social
movement.33 The radical politics of minjung survives with post-minjung, as the minjung
of the contemporary dilemmas in writing the history of minjung, and I seek to interrogate
the minjung ideology’s various parochialisms and problematic discursive strategies while
recuperating the liberating forces of minjung. Minjung ideology is itself an ideology with
ramifications that became apparent to even the most avid proponents of minjung
struggles––scholars like Chungmoo Choi and Namhee Lee, who question minjung’s
and patriotism,35 which I detect in the portraits of heroic male martyrs and suffering
minjung figures in large banners that attempted to idealize and consolidate a singular, all-
androcentric, and working-class identity. In the arts, the exclusive emphasis on narrative
and figuration, which relied on the logic of binary opposition such as Korean versus
foreign, urban versus rural, is the most prominent shortcomings of art from the minjung
period.
not to form a linear history leading from minjung to post-minjung.36 Its core agenda
instead lies in resisting the progressive historicism that pervades the historical writing of
South Korean politics and arts. There is a prevalent misconception that the struggles for
democracy ended victoriously with a nation-wide social movement in 1987, only to open
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Chungmoo Choi, Ibid., 300. Choi’s critique of minjung activists and their rhetoric lays out the
inherent dilemma experienced by the minjung intellectuals who sought to locate the innate
minjung-ness in the workers and farmers, but also wanted to shape these Korean proletariats into
the revolutionary subject. For Choi, this contradiction demonstrates the process of othering that
the minjung intellectuals enacted onto the working class Koreans.
36
If we consider “post-minjung” aesthetics as arising directly after minjung art or emulating it,
we fall into the danger of forging a singular, linear temporality between minjung and post-
minjung. By claiming that social critique in today’s art was born after “the death of minjung,” one
not only mistakenly forms a teleological narrative but also asserts that minjung is “dead.” Curator
Kim Jong-gil argues the resurrection of minjung in today’s art after the (clearly pronounced)
death of minjung art. Kim Jong-gil. “Dasi, j!nwuiwa silch!n, haengdong #i abanggar#d#r#l
wuihay!” (Towards experiment, practice, and action of the avant-garde!)” in Art in Culture (April
2010).
37
In South Korea, globalization, was promulgated by the state under the official policy of
segyehwa, a term roughly translated as “world-ization.” Globalization is considered to naturally
follow democratization as an extension of it. See Samuel S. Kim “Korea and Globalization
23
!
problem of this narrative is that it simultaneously declares the end of a social movement
(as a permanent rupture) and insinuates the impossibility for another revolution (because
the struggle has ended). Also contested in my project is the narrow definition of
democracy that pervades the writing of Korean art history, because the ideals of
democracy, when visualized in artistic projects, may have less to do with the rules of
governing and more to do with the formal language of spatial composition, colorful
harmony/disharmony, and framing device, as well as the material support of papers, walls,
flags, and film negatives, that together give the artworks a multivalent political meaning.
Only when the relationship between art and democratic ideals opens up do we understand
the constellation of today’s Korean art works as innovatively political, even if innovation
at times means reinventing the workings of realities (as hy!nsil, hy!njang, and various
combinations of the two) developed some thirty years ago, when the first de-colonizing
Democracy serves a key role in this project for multiple reasons. In a most general
sense, this dissertation engages with the notion of democracy by investigating artworks
And yet, this kind of engagement with democracy, or the history of institutional
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Segyehwa): A Framework for Analysis” in Korea’s Globalization, edited by Samuel Kim
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2–3. Korean political theorists have argued this
before. See Kim, Jong-yeop, ed. 87ch'aejaeron minjuhwa ihu hanguk sahoe #i insikgwa sae
j!nmang (A Theory of the 1987 System: The Understanding and New Vision of South Korean
Society Since Democratization). (Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 2009)
24
!
political system of governing, and whether the art was produced during the time of a
Certainly, South Korea provides an interesting case study for scholars in both “normative
political issues such as maintaining economic and political stability after a transition
period).38 How I approach the question of democracy and democratic ideals in visual arts
is more specific to the political impasse that intellectuals across borders began to sense
especially during the post-war period of decolonization and political uprisings, such as
the Algerian independence movement, Paris May ‘68, Japan’s Anpo protest (against the
Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan), and
new social movements like the civil rights movement in the U.S.
within the larger wave of political dissent of the second half of the 20th century that
actively interrogated the very mechanism of organizing power, the very meaning of
Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and others in the
European post-68 era to articulate politics through such terms as ideology, dissensus,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c2003);
Archon Fung, “Democratic Theory and Political Science: A Pragmatic Method of Constructive
Engagement” in American Political Science Review 101.3 (August 2007), 443-458.
25
!
antagonism, alterity, and multitudes.39 It is my belief that the Korean art scene of post-
minjung politics serves as a site of a continued struggle for democracy—that is, the very
Huntington that South Korea has effectively achieved democracy, and thus has
spearheaded the third wave of democracy.40 Huntington’s praise rhymes with the
its democratic status rather than addressing how the coordinates of democracy have
changed in the new environment. Not as an object to achieve but as a social space that
considered by theorists in the humanities and the social sciences in Korea as one possible
I also find the more recent and post-colonial understandings of democracy put
forward by Homi Bhabha to be strongly pertinent to the South Korean minjung and post-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Antonio Gramsci’s development of cultural hegemony as a system of power in flux between
the dominant and the oppressed is important, as Althusser and his students Laclau and Mouffe
take hegemony as a basis of their theoretical development. Laclau and Mouffe also further
develop Claude Lefort’s idea of the empty vessel of power as the foundation of modern-day
democracy (i.e. the impossible ground and incommensurability), by formulating their “radical
democracy theory” in which consensus among people becomes not a goal to achieve but an ideal
to infinitely reach towards. Democracy for them is lived through the perpetual condition of
antagonism. This reformulation of democracy with the idea of dissensus rather than consensus is
resonant in Jacques Rancière too. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001). Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum, 2004).
40
Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997).
41
Here I refer to the Sungkonghoe University-based research center of democracy established in
2008. The radical democracy theory as a viable political theory however does not have a strong
mainstream impact in Korean scholarship of democracy now (circa 2012-2014), as I have
observed that talks by Zizek and Ranciere attract a substantially larger and wider crowd, as well
as a more visible media spotlight, than one by Chantal Mouffe in Seoul.
26
!
minjung approach to democracy. If works like Mouffe and Laclau’s radical democracy
incommensurable project, Bhabha agrees with and yet departs from their premises and
historicization. For Bhabha, democracy today is a de-realized project whose gap between
look at those who suffered the most under many democrats’ neocolonial impulses:
the very naming of the formation of the democratic experience and its expressions of
equality.”43 Throughout the thirty years of Korean political art-making, I argue, the goal
seeing reality with a critical distance. For the Korean artists featured in this project,
democracy and all of its ideals such as equality, justice, and liberty have always meant
two contradictory operations: the malleable universal ideals that can be applicable to
anyone, including themselves, and at the same time, the ideology of liberal democracy
anti-democratic corporatism in the name of a better life for all. Instead of railing at
democracy’s failure, it is democracy’s “fragility” and “frailty” to which Bhabha and the
artists about whom I write have turned for the idea of democracy’s “creative potential.”44
While keeping in mind that the frailty and the creative potential coexist in a
critical outlook onto democracy, this dissertation brings to the surface questions of visual
language and visual form. What does such a de-realized understanding of democracy
look like? What do the forms of resistance against a naively universal epistemology of
democracy look like, or feel like? As important if not more important than the battle of
ideology are the material forms and spatial construction of the everyday that take into
consideration the “de-realizing dialectic.” This question of form also complicates the
certain forms and places, all the while transforming into a new understanding of agency.
The consideration of colors, spatial compositions, rhythms, and materials with durability
and ephemerality bring conceptual and visual depth to the analysis of practiced
democracy. The artists in Chapters 2-3 thus turn to the urban space as a concrete site in
which other adjacent terms like “the vernacular,” “spontaneous culture,” “mimetic art,”
and “publicness” express the dialectical forms of democracy. And finally, in Chapter 4, I
add the idea of democracy being inherently divisional, as well as de-realized, in the
divided Korean peninsula, thereby introducing another formal, structural, and ideological
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Ibid.
28
!
* * *
Chapter Outline
Korean Art (1979-1987),” I investigate the aesthetics of dissident art that flourished
during the 1980s. Although the movement’s historical, social, and political aspects have
long been the subject of in-depth studies, the focus on the activists and their ideologies
period—despite the fact that a plethora of visual artists produced innovative aesthetic
language that actively reinvented the very meaning of politics and dissident spirit. One
important goal for this chapter is therefore to study various artistic activities (e.g. holding
exhibitions despite censorship, writing manifestos, launching a citizen art school, and
political anguish but as forging a productive site where the meaning of politics itself is
negotiated.
hy!njang—that are connected yet hold distinctive semantic power for the two types of art
practices born in Seoul and Gwnagju. I begin this chapter by focusing on the Seoul-based
art collective Reality and Utterance (Hy"nsil kwa par"n), which was founded in 1979 and
spearheaded a theory of art that engaged with society by relating speaking (par!n) to
reality (hy!nsil). The collective’s desire to make political speech through art encouraged
them to assess “reality,” which for them meant both the state-sponsored media spectacle
29
!
(medium) and the “truth” of reality (content) hidden behind it. Photo collages of Kim
Gun-hee and Kim Jeong-heon most aptly illustrate the relationship between reality and
artistic speech that was established through numerous, heated debates (held in both public
and semi-public spheres) among the artists and critics of Reality and Utterance. This is
what I discuss in the first part of my chapter, which remains within Reality and
Utterance’s discourse on “reality.” In the second part of the chapter, I analyze how a
different notion of reality was envisioned at demonstration sites (hy!njang) by tracing the
political art-making. This chapter, historically rooted in the minjung period, therefore
“collective authorship,” setting the stage for my argument that, with the 1980s democracy
movement, the notion of reality provided a dialectical basis for contemporaneity for the
artistic practices which subsequently unfolded in the post-minjung era of the 1990s and
2000s.
Entitled “Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Postcolonial Pop and the Mimetic Art in the Long
incorporation of vernacular culture and ephemeral temporality in the “pop art” of Choi
movement period. Even though the 1980s dissident artists and protest art were considered
30
!
by many to have “disappeared” with the end of military dictatorship (1987), the
cultural critics alike.) On the level of the everyday, anti-democratic forces were most
I examine the various mediums and disciplines with which Choi builds his
creative world: the archive of his street photographs; art installations with pop
sensibilities using inflatable balloons and cheap plastic baskets; exhibitions for
experimental performances; interior designs for cafes with chairs from working-class
food stall (p’ochangmach’a); and the publication designs of books and posters. If Korean
and international art critics’ hitherto unbalanced focus on Choi’s colorful plastic art
installation has mistakenly associated Choi with globe-trotting pop artists like Jeff Koons
and Damien Hirst, who also use banal objects, this chapter will take a more balanced look
at Choi’s entire oeuvre, proposing that Choi’s art-making model is more ambiguous. In
his ambiguity, and in his production model of incessantly copying the unstable, transitory,
spontaneous aesthetics of Korean vernacular culture, Choi becomes more than a “Korean
pop artist.” He instead reinvents the post-modern aesthetics of pop art through a post-
colonial, post-minjung politics that confronts the 1990s South Korean march towards
cultural globalization. His art forges a mimetic relationship with vernacular reality—a
those terms and brings them into a new era in South Korean politics. It is in this chapter
31
!
that I elaborate the aesthetics of post-minjung, which designates the bifurcated view of
projects by two collectives: Sungnam Project and FlyingCity. In the Korean art scene, the
years 1998-1999 are important for two reasons. First, the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis
(the “IMF Crisis”) affected the Korean art market and corporate funding for art, which
led artists to found “alternative art spaces” themselves (called taean konggan, literally
meaning alternative space). This gave a push to a new institutional model that thrived on
Second, these alternative art spaces functioned as think tanks for a new artistic mode of
engaging reality through site-specific, research-based conceptual art in the name of new
public art. Although the term “reality” as in hy!nsil and hy!njang had almost entirely
disappeared from the scene by the late 1990s, I argue that the political and aesthetic
ambitions in the 1980s articulated via reality were reoriented and translated into a new
term, that of publicness (kongkong), an idea that reinvents the workings of hy!nsil and
The pursuit of publicness was most actively manifested in the artist collectives
Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s efforts to critique the half century-long tradition of
commercial plazas) by making a new type of art that embraced a more populist notion of
32
!
the “public.” A plethora of questions about art and democracy are posed in these two
working-class satellite city near Seoul) and the human ecology of Cheonggyecheon (a
hub of small-scale metal workshops facing urban renewal in the historic downtown of
Seoul). But what are their working definitions of public space; who or what is the public;
and how can one express publicness in politico-aesthetic terms? These questions are
asked by the artists in part due to the increasingly prevailing practice of “urban renewal”
trace the epistemological significance in the shift—from minjung art (minjung misul) to
public art (kongkong misul), or from minjung’s obsession with “reality” to public art’s
dominant notion of public, public space, and publicness. I also put the art projects
featured in this chapter of late 1990s and early 2000s South Korea into conversation with
the contemporary paradigm shift in the public art practices in the U.S. with the emergent
discourse of “art and spatial politics” (Deutsche, 1996) and “dialogical art” (Kester,
2004).
democracy movement in South Korea, Chapters 1, 2, and 3 also demonstrate the diverse
ways in which Korean artists have sought to make art closer to what they perceived as
reality over the past thirty years. This idea of proximity to reality that injects energy into
the South Korean art scene over three decades is finally addressed as an
North Korea within South Korean art history is already well accounted for: in South
Korea, the cultural history of modern Korea is written through the disavowal of North
Korea and its cultural practitioners, or the forced absence of any cultural products
sympathetic to socialism. But despite the South Korean military dictatorships’ strict ban
on any alliance with communism and North Korea, and the stultifying effects of the
National Security Law (1948-), artistic efforts to reconnect with Northern brethren began
with the rise of the minjung movement and their socialist ideals, which flourished in a
In this chapter, I am inspired by one of the foremost literary critics, Paik Nak-
chung, who theorized “division system (pundan ch’aeje)” and “division reality (pundan
hy!nsil)” as the ultimate logics organizing social formation and reality in South Korea.
The notion of division reality, when seen through the various manifestations of “reality”
that I outline in the previous chapters, stands out as envisioning a different type of
antagonistic relationship between opposing entities. Whereas the first three chapters
develop a hegemonic paradigm between the dominant and the oppressed, the dividing
line between the North and the South cannot be understood in such terms. Following the
pictorial representation of “the Korean nation as one” (by 1980s dissident artists) to the
and the North (starting from the 1990s, especially during the Sunshine Policy era of
democracy, a pure manifestation of democratic antagonism (per Mouffe and Laclau, via
Rosalyn Deutsche). Along with two oil paintings about unification from the 1980s by Oh
Yoon and Sin Hak-chul, closely analyzed in this chapter are Seung Woo Back’s
Chapter One
On October 17, 1980, the electricity abruptly cut off at the Munyejinh!ngwon Art
Gallery in Seoul. Just like that, the Inaugural Exhibition of the legendary 1980s art group
Hy"nsil kwa par"n (Reality and Utterance) began—and ended within a few hours. [Fig.
1.1] According to the state-run art gallery representative, the exhibition had to shut down
due to the “inadequacy” of the artworks on display. One visitor, an art student at that time
who had fortuitously stumbled upon the exhibition, remembers his inability to see the
paintings; the candles hastily lit by the artists were too dim to render visible the works on
the wall.45 If the lights had been on, he would have witnessed a range of styles: oil on
costume hanbok, etc. To different degrees, all of the works illustrated aspects of what
reconstruction in the three decades following the provisional end of the Korean War
(1950-53), which had devastated most of the country’s industrial and cultural
infrastructure. For the participating artists, these two-dimensional works with references
to mass media and popular culture had two goals: The first was to counter the years-long
dominance of monochromatic abstract painting in the South Korean art scene [Fig. 1.2],
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Reality and Utterance (Seoul: Sigak kwa "n", 1985) and Minjungmisur#l Hyanghay!: Hy!nsil
kwa par!n 10-ny!n ûi Palchach’wi (Towards Minjung Art: Reality and Utterance’s 10 Years of
Footprint), (Seoul: Kwahak kwa sasang, 1990).
36
!
which conspicuously thrived under the dictators Park Chung-hee (1960-1979) and Chun
Du-hwan (1979-1987), and which sought to evacuate narrative from the picture frame.
The second goal was to interrogate the widespread fear of enunciating—or narrating—
relatively benign censorship on the part of the gallery was therefore not entirely
unexpected, given this climate of oppression in which artworks like these represented the
fight for visibility against obscurity and erasure that would continue throughout the 1980s
and beyond.46 However, the issues of visibility versus invisibility and of government
censorship versus dissident opposition were never stable binaries. They had multiple
the location of expression, and the composition of anticipated audiences, that this chapter
art and reality emerged from the members’ recognition of the artist’s changing role in the
increasingly mediatized landscape of the industrializing society, this view did not
represent the entire picture of dissident art-making in the 1980s. A slightly different
political agenda was at play in other art collectives, such as the Gwangju Jayu Misulin
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
As a participating artist told it years later, the person who insisted on censoring these works
was an abstract painter who held his exhibition one flight downstairs and who asked the gallery to
remove the works of Reality and Utterance. It was censorship within the art scene—not by the
government—that Reality and Utterance artists faced. Yun B"m-mo, “Hy"nsil kwa par"n 10-
ny"n ûi Palchach’wi” (Reality and Utterance’s 10 years of footprint), Minjungmisur#l Hyanghay!:
Hy!nsil kwa par!n 10-ny!n ûi Palchach’wi (Towards Minjung Art: Reality and Utterance’s 10
Years of Footprint), (Seoul: Kwahak kwa sasang, 1990), 552.
37
!
(1985-1994), and S"ul Misul Gongdongche (Seoul Art Collective, 1985-1995). The
growing urgency of configuring a new art reflected the heightened sense of political
which commenced in the 1960s and took a more radical turn in the 1980s. By the early
1980s, these art groups quickly formed association with minjung munhwa yesul undong
(the minjung culture and arts movement), which also germinated in the 1960s and came
of age in the late 1970s. Considered part of the broader minjung culture and arts
social movement as active propaganda units, which meant that they effectively
introduced the visual component to the minjung demonstration sites by producing large-
scale banners, flags, brochures, and wall texts with slogans and images to be distributed
on university campuses and across the city. Enveloping the urban space and the citizen-
The reality for these activist artists concerned hy!njang, meaning a “site” or more
accurately a site where an event (e.g., a political protest) takes place. Instead of pursuing
the ground of hy!njang and making protest visual arts that shaped the dynamics as well
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
As I delineate in the introduction, even though minjung misul (minjung art) is currently the
default term for 1970s and 1980s political art, the term was coined by a journalist in 1985 and
was initially rejected by the artists themselves. In the 1970s and early 1980s, saeroun misul
undong (new art movement) and “minjok art” (national art) were the terms mostly commonly
used.
38
!
their bodies according to, and under the influence of, the on-site visual installations. The
photograph of Seoul’s City Square taken during a funeral procession of six student
martyrs in June 1987—provides a prime example. [Fig. 0.1] Six larger-than-life face
portraits loomed large amid innumerable citizens who filled up the square. These moving
paintings—quickly prepared for the funeral procession by artists like Choi Byung-su (a
literally moved and mobilized the bodies of the activated citizens who enacted a
collective ritual.
Days after the photograph was taken, the dictator Chun was compelled at last to
year. However, it is important to remember that this photograph epitomizes the dynamics
of art and politics in South Korea not simply because the event that it captures was
deemed successful. More important than the immediate result of the movement is what
the photograph reveals: that the funeral paintings’ particular aesthetic quality (i.e. size,
composition, etc.) and the mechanism of its display (on a truck as part of a funeral
space, thus forging a new cultural language born out of the political movement. This new
language, as I will analyze in detail, has acquired the power to make the social reality of
the 1980s categorically visible, a power that survived long after the political movement
had dissipated by the end of the decade. How then can we unravel this new language
39
!
from thirty years later, especially given the complex set of dissimilarities and contrasts
that arise from juxtaposing, say, the exhibition of Reality and Utterance versus the protest
art of Choi Byung-su? In other words, how do we account for the divergent views of
the new visual languages, by artists who shared a certain “mandate” to seek alternatives
beyond state ideologies and beyond the received notions of international modernism? As
historian Kristin Ross’s work on May of 1968 in Paris discusses, a time of political
struggle puts pressure on its dissident participants to create a new visual and cultural
language, even in their inability to assess such a change or to possess a full cognizance of
their invention. Often the rapidity of revolution’s unraveling exceeds the articulation of
aesthetic language, forcing the actors on the site to lose absolute control over their actions
or at least an acute awareness of the consequences of their actions in both aesthetic and
political terms. Such was the case for artists in 1980s South Korea attempting to make
The inability to see clearly the mechanisms and impacts of artistic production at
the time of its making inevitably shifts the burden of historicization into a post-revolution
period. I must highlight here that the place of minjung art in Korean art history has long
been that of negation and invisibility. Detractors of minjung art dismiss it on the basis of
phenomenological, and affective values. Until recently Korean art historians in academia
rarely gave minjung art the aesthetic and political significance it deserves. Surprisingly,
the very words of former minjung art practitioners also lend perceptive negativity to their
40
!
primary resources from the 1980s through the 2000s (which included artist publications,
support of the artists), the minjung practitioners’ self-assessment of the art movement,
both at that time and retroactively, is steeped in lamentation over the art movement’s
inadequacy, with the reasons for failure being divided, broadly speaking, into those
internal to the art scene (i.e. the artworks proper and the dynamics within the art
movement) and those external to the art scene (i.e. sociopolitical factors that frame and
For Choi Yeol and Kim Bong-jun, who locate the fault within, the art movement
failed to fully integrate into the social movement. For them, some artists problematically
and anachronistically made the agenda of remaining within the realm of art (i.e. gallery
space in the case of Reality and Utterance) their priority, while others, despite their brave
willingness to produce protest art, most often failed to devise “correct” figurations of
member of Reality and Utterance) likewise argues that the failure originates from the
inability to reconcile gallery art (ch!nsijang misul) and protest art (hy!njang misul)
within the art movement at large.49 The lack of a unified front forged between the two
“factions” of minjung art is the cause of failure for Sung. The second line of criticism
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Choi Yeol, Minjokmisul#i ironkwa silch'!n (Theory and Practice of Minjok Art). (Seoul:
Tolpeke, 1991), 237.
49
Sung, Wan-kyung. “From the Local Context: Conceptual Art in South Korea.” In Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, edited by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and
Rachel Weiss (Queens, NY: The Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 119-126.
41
!
traces a reason “external” to art—that is, the rapidly shifted sociopolitical environment of
Korea, in which the end of the democracy movement in 1987 meant the implementation
country’s wholesale insertion into the neoliberal economic order.50 Amidst the 1990s
march towards the age of post-ideology and globalization, the intensely ideological
position of minjung art became conspicuously obsolete, appearing out of date and too
“hot” in the age of “cool” global culture, as Sung and others acknowledged in hindsight.
In this explanation of minjung art’s demise, the fall of the Soviet bloc and historical
communism was repeatedly emphasized as another major reason for the domestic social
change, and a legitimate reason for the loss of lofty goals of revolution for the artists and
activists alike. With the end of movement came the end of activism and activist art. Or so
they say.
The evaluation of minjung art (art historical or sociopolitical) has so far been
imprisoned in the tale of success and failure (of either the art or the social movement) at
the expense of articulating the aesthetics of the diverse range of activities—from photo-
collages and woodblocks to banner paintings and slogan flags—that constitute a complex
discourse of art and politics born amid the democracy movement. Therefore, locating
points of divergence between art and the social movement, as much as finding the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Sung Wan-kyung, Minmung misul modonism sigakyongu (Minjung Art, Modernism, Visual
Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999), 39; and Sung, “The Rise and Fall of Minjung Art,” Being
Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy,
1980-2010. ed. Sohl Lee (Seoul: Hy"nsil Munhwa; Seattle: University of Washington, 2012),
188-203.
42
!
argument. On another level, my attempt to give a renewed visibility to minjung art also
makes a decisive move away from the very language of success and failure, truth and
false, right and wrong—that is, the rhetoric of truth claims and moralism—in which the
that what is obsolete now is not the 1980s art itself but today’s discourse on minjung art,
a discourse that fails to see both the artworks and the criticism of the 1980s in a new light
and beyond the words of minjung practitioners themselves as well as their opponents.
Moreover, the analysis of the work, I argue, demands understanding not just of what it
says but of how it functioned in physical and discursive spaces. In other words, I will
analyze not only what is depicted within the composition but also how the materiality of
the very support—as various as banner, flag, floor tag, or funeral portrait—gave the
art gallery, my analysis points to the significance of “artistic speech” (par!n) made
This chapter therefore seeks to liberate two histories of minjung art—one that
developed in the galleries and art publications (the art of hy!nsil) and the other that
thrived on the streets and the public squares (the art of hy!njang). Despite wide-spread
cynicism about the inability of 1980s politically engaged artists to reconcile the gap
between gallery art and protest art, I argue that the preservation or the incomplete
trajectories of minjung art’s development as politicized art that engages with reality—as
43
!
hy!nsil or hy!njang. The tension between the two different understandings of reality was
initially also a difference between the earlier art groups like Reality and Utterance, whose
members were well into their mid-30s in 1980, and the later groups with more self-aware
activist tendencies like the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists and its predecessor
Visual Media Research Group in Gwangju (whose members were in their 20s and many
still enrolled in university). My research, however, has led me to believe that the most
Whereas the first group sought to revolutionize the institution of art from within by
injecting the visual economy of popular culture into the picture frame, the latter sought a
revolution outside art institutions by visually politicizing the public realm and urban
landscape.51 As I will explore more in detail, this difference in location has consequently
shaped the ways in which collective spirit and collective authorship are practiced in
Contrary to the misperception that the dialectical relationship between these two
positions erupted in mid-1980s, the history of minjung art that I discuss begins with the
premise that the tension between these two poles has a much longer history. Here, I will
examine two vastly different artistic strategies in the art of hy!nsil and the art of
hy!njang—the strategies regarding the location of enunciation and the audience for their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
This dilemma is similar to the 1920s colonial struggle that the Korean Federation of Proletariat
Artists (KAPF) in search of a resistant mechanism working within the Japanese colonialism or
claiming revolution like the 1919 March Independence Movement in Seoul. Another set of
dilemmas that haunted KAPF artists concerned whether to utilize or dismiss popular culture (i.e.
popular mediums like film novel, cartoons, movies, etc.). These binaries seem still relevant in the
1980s, especially considering Reality and Utterance’s first two exhibitions that pay close
attention to commercially available images such as advertisements and products of popular visual
culture like television dramas.
44
!
respective art. Both the art of hy!nsil and the art of hy!njang share the year 1979 as their
point of origin, as artists formed Reality and Utterance and the Association of Gwangju
Freedom Artists in Seoul and Gwangju, respectively, without awareness of each other’s
existence. This chapter will therefore trace the artists’ different rationales and motivations
for the unprecedented collective gesture, their discussions about the ideal of art (what
kind of art is called forth in the reality of the here-and-now), and their understanding of
reality, as well as their representation and eventual making of reality as a political and
popular interface. Only with such an archeology can we grasp a more nuanced
understanding of the 1980s zeitgeist, one that accounts for divergences as well as
this end, this chapter lays the groundwork for this dissertation’s thesis: that artists’
investigation of the relationship between art and reality is at the core of South Korean
contemporary art, serving as the thematic, discursive, and aesthetic thread that weaves
moments of creative eruption and epistemological transition together with aspirations for
democracy.
Reality and Utterance: hy!nsil and la prise de parole in the New Era of Images
For the first gathering of what later became Reality and Utterance, ten artists
including Kim Jeong-heon, Joo Jae-hwan, and Oh Yoon and two art critics Ra Won-sik
sik, who thought it would make little sense if visual artists did nothing to commemorate
the twentieth anniversary of the April 19 Revolution the following year.53 The April 19
Revolution of 1960, or 4.19 as it is called in South Korea, was the first grass-roots
movement since the founding of South Korean government in 1948 that mobilized
nation-wide dissent against the statist hegemony. The movement ended when the wave of
young activists (consisting mostly of middle school, high school, and university students)
successfully forced president Syngman Rhee to step down and eventually flee to the U.S.,
whose ardent support he had enjoyed during his 13-year tenure. Shortly thereafter,
however, army general Park Chung-hee seized the presidential power by a military coup
on May 16, 1961. Despite the brief lifespan of 4.19., the so-called 4.19-generation’s
activist fervor had subsequently spread to a wider cultural arena, producing aftereffects in
literature, music, and theater throughout the 1960s and 70s. Examples of people’s
literature, music, and theater are ample.54 Depending on the theorist at this time, the term
to designate “people” oscillated between minjung and minjok, sometimes with little self-
reflection. While minjung is closer to the Korean term for “proletarians” and minjok for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
The twelve participants were: Won Dong-suk, Kim Jeong-heon, Joo Jae-hwan, Oh Yoon, Ra
Won-sik, Sung Wan-kyung, Son Chang-s"p, Kim Ky"ng-in, Oh Su-hwan, Kim J"ng-su, Kim
Yong-tae, Yun B"m-mo, and Choi Min. Yun B"m-mo, “Hy"nsil kwa par"n 10-ny"n ûi
Palchach’wi” (Reality and Utterance’s 10 years of footprint), 535.
53
Sung Wan-kyung recalls Ra’s words: “When considering the impact and weight of 4.19 in our
history, it would be a shame if the arts scene does not express any response or reflection about it.”
“Roundtable: Consciousness of Hy"nsil and Activism of Art: The Development and Prospect of
1980s from the Perspective of Reality and Utterance,” Reality and Utterance (Seoul: Sigak kwa
"n", 1985), 185-7.
54
Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South
Korea. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.). Also see: South Korea’s Minjung Movement:
The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. ed. Kenneth Well (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,
1995).
46
!
“(Korean) ethnic group,” both refer to the oppressed, subaltern nature of ethnic
Koreans.55 In the field of visual arts, the only memorable incident that stands out in the
1960s is the 1969 establishment of a collective Hy"nsil Tongin (Reality Group), whose
inaugural exhibition was preemptively censored the day before its planned opening in
Seoul, with a more brutal consequence than Reality and Utterance would experience in
1980.56 Reality Group consisted of Kim Chi-ha (a poet), Kim Yoon-sik (an art critic), and
Oh Yoon, Lim Se-taek, Oh Ky"ng-hwan (three painters in their early 20s and still
enrolled at the Seoul National University). Among the three, Oh Yoon became famous
for having burnt all of his submitted paintings as a protest against the shutdown. The
exhibition was unrealized but not, in the end, completely silenced. The collective’s
manifesto, composed by the already-recognized leading minjung literary figure Kim Chi-
ha, called for a new artistic language that would reflect and intervene in contemporary
to build minjok ch!k hy!nsil ju#i (realism or the aesthetics of reality for/about/by Korean
people) and ultimately provided a vocabulary of resistance for other critics and artists,
such as Kim Yoon-su and Ra Won-sik, who developed their theory of dissident art (under
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006), 165-192. On the leading
literary critic Paik Nak-chung’s minjok literature theory in light of his division system theory, see
Ryu Junpil, “On national literature and the division system,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 11,
No.4. (2010),552-565.
56
These artists rebelled against abstract expressionism, which was the dominant painting style
taught at art schools at the time, by emulating the socialist realism and mural movements in
Mexico. The announcement posters for the collective’s inaugural exhibition caught the eyes of
their professors, who deemed the figurative paintings decidedly socialist and thus pro-North
Korea. Under the anti-communist military dictatorship, any gesture even obliquely pointing to the
“other” Korea and its cultural identity was worth reporting to the South Korean CIA, which is
precisely what the professors did.
47
!
the name of minjok art or minjung art) in the 1970s. Both Kim and Ra became the
founding members of Reality and Utterance; so did Oh Yoon, one of the three artists of
Reality Group.
Not long into the first meeting of Reality and Utterance, the conversation drifted
away from the initial motivation for their gathering—that is, addressing the role of art in
honoring the past revolution of 4.19—and instead advanced to what the artists considered
more pertinent and immediately political: activating present-day politics of the Korean art
world at an institutional level. The 1970s discourse of art in South Korea was
painting, which the artists and critics gathered on Sinmun Road considered
“fine art” but literally meaning “pure art”58) despite other artistic mediums’ increasingly
forthright “social engagement” (ch‘amy!) put the art world out of touch with the here-
and-now.59 Against the widespread ideology of purity, disengagement and disinterest, the
desired way of making art had to evolve to engage hy!nsil, first by determining “what
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Sung in “Roundtable,” 186.
58
When in use, the Korean term sunsumisul means “art’s for art’s sake” even though it is a direct
translation of “fine art.”
59
Sunsu or the idea of purity itself takes on a local-specific meaning in Korea, with the advent of
Park Chung-hee dictatorship. As a result, Sunsu can directly mean anti-communist policy of the
military regime. Theodore H. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's
Frontier (Columbia University, 2012)
48
!
hy!nsil is” and then articulating it in visual means.60A profound desire for such art rooted
in hy!nsil is explicit in these artists’ decision to include the term hy!nsil in the
collective’s name.
studies, as well as art history, with different traditions of understanding in different parts
of the world. In Korean intellectual history alone, the discourse goes back to the colonial
period (1909-1945) and the leftist artists (writers, critics, film theorists, and visual artists)
of the Korean Proletariat Federation of Artists (KAPF, 1925-1935) and other progressive
writers, for whom realism was ideological and social than simply epistemological.61 For
the colonial-period artists, realism was understood as one of the most effective artistic
means with which to express both a materialist worldview and the writer’s critical
subjectivity, thereby favoring the latter between epistemological realism (depiction of the
world around us) and social realism (ideologically driven construct of the world and the
“typical” individuals whose psyche world serves as a critique of the ideology). The
emphasis put on realism in Korea with such terms as hy!nsil ju#i (aesthetics of hy!nsil)
and ri!lij#m thus has its origin in the colonial period.62 Over the following three decades
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
60
“Roundtable,” 181-226.
61
For the influence of Lenin and Georg Lukács on the Korean proletariat artists, see Rat Fire:
Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell University, 2013).
62
Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006), 182.
49
!
beginning in 1932, the national partition in 1945, the subsequent founding of the South
progressive intellectuals to the North in the 1950s—all contributed to a long hiatus in the
practice of such realism in South Korea.63 It was only in the 1970s that the return of
realism was vividly felt in the realm of literature, with the poet Kim Chi-ha being one of
its ardent proponents. Undoubtedly, Kim’s Reality Group manifesto (1969) was one of
major inspirations for the founding of Reality and Utterance, as well as the 1980s artists’
The brief manifesto of Reality and Utterance, published on the first page of their
exhibition’s catalogue, encompasses the range of inquiries that the artists posed through
their practice. A sentence expressing their discontent with the “existing forms of art”
opens the manifesto, while the core of the manifesto is concisely summarized and posed
as questions that prioritize criteria concerning the artists. Although the manifesto reads as
determination, its interrogative force and concision rendered it amenable to citation. Parts
of the manifesto were repeatedly referred to in various art historical texts as reflecting the
1. What is reality (hy!nsil)? For artists, is reality located within the realm
of art, or does it expand to the urgency of embracing external influence?
[From this arises] the reexamining of the meaning of reality, and the
point of encounter between the artist’s consciousness and reality.
2. How do we see and feel reality (hy!nsil)? From perceiving reality,
developing critical reflection, and acquiring insight into reality [we gain]
the reality of neighbors, the reality of the era, the connection with site-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
Theodore H. Hughes, Ibid.
50
!
way, what truly concretized their conceptual ground can be found in the essays and
critic Won Dong-suk emphasized the pronoun uri (our) that modifies hy!nsil (reality) at a
paper given at the group’s 1980 meeting. (Between 1980 and 1985, the group met
The pronoun “we” designates Korean people (minjok or minjung) who are oppressed,
and whose life is deeply affected and dispossessed by foreign powers as well as by the
Won’s understanding of reality was symptomatic of the 1970s and 1980s programmatic
elimination of modernist universalism that KAPF had, to a great degree, retained during
the first two decades of the twentieth century.65 In the 1980s the progressive artists’
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
The presentation manuscripts, and in some cases the transcript of discussions, were published
in art magazines or as part of exhibition catalogues.
65
Theodore Hughes, Ibid. Also see: Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and
Popular Memory: South Korea,” Positions 1.1 (Spring, 1993): 77-102. Choi argues that the
Korean minjung movement is less a Marxist proletariat movement than a nationalist
decolonization movement.
51
!
antagonism towards anything foreign and their firm belief in the dichotomy of the Korean
versus the foreign was a reaction to the fascist state’s violent propaganda of pure art
(sunsu misul), which the artists in Reality and Utterance considered a mere copy of
Western (read: imperialist) style.66 Entrenched in ethnonationalism that spills into anti-
colonial nativism, artist Im Ok-sang went so far as to dismiss all signs of industrial
modernity as properly belonging to the Other (that is, the Western): “As I walk across the
city, rely on refrigerator, and watch TV, I feel that I am a victim of industrialization,
which is a different type of civilization [than the one of our own]. It has already become
commonplace to see in our surroundings the modern urban space filled with plastic and
cement, pornographic images and advertisement, and industrial products modeled after
the West. Not only in sunsu misul but also in such a visual environment, we witness a
The group’s collective agenda was clear: if the reality of the art world concerned
“pure art” (the status quo in need of usurpation), the “commendable” artistic practice
should not engage!a direct parody or ameliorative expansion of abstract painting, but
make explicit the possibility of communicating “our reality” through art. The core value
of art arises from its ability to mediate a message, trigger communication about “our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
The historical research of the formation of tansaekhwa reveals that a much more complex
matrix of agendas and forces were at play than a mere desire to faithfully mimic the European or
American abstract painting. An investigation into Koreanness was embedded in the production
and promotion of tansaekhwa. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of
Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
67
Sigakkwa !n! I (Vision and Language I: Industrial Society and Art) (Seoul: Y"lhwadang,
1982), 284. Cultural theorist Chen Kuang-hsin’s differentiation of nationalism and nativism is
useful here, because Im’s rhetorical emphasis on native Korean culture of the pre-colonial and
pre-modern era is more similar to nativism. Chen, Kuan-hsing, “Decolonization: A Geocolonial
Historical Materialism,” Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University,
2010), 65-114.
52
!
reality.” The second term of the collective’s name “par!n,” which is connected to hy!nsil
by the conjunction “kwa” (and), points to a desire to formulate art as communication and
mediation. Of the collective’s debate between the name Reality and Utterance and its first
runner-up (hy!nsil kwa p’y!hy!n, or Reality and Expression), Sung Wan-kyung notes
that their ultimate selection of “utterance,” a term less familiar to artists than
“expression,” represents a desire to move away from the “inside” of art (the art world
proper) and expand its boundaries of activity to the “outside” (the social, the cultural, and
the political), and to “emphasize the belief that diverse individuals outside of the art
institutions can become subjects of multiple utterances.”68 Such a utopian move was
meant to invite non-art professionals, that is, the people (minjung) and masses (taejung),
into possibly occupying the subject position that recognizes the inadequacies and
injustice in hy!nsil and speaks about it. Moreover, it injected into artistic practice a sense
of direct political speech rather than a processed, ambiguous cycle of exhibition. On how
to translate par!n into other languages, Choi Min thought of the English term “utterance,”
that is, “an immediate and direct response in the face of a certain situation or motivation,”
whereas Sung suggested the French term “la prise de parole,” to imply that one raises
one’s hand among the audience of people. Sung says that he wanted to “emphasize how
one becomes aware of the necessity of one’s par!n and exercises initiative.”69
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Sung Wan-kyong said: “If the term “expression” already anticipates a certain voyeuristic
distance, “utterance” is a response more immediate, active, and concrete, one that is more hy!nsil
ch!k (realistic or reality-like) and effective.” “Roundtable,” 186.
69
Even though the collective name is not hy!nsil #i par!n, which would mean “utterance of
[about] reality.” The discussion about the foreign translation of hy!nsil kwa par!n began early
on. As Sung Wan-kyung noted in 1985, he and Choi Min each proposed the French and the
53
!
spectacle? If, as the members of Reality and Utterance hoped, the cultural form of art was
to step into the territory of par!n and sot’ong, competing with other mediums of
culture, what would it look like? What forms would such an art take? As illustrated in the
two-dimensional works by Reality and Utterance artists, the primary aim of their art was
two-fold: to communicate with the audience but also to generate a hybrid mediatized
language.
The Early Works of Reality and Utterance: Consumer Culture, Media Spectacle,
and Kitsch
closed inaugural show was "l!ld!ld!l, a silkscreen print by Kim Gun-hee. [Fig. 1.3]
Two planes collapse onto the flat surface—both indexical copies of print cultural
materials. The bottom layer is reproduced from the page 5 of the Chosun Daily, dated
May 21, 1980. This spread either lacked illustration; or, even if it had one, it would have
been hidden by the top layer, which is a torn half of a commercial advertisement
(originally in full color scheme but reduced here to black and white), for tubed ice
popsicles called Aicha (a pun on “Oh, cold!”). In its original state the advertisement
would have had two separate but intersecting narrative components: the upper half of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
English translations. Educated at Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French scholarship between
1972-76, Sung remains more fluent in French than English.
54
!
page devoted to three identically dressed women with large hoop earrings and head
scarves of Caribbean flare, each holding a popsicle; the advertisement’s bottom half
featuring their captain: a Korean man in the awkwardly artificial role of a pirate. In the
original advertisement, the two planes are divided by a text band that reads “[So cold that
it] numbs inside your mouth.” [Fig. 1.4] In Kim’s reuse of the commercial image, she
only left “"l"ld"ld"l,” the mimetic word describing the numbing state, and the three
women of the top half.70 The removal of the word “mouth” (the physical site of
desensitization) and the captain (the beneficiary of the pleasurable dessert or the
sexualized women) liberates the state of numbing to describe any number of possibilities.
The news dated May 21, 1980 (when the state-sponsored massacre in Gwangju that had
begun on May 18 was still fully on), not the popsicle, might be one such object which
motivates the production of montage. Through the montage, the artist makes explicit her
position on the May 1980 Gwangju Democracy Movement. The reference to Gwangju is
explicit in its date, regardless of whether the particular news clipping reveals the truth
behind the massacre or distorts it. If the Korean major news media at that time had ever
reported on the incident, as in the case of another prominent paper Tong’a Daily of the
text, Kim’s "l!ld!ld!l links the two sides of mediatized realities—the news outlet that
suppresses truth (the play of invisibility) and the advertisement whose raison d'être is to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Aicha commercial (1980) is now available on YouTube, effectively demonstrating the
aesthetics against which Kim Gun-hee was working:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2KGw9nQwRg. (Last accessed on November 30, 2013)
55
!
encompassing control of the South Korean people beyond the reach of the hard politics of
martial law but in the realm of culture. This could be seen in the “Three S Policy”—the
government’s outright promotion of “sports, sex, and screen,” the designation of three
popular entertainment arenas constituting the site of fantasy for the masses, delivering the
lush food of divertissement rather than critical thinking. The artist’s critical par!n targets
these invisible and hypervisible realities that make up the two sides of the same coin.
New meaning arises from decontexualization and recontexualization, which alter existing
meanings by reframing the existing social fabric supporting the undemocratic regime. A
thread of commonality linking artists in Reality and Utterance is the discursive weight
placed less on the outspoken critique of the regime’s landmark political decisions (such
as political massacre and violation of constitution) than on its cultural mechanism (such
as the mass media and the language of communication of popular culture, which the
and its pervasiveness in the everyday). 71 The targeted location of enunciation for Reality
and Utterance was always the realm of cultural representation, one degree removed from
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
The point that the dictatorial rule depended on such an unstable mechanism of visuality and
politics was well made when the artist re-cast a new version of "l!ld!ld!l for the second version
of the Inaugural Exhibition. To avoid the censorship second time, the artists self-censored some
of the works, one of them being "l!ld!ld!l. The new version omitted many of the texts in the
back plane, so as to mimic the form of harmless advertisement. Although it is questionable
whether this self-censorship mechanism was effective, it demonstrates the artists’ belief that a
dissident political speech can be made through juxtaposing the two means of regime control.
56
!
The reference to mass media and consumerism also appears frequently in the
work of Kim Jeong-heon (b. 1945), whose two collages are featured in the catalogue’s
next spread. Titled Marching Alongside Tom Boys (1980) and Creating a Life of Plenty
(1980), both works insert the non-descript figure of a Korean farmer into found
Because the figures are rendered with rough brushstrokes in acrylic, both farmers are
discernably male but their physical features do not explicitly indicate gender or age, In
Marching Alongside Tom Boys, the farmer stands, or walks, in between two Korean
female models sporting Annie Hall-style pants suits and high heels, conspicuously
replicating the new-woman image that has a long history in Hollywood cinema and that
Korean cinema had also replicated on its screen. [Fig. 1.5] Most obvious are the women’s
perfectly styled outfits, coiffed hair, and straight legs caught in the moment of a fashion-
shoot runway walk, all of which direct the viewers’ eyes to the contrast they make vis-à-
vis the farmer’s awkward standing pose and fashion appropriate to his physically
demanding labor: sun hat, shapeless shirt, baggy rolled up pants and a sickle in his hands.
But it is the models who are in the wrong place, as the artist not only inserted the farmer
into the picture frame but also painted over the background to depict a quintessentially
Korean rice field with low hill mountains afar, as if the new, modernized Korean lifestyle
has accelerated the decimation of the good, old tradition of prelapsarian agricultural
community.
What might come to mind first is the ease with which the artist contrasts the
premodern with the modern and pits country against city. But the fact that the artist paints
57
!
versus consumption, whose material consequence leads to a widening gap between the
haves and the have-nots. Kim Jeong-heon reinserts an agricultural worker into the
consumer-oriented advertisement pages as a haunting ghost that shouts his speech and
opposing poles, which is elaborated and never fully suspended. The establishment of a
binary naturally involves a certain degree of abstraction and stereotyping, as in the case
of the farmer figure, which attains its allegorical power as the symbol of production only
at the expense of the factory workers, who by the 1970s were recognized as the country’s
largest labor force. Similar to the farmer, the middle-class lifestyle featured in Creating a
Life of Plenty relies on the tropes of exaggeration and symbolization. [Fig. 1.6] Taking up
most of the composition is a living room filled with signifiers of the country’s newly
rising middle class (leather couch, coffee table, indoors orchids, collectible celadon
vases) probably in a newly built apartment complex in an urban center like Seoul. These
decorative elements are relegated to the upper edge, so as to emphasize the linoleum floor
of bright yellow and orange hues, which occupy the picture’s center. Kim’s painting is in
home. The farmer figure, on the other hand, is pressed to the composition’s bottom edge,
literally crushed by the presence of linoleum. With its scooped back turned away from
the viewer, the anonymous farmer attends to his rice field, inciting the viewer to
58
!
speculate whether he is planting the seedling or removing the weeds. The viewer is,
however, certain about one thing: the farmer’s posture changes the symbolic meaning of
the artificial floor of modernity into the fertile land of Korean origin. Such a facile switch
wealth (in the advertisement) and the equally exaggerated depiction of humble labor (in
political victimhood) both operate on the level of allegory and symbolic representation.
All this points to the fact that the artist is keen on mimicking the semantics of commercial
advertisement that plays on immediately recognizable metaphors. Indeed, Kim has not
painted the image of an ad but reused the very glossy magazine page with the linoleum
brand name—Lucky Monorium—preserved intact in the upper left corner. Not only the
visual language but also the materiality of the commercial medium was reclaimed. The
the very material of commercialized popular culture with which the artist would like to
interact. Through this dialectical move, the print surface becomes a brand new surface, a
new material for artistic production in the newly industrialized country. [Fig. 1.7]
realism popular in 1970s South Korea, or a code for the accusation that these artists’
As seen in the early activities of Reality and Utterance, these artists’ application of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Critic Lee Young-june’s critique is apt for some examples of murals and paintings, but here I
demonstrate counterexamples that likewise prevalently appeared. Author’s conversation with Lee
on November 27, 2012.
59
!
photographs in the picture frame resembles more closely the nouveau realism and Pop of
1960s and 1970s Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles, which comments on the
society. But unlike many Pop artists’ quest for and embrace of glamour, these Korean
artists were adamant about critiquing the media-induced glamour because for them media
not only represented the mechanisms of capitalism but also the military regime’s
ideological state apparatus that rendered the rest of the glamour-lacking reality invisible.
These Korean artists might seem to strike a closer affinity with Adorno’s critique of mass
and criticism.73
In order for art to achieve authentic communication, the artists believed, art itself
should not only communicate to its audience (in terms of the message) but also engage
with the medium of popular culture that its audience is familiar with (in terms of the form
and language), and at times even with its materiality. Hy!nsil, or reality, is inherently
double-bound for these Korean artists: that which is the veil (the “hypervisible”
mechanism of “distraction,” “alienation,” and “escapism”) and also that which is hidden
behind the veil (the “invisible” truth that needs to be better communicated among the
viewers and the masses). One cannot exist without the other, and it is this relationship to
which these artists draw attention. Their tactics therefore involved appropriating
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Sigakkwa !n! I (Vision and Language I: Industrial Society and Art), 289. Oh’s words are: “As
a separate entity from art that is caged in gallery, visual images are produced in new ways due to
the development of photography, advertisement, TV, and mechanical reproduction, which is what
contributes to the making of popular culture (taejung munhwa). The fact is that in many aspects
this [phenomenon] is not all desirable. Rather than assisting difficulties in survival for those in the
receiving end, [these images] tend to provide escapist pastime and entertainment.”
60
!
communication (sot‘ong). The object of criticism and the object of promotion (and even
Until the early 1980s, artists of Reality and Utterance and other groups used the
term taejung more often than minjung to refer to “people.” Taejung, more than minjung,
refers to masses that might privilege entertainment over politics, and anonymity over
authorship. In Korean, popular culture is thus called taejung munhwa, and not minjung
munhwa. This colloquial use of taejung among the artists proves that engagement with
the ideals of democracy, as envisioned by Reality and Utterance, was the process of
democratizing artistic language, to free it from the ivory tower of what they considered
“formalist high art.” In order to communicate with the masses who were taejung but
laden with the potential to become politicized, the artists had to find a channel through
which to communicate (sot’ong) with the audience. Such trust in and hope for the masses
indicates these artists’ alignment with the spirit of the minjung social movement even
when they did not explicitly advocate the minjung ideology or use the term minjung in
their theorization of reality. Artists attempting to practice the art of hy!nsil seemed to
have learnt their lesson from other leftist intellectuals in the minjung period, who, as
Namhee Lee theorized, put trust in the masses even when they believed that the
intellectuals had to awaken them.74 In so far as “our reality”—or uri hy!nsil as Won
Dong-suk had earlier expressed it—was in fact the reality diagnosed by us (the artists as
the political vanguards) for the masses, the us-versus-them binary that the artists formed
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Namhee Lee, "Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-gk, Ritual, and Protest"
in positions: east asia cultures critique. Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 2003), 555-584.
61
!
against those in dominant social positions has dangerously been transferred onto another
Utterance was more of a one-directional speech to those in the art scene than a dialogue
This also meant that their art had to be shown in the form of art exhibition, even
with certain compromises. Two weeks after the first exhibition was shut down, Reality
gallery. In order to avoid the censorship a second time, they explained, some artists
exercised “adjustments.” Kim Geon-hee erased most of the newspaper text from
"l!ld!ld!l to make less reference to May 18. The single-page manifesto was taken out of
the exhibition catalogue, and the artists bios were added in order to “give the more
artistic speech—the notion of par!n for Reality and Utterance—can only be heard within
the existing realm of art, i.e. the gallery, which is why the exhibition had to take place at
Opened with the “successful” (that is, publically accessible) inaugural exhibition
in November 1980, Reality and Utterance held other thematically organized shows such
as City and Vision (1981), Image of Happiness (1982), Print Exhibition of Reality and
Utterance (1983), June 25 [the date indicating June 25 of 1950 when the Korean War
broke] (1984). Even though the group met frequently to discuss their continued dilemma
vis-à-vis the art scene and the changing social atmosphere, these exhibitions always
featured individually authored works in a neat layout that shows no distinction from the
62
!
exhibition format of the establishment. [Fig. 1.8 and Fig. 1.9] As these thematic
exhibitions signified, it is through their loosely interlinked thematic concern that multiple
Reality and Utterance’s verbal and textual articulation of their intent, heavy
theorization of art and reality, and relative autonomy of its individual artists guaranteed
some of its members longevity in the art world, giving them the opportunity, as early as
the late 1980s, to reinvent themselves as curators, academics, public art project managers,
board members of funding agencies, and even market-friendly artists. Yet, this
predominance has its cost. The group’s outstanding status as representative of 1980s
political art, at least seen from the perspective of mainstream art history and criticism, has
long been overshadowed by another significant strain of minjung art: the protest art like
that of the carpenter-artist Choi Byung-su which thrived in the squares. As mentioned
earlier, one of the most pernicious misconceptions about minjung art history is that
hy!njang misul (“art of the site,” referring to protest art that was made for and that
and Utterance, when in actuality the conceptual rumination and visual language of
hy!njang misul as illustrated in groups like the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists
began in 1979 if not earlier. This not only complicates the temporal evolution of minjung
art history, but also gives a multi-layered texture to the notion of dissident art and art’s
relationship with the social movement, which were newly envisioned during the late
63
!
1970s and throughout the 1980s.75 Therefore, the second part of this chapter will
complicate the meaning of reality, which a plethora of art collectives actively shaped
outside art galleries and on protest grounds. My analysis will predominantly focus on the
practices of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists, the Visual Media Research
Group, and Tur"ng, but also mention works by Kan!pae and Seoul Art Collective.
Art that Sculpts a Different Reality for All: The Association of Gwangju Freedom
Artists
The first meeting of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists (Gwangju Jayu
will henceforth call them) was held in July 1979, three months before that of Reality and
Utterance in Seoul. Present at the meeting were Hong Sung-dam (b. 1955), Choi Yik-
kyun (b.1956, penname Choi Yeol), and others who were fresh out of art school or soon
to graduate from Chosun University, which makes them five to ten years younger on
average than the members of Reality and Utterance. The collective Gwangjahy"p drafted
a manifesto that shares similar key words, such as par!n (utterance or speech), with that
of Reality and Utterance, which only further emphasizes that both groups were under the
profound influence of the zeitgeist circa 1979 characterized by artists’ desire for
participatory social change, or at least for using art as a ground for political expression.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75
“Of course it is not that collective activities (tongin hwaldong) previously did not exist. But if
the group’s nature was in for art competition winners to flaunt their connections among based on
school, sects, career route, the [new] collectives can be ideologically distinguished because their
fellowship was built around the will to overcome the fiction of competition system on the
conceptual level.” Won Dong-suk, “New Tendency of 1980s Art: Beyond 1970s Art” in Minjung
Art 15 Years: 1980-1994 (Seoul: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 1994), 17.
64
!
Yet, it is also possible to detect a subtle difference in the agenda, especially the use of the
The artist is to see the situation of this land and this era. If this situation is filled
with contradiction and corruption, it is the command of our conscience that tells
us to direct a focused attention there…Artist as a human must not pursue what is
vain; instead s/he should always approach the problems arising from the situation.
The work should contain the testimony and speech (par!n) of such an approach.
If the reason for existence of art is in transmission [or conveyance and
communication], art shall acquire the power of testimony and speech.
Accordingly it shall be a challenge issued to the corruption of human society.
Form should be offset by freedom. (Emphasis mine)76
In this manifesto, form is cast in contrast to freedom. These politicized artists in Gwangju
target both the current art scene dominated by the formalists and the undemocratic
regime that bars freedom of speech. This dual emphasis contrasts with Reality and
Utterance’s move from the political concern to the artistic scene during the collective’s
inaugural meeting. Another considerable difference is found in the Gwangju artists’ use
of the term sanghwang (situation) instead of hy!nsil (reality). When “situation”—a term
imbued with a more acute sense of time-specificity and space-contingency—is put side
by side with a relatively general term like “reality,” it becomes apparent that “situation”
moving target, inevitably disallows a safe distance of critical position and affects the
artists’ conception of their role vis-à-vis the shifting social reality of the 1980s. The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Oh Sang-gil, 20 seki hankuk misul untongsa (The 20th-Century Korean History of Art
Movement) (Seoul: ICAS).
65
!
particular direction that the everyday reality of Gwangju took circa 1980 was indeed
artists, as well as everyone else in the city. Now praised as the Gwangju Democracy
uprising of students and citizens of Gwangju was immediately met with the U.S.-backed
South Korean army’s violent crackdown and eventual slaughter of an estimated two
thousand civilians. The cruel, full-scale attack on the Provincial Hall in downtown, where
the last remains of a citizen army had retreated on the evening of May 18, marked the
complete defeat of the anti-state uprising, giving it the name of May 18, or 5.18. What
made the event a “state of exception” was the days-long isolation and insulation of
Gwangju from the rest of the country. During this period, state troops blocked all the
roads in and out of Gwangju, and the media, effectively controlled by the military
participation in the rapidly changing scene of May 1980 in his testimonial essay. By early
May, Gwangjahy"p had already held multiple meetings. The artists were fully aware of
the quickly changing atmosphere across the city, even though they went about their daily
lives, including tutoring youth at an afterschool art institution. The acute consciousness
that something dreadful could happen at any moment filled the air. Then, in one
afternoon, Hong heard the uproar from the streets. Without much time to think, he
quickly gathered his students’ “sketch books and all available papers” and hastily wrote
66
!
protesters.” As the two brought the makeshift placards to the streets nearby and
distributed them to the activists in protest cars, more activists who had heard about this
began to flock. Running out of paper, the artists “managed, in a hurry and impromptu, to
write the slogans directly onto the cars.”77 On the following day, with more artists of
Gwangjahy"p gathered together, they divided tasks to efficiently produce the protest
propaganda, which was in increasing demand, as the conflict with the military troops
escalated and much more citizen protesters joined in the uprising. One task group would
spray slogans in “any tiny blank spaces” like pedestrian cement blocks and telephone
poles throughout the city, while another group produced placards on twenty rolls of
neighborhoods.78 Required to rapidly react to the situation rather than carefully reflecting
on it, the artists produced a range of “works” on a scale that no single individual artist
could achieve within the given time frame. Such collaborative practices—of tagging the
public space in a swift fashion without having the time to retain a critical distance—gave
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
The Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists, “ch‘ongtan sok #i p#rangk‘at#”(“Placards amid
Shooting”) in Kwangjumunhwa [Gwangju Culture] Vol.2 (Gwangju Minjung Munhwa
Y"nkuhoe, 1985. 6), cited in Choi Yeol, The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement
(Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994), 174.
78
The declaration of martial law by General Chun Du-hwan, who only few months earlier
requisitioned the Blue House via a successful coup d’etat, meant the blocking of any channels of
travel and transportation to Gwangju by tanks for a good duration, and the absence of domestic
media coverage of the brutal slaughter, barring the rest of South Korean citizens’ access to the
real time news from Gwangju. Photographs taken by reporters of the Times and other foreign
news agencies, as well as a native-Gwangju photographer’s furtive shots of soldiers beating or
shooting citizens on the streets in broad daylight, survive as rare visual evidence in the fashion of
George Holliday’s video of Rodney King.
67
!
these artists a concrete experience of working collectively to intervene in the reality that
was hy!njang.
Even though the artists’ participation in May 18 lasted only a few days, the
momentary lift from the everyday did not return them to the same ground. Most
obviously, the Gwangjahy"p’s inaugural exhibition, which had at first been planned for
some time in May 1980, never took place. Instead of organizing another art show, like
Reality and Utterance had done after the initial censorship, Gwangjahy"p performed a kut
(a shamanistic ritual of mourning) in an open field outside the city of Gwangju called the
Nampy"ng riverside field, wherein they read out aloud the group’s manifesto.79 The
discursive distinction of “situation of this land and this era”—the very word chosen to
describe reality in Gwangjahy"p’s first manifesto, and a term endorsed precisely for its
who interacted with the extremely specific and relatively short-lived uprising of May 18,
1980. Their inaugural “exhibition,” too, was a direct response to the unprecedented
circumstance of post-May 18 Gwangju, in which the state’s war on its own civilians left
thousands dead and injured and tens of thousands traumatized by the loss of friends and
families. Both decisions—participating in the protest and holding the mourning ritual in
the aftermath—were decisive artistic choices that disrupted the pervasive understanding
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
Compared to ancestral worship of chesa, the shamanistic ritual kut is a more dynamic, versatile
stage of encounter between the dead and the living. It is a dialogical and unstable exchange of
gestural performance, rather than a customary worship, that is manifested by the artists in
Gwangju. Laurel Kendall, The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1988), 7-8. Also see: Rogert L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli, Ancestor
Worship and Korean Society (Stanford: Stanford University, 1982).
68
!
That art can be made outside art studios, exhibited outside art galleries, and
the artists to further invest in the art’s performative potential. On March 27, 1981
Gwangjahy"p decided to hold an outdoor show (yahoe ch!nsi) as the group’s second
performance, and over a hundred attendees. This spectacle is different from the media
spectacle that Reality and Utterance feared and sought to fight. The type that
Gwangjahy"p forged—with the slogans, placards, and tags on the streets during May 18,
and in the open field in post-May 18—was one that created new intersubjective
togetherness for its participants. Either as a festive theater or a life-threatening (and also
In both making and sharing the spectacle, a new collectivity was formed, and a
utilitarianism, such a protest art therefore brings to light a conceptual importance to the
discussion of art, democracy, and communication (sot’ong) in 1980s South Korean art
scene—for it reconfigures the notions of viewership and authorship. Those on the streets
constitute an immediately established audience that demands of artists visual markers that
discourse surrounding the question of audience for Reality and Utterance is here cast in a
completely new light, as neither minjung nor taejung is a preconceived target audience of
the artworks; the audience is instead formed as the artworks are made. The relationship
between art and protest, too, like that between art and audience, is difficult to discern as
to which one is a cause of the other—or which one serves the other’s purpose. While
protest calls for art, art also calls for protest, as Namhee Lee and Chungmoo Choi’s lucid
expression of counterpublicness that erupted in the 1970s and continued in the 1980s,
madangg#k was a form of “people’s theater” performed at the demonstration sites, often
leading up to, and preparing the audience for, the protests. As a reinvented form of
traditional folk drama, madangg#k demolished the division between actor and spectator,
between drama and ritual.81 Whereas madangg#k has been widely performed on
university campuses and at protest sites since the 1970s, the exponential growth in visual
markers that served similar goals of bringing the dissenting bodies together and
culminating in their embodied experience came late, with the advent of “art of hy!njang.”
These Gwangju artists were not alone in promoting this propensity to cooperate in
elements. Another collective called Tur"ng had, since the early 1980s, developed in
Seoul a similar method of artistic practice on the level of art education, ritual
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Namhee Lee, “Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-gk, Ritual, and Protest,”
Ibid.
70
!
Kim Bong-jun, formed an on-campus madangg#k collective in 1978-1979 and were well
informed with the 1970s reintroduction of folk culture as the potential rehearsal of anti-
statist resistance.83 Influenced by the 1970s activist culture, Tur"ng’s activities leading up
to its long-overdue inaugural exhibition in April 1984 projected the raw energy of
minjung culture with its shamanistic kut performance, regarding which Sung Wan-kyung
of Reality and Utterance famously commented that the event was unlike anything he had
ever seen in the art world.84 [Fig. 1.10] Gwangju artists’ replacing of the art exhibition
with kut was also influenced by 1970s activist beliefs in readapting pre-modern Korean
folk culture, especially the potential of madangk#k, the open-air performance in which all
members of the audience can participate. Tur"ng’s most prominent contribution to the
1980s art movement was the invention of k!lgae k#rim, to which I will now turn my
attention in the hope of further expounding the mechanism of hy!njang in protest art.
The newly formed genre of k!lgae k#rim (banner painting) was first devised by
Tur"ng, and then widely spread among activist art groups like Gwangjahy"p (1979-1985)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82
The understanding of situation is similar. The leader of Turong, Kim Bong June, just like Hong
Sung Dam, is said to have spread pamphlets/news about May 18 when he heard the news. Lee
Dae beom, The Legacy of Minjung Art (Korea National University of Arts, Masters thesis, 2010).
Lee’s thesis is the first substantial graduate-level study of minjung art, and one of very few
studies that pursue analyses beyond the face value of minjung practitioners’ words and written by
a generation that came of age in the 1990s when the degraded reputation of minjung art quickly
began to prevail.
83
Namhee Lee, Ibid.
84
Sung Wan-kyung “The Inaugurationof Turong—towards a life-art” in Minmung misul
modonism sigakyongu (Minjung Art, Modernism, Visual Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999),
72-6.
71
!
and the Visual Media Research Group (1985-1989 as the later incarnation of
Gwangjahy"p). The term k!lgae k#rim is the Korean translation of the Sino-Korean word
kwaehwa, which literally means “hanging painting” and is exhibited outdoors for a
Buddhist painting (taenghwa) in its composition and color scheme. [Fig. 1.11] The
painting is a composite of multiple narrative vignettes that illustrate one ill after another
of modern urban life. In this painting that merges the old and the new, the mix of bright
colors are appropriated from the convention of Buddhist painting, while the subdued
colors of grey tones are added as the new plastic element with which to depict city life.
Obliquely adapting the composition of the Buddhist “hell painting,” the painting’s upper
section depicts modestly dressed groups of people, some of whom are dressed in farmer
attire and dancing in a circle to hint at collective rural life. These protagonists are the
onlookers of the congested urban scene (captured in the middle section) and the
corruption and overconsumption depicted in the bottom section. Other human figures are
smaller in scale than these observers on the top layer, indicating that the painting, which
ignores aerial perspective, give weight to these onlookers who are supposed to reflect the
Beyond the composition and (lack of) perspective, the methods of collaborative
production used in making the banner are also inspired by Buddhist painting. In Buddhist
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
85
According to Choi Yeol, a minjung art critic and the founding member of the Gwangjahy"p,
the earliest modern adaptation of kwaenghwa for political purpose is during the Japanese colonial
period. Choi Yeol, ibid., 224-6.
72
!
methods, the main painter (chupil) makes the sketch and the outline, and others in the
group, the colors and shapes.86 In banner painting, the entire group first engages in a
rigorous discussion about the composition and allegories, after which the main painter
drafts a sketch for other members, who are permitted to comment on the location, size,
and shape, for example, of certain figures.87 The most important aspect about collective
production, which might seem self-explanatory but was never explicitly spelled out by
Korean art historians, is that in the 1980s many artists willingly abandoned their
individual authorship, at least partially if not entirely. Understandably, not all collective
activities in the so-called 1980s new art movement were on the same page about the
model of collaboration: while some collectives like Reality and Utterance and Imsulny"n
retained individuality, others like Tur"ng and the Visual Media Research Group, when
drawing, and coloring. There is no written record of who focused on which figure or
which corner; the boundary of authorship is therefore not known to anyone but is simply
remembered by these multiple co-authors who were present at the site of production. But
these authors themselves do not reveal much detail about individual contributions. As the
frequently rehearsed dictum “we all did it together” indicates, the boundaries of
individuals blurred amid their pursuit of collective authorship. One can easily imagine a
scene in which multiple artists are immersed in the room-size banner, all simultaneously
working on each corner and edge, feeling each other’s proximate presence but without
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86
Choi Yeol, ibid.
87
This was the case for Visual Media Research Group and T‘omal (art collective on Chonnam
University campus) as the participating artist Hong Sung-min recalls. Author’s interview with the
artist on September 3, 2013.
73
!
the certainty of what their own contribution to the larger picture might look like when the
work is complete. The painting surrounds the individual bodies; the artist is within the
painting that envelops his body, as well as the bodies of his collaborators. [Fig. 1.12]
realm of techniques and use of symbols in the k!lgae k#rim practice. The techniques of
figuration as well as composition are recycled across different banners; slogans, symbols,
allegories, story vignettes and color schemes that are similar reappear in works executed
by divergent collectives. Sometimes the same set of artists recycle previously effective
motif in their new creation. It is as though the act of borrowing, copying, and repeating
gives the image of dissent the power of omnipresence, and in the process, individual
artists insert themselves into a larger collective of artists making the propagandistic,
protesting visuality. Reality and Utterance’s “la prise de parole” is an individual speech
individual freedom of speech) as a viable emancipatory claim with which to combat the
martial rule. But in precisely such a time, the practitioners of hy!njang misul (the art of
hy!njang) arduously formed an alternative vision of holding dear the ideals of collective
sociability.
Not only production but viewership, too, was achieved in a collective manner.
The visual materials made for protest sites, such as banners, flags, and large type posters
(daechabo), are meant to be displayed in a large-scale public space filled with different
groups of viewers and a range of diverse visual materials that are in constant motion.
74
!
(Banner paintings rarely permit a one-to-one relationship between the viewer and itself,
lest it defeat the raison d’être of the banners.) In an open field, the protest artworks not
only delivered visual speech (par!n) with explicit messages linked to the specific purpose
of the protest, but also physically marked the space. The protest materials therefore set
the stage for something larger than a simple delivery of a speech; a banner, for example,
demarcated a site fully laden with a potential eruption of more dynamic sociability and
collectivity. They provoked an experience more visceral, bodily, and intersubjective than
for those who experience the same hy!njang. Where there seems little that is “internal” to
Indeed, the artists in the Seoul-based collective Kan!mpae, known for its
site as important as painting, arguing that activating the banner in the viewing site was as
important as producing one.88 How it was viewed when it was up for a brief period of
time and how it heightened the fervor of protest participants were certainly points not to
be missed. To this end, I would argue that a large banner painting’s value lies in its
wherever it is hung. My analysis of the banner painting therefore lays emphasis on the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
88
Minjung Misul (Minjung Art) (Minjung Misul Pyonjiphoe, 1985), 47-50.
75
!
expense of art historical visual analysis of what resides within the picture frame. Even
though the aesthetics of banner painting has preoccupied minjung critics like Choi Yeol
of Gwangjahy"p, who values the “dynamic movement” in the composition and the
figuration of a “faithful archetype of minjung,” I believe that the “convivial energy of life”
(sinmy!ng) that Choi locates within the picture frame actually lies more vividly outside
the picture—in the people who make the picture, the people who experience the picture,
and the picture’s ability to produce a protest site (hy!njang) that is a contemporary reality
the inherently Korean value rooted in the pre-modern past native to the Korean peninsula.
As such, “sinmy!ng” was a concept with which to oppose the invasion of modern
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
89
The criteria for “good” banner painting seem to have existed for minjung practitioners such as
Choi Yeol, a founding member and a critic of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists. The
figuration and schematization of minjung as the oppressed but hopeful people, as much as the
collaboration-based production methods, seem to carry the most significantly cherished value in
minjung art for Choi. As apparent from The History of Korean Modern Art Movement, in which
Choi establishes twentieth-century Korean art’s genealogy with the KAPF, Reality Group, and
the new art movement of the 1980s, the “movement” for Choi is always a sociopolitical as much
as aesthetic endeavor. The tradition, whether Buddhist or folk, is an entity to be always
reinvented for contemporary re-use, which explains why Choi seems to give more value to
T‘omal’s banner Battle of Minjung (1984) than Turong’s Everything under the Sky (1983).
Originally over 14 meters-long, Battle of Minjung is another early banner painting whose
distinction from the previous ones is outstanding in its composition, because this banner breaks
ties with Buddhist painting by composing the picture’s left half with the conglomeration of past
and present forces of minjung that push away the disorderly composite of Western influences (e.g.
Coca Cola, pornographic magazines, the Statue of Liberty located on the right hand.) The
muscular “King of Heaven and Earth” leading the troops of present-day minjung and past
minjung struggles (e.g. the general Chun Bong-june of the 18th peasant revolution) leans over to
the right and crosses the central axis of the painting, thus giving a sense of dynamic movement to
the picture. It is the depiction of a future revolution, a strong will rooted in the present moment,
and a history of Korean grass-root revolts. Choi Yeol, 32-49; 67-75.
76
!
and talks. In the 1980s, if one could argue that the painting (or woodblock) has sinmy!ng,
then it must be a good, valuable example of dissident art. When examined now, from a
with multiple significations. With sinmy!ng, minjung artists sought to express their
loyalty to the pre-modern, folk tradition (seen in mask dance, shamanistic ritual, the
humor in the everyday) and also to the utopian hope of surviving the era and changing the
dire reality.90 The conceptual significance imposed onto these sentiments by the 1980s
necessitates a deeper investigation, which I believe should happen alongside such notions
authorization. In this chapter I emphasize that it is not within the picture frame (i.e.
composition, color scheme, lines of two dimensional works like banner painting, etc.) but
art at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea The 15 Years of Minjung Art
(1980-1994), which brought not only oil paintings and collages by Reality and Utterance,
but also the few protest banner paintings that survived weathering and confiscation. In the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90
Sinmy!ng is often discussed in relation to han, which means an amalgam of anger, frustration,
and sadness originating from oppression. Sinmy!ng and han, the two sides of what composes
Korean sentiment, always come as a pair, because han is always already imbued with a little dose
of sinmy!ng and vice versa.
77
!
gallery the banner paintings seemed deprived of their power, even though what was
represented in the picture frame remained the same. To many critics and artists, this
degree of truth, the “funeral” of minjung art that announced the final end of dissident art
that flourished under authoritarianism.91 [Fig. 1.13] The entry of the previously counter-
governmental production into the acme of state art institution that is the National
Museum falls prey to such a criticism, even though the South Korean state in 1994 is not
the same as that in 1987. On a symbolic level, the exhibition signifies the
or even praise of the art of democracy fighters that the governmental leaders began to
identify with. The dissidents have become the institution, as if anticipating Andrea
Fraser’s institutional critique— “we are the institution.”92 But a more art historical,
semantic, and material tack of analysis reveals that this entry was fatal to the works
because the particular use values of the art objects—either as a politico-aesthetic speech
Korean War and urbanization or as a spatial marker of protest sites in the case of banners
analogy can be found in cases in which ethnographic objects with context-based use
values gain formalistic values but lose ritualistic values upon entering in the white-cube
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
Sung Wan-kyung, “The Meaning of A Memorable Event: 15 Years of Minjung Art” in Gana
Art Journal (March/April, 1994). Interview with the author, June 8, 2012 and September 17,
2013.
92
Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum, Vol.
44, Iss. 1 (New York: Sep 2005), 278-285.!
78
!
gallery.93 In the case of minjung art, a more substantially detrimental effect was the
multifaceted and often factional collectives who worked in and across multiple provinces
under a singularized national battle against authoritarianism. All the art works and the
artists have become the national heroes venerated on the national altar by 1994.
activities fell off the grid of art history, and their next steps seem only to have widened
their distance from art establishments. In 1980-2 the artists indulged in a rigorous process
of un-educating (of the modernist abstraction and individual authorship taught at art
school) and self-educating (of techniques such as Buddhist hanging-scroll painting and
woodcut prints that could be appropriated for new uses), sometimes under the reinforced
crackdown of any dissident activities under the then newly instituted martial law.94
education in Simin Misul Hakgyo (Citizen Art School), which propagated the methods of
collective production and sharing. In 1985 Gwangjahy"p was renamed the Sigak
Maechae Yonguso (Visual Media Research Group), which functioned as the visual arts
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
On this topic, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Ritual: Inside Public Art Museums (New York:
Routledge, 1995) and Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations eds. Ivan
Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Thomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006).
94
In 1982 Hong learned the techniques of painting Buddhist painting (taenghwa) at a Buddhist
monastery. “From May to Unification” Misul Undong (Art Movement) (Seoul: Kongdongchae,
1988), 54-66.
79
!
division of the cultural activist group Il kwa nori (Work and Play) and operated alongside
engendered, it is instructive to turn to the particular example of the Citizen Art School.
[Fig. 1.14] Sponsored by the Gwangju Catholic Center and held at its center in downtown,
the Citizen Art School proved popular with students, professionals, and homemakers in
Gwangju, who were not artists or art students. Every summer and winter in 1983-1986, a
total of 236 Gwangju residents signed up for the classes consisting of both theory and
practice. For example, the first Citizen Art School was held for two weeks during which
the two-hour morning sessions included lectures on folk art and the afternoons were
reserved for studio sessions. Members of Gwangjahy"p, such as Hong, had previously
made a living by teaching in private art institutions. [Fig. 1.15] But at the Citizen Art
School, the aim of the curriculum was not to reinsert these newcomers into the existing
Now is not the time when only poets can compose poetry and only painters can
draw pictures. Rather, the appropriate art of this era can be realized with an
attitude of respectfully understanding and sharing each other’s experience about
everyday survival… From now on what is at stake is not the function and
professionalism of art but its responsibility to express a total life of the given
period.95
Of course the act of expressing “total life” is not equivalent to producing a picture of life
as totality, because the foundation of Citizen Art School requires participation of multiple
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95
Citizen Art School Manifesto (1983) as appeared in Choi Yeol, The History of Korean
Contemporary Art Movement (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994), 57-8.
80
!
authors with multiple artistic objectives. Some woodblock prints depict the joy of daily
life, others the economic hardship of survival, and still others the traumatic residue of
May 18 for Gwangju citizens. [Fig. 1.16] Some prints share formal and narrative
similarity with the well-known woodcut series May by Hong Sung-dam and others. Hong
published his print collection as early as 1982 in the form of a calendar, a format that the
Citizen Art School repeated in 1984, for example, by publishing the exemplary works of
students in a calendar that accompanied a group gallery exhibition. The Citizen Art
School therefore put into practice the formation of an alternative network for distributing
images and stories produced by people. Here, the people as producers and consumers are
already both minjung (people) and taejung (masses) in the conjoined senses of the
Regarding the popularizing effect of arts and culture promoted by the School,
critic Won Dong-suk notes that the inception of the School signifies a shift in the 1980s
art movement. Won argues: if some artists previously posed as intellectuals and made art
in the name of expanding the realm of art for the people, a new breed of artists finally
began to merge the subject/object positions and allow the people themselves to make art
of their own.96 Won’s distinction between two notions of minjung—the oppressed people
to be portrayed in the arts (painting, fiction, poetry, etc.) versus the producers of the arts
in their own right—reflects the development of minjung literary theory, which in the
1960s sought a way to represent the figure of minjung and then in the 1970s made a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
Won Dong-suk, “New Tendency of 1980s Art: Beyond 1970s Art” in Minjung Art 15 Years:
1980-1994, 20.
81
!
theoretical jump to privilege the writings by the workers and farmers themselves.97 It is
indeed the 1970s development of minjung cultural activism at large and especially its
(1968; translated to Korean by Catholic Press in 1979) that influenced the Gwangjahy"p
members. To these cultural activists, including the artists in Gwangju, the country’s
implementing regime change. By praising the model of the Citizen Art School and its
different notion and role of artists envisioned by Gwangjahy"p. Artists are the
collaborators of minjung, the providers of platform, format, and modes (i.e. context, or
situation) with which people create their own narratives (i.e. content).98 What is
important here is that such a role can be repeated in different times and places. The
notion of reproducibility should be read as ingrained in the artistic practice. Rather than
being concerned about jeopardizing “originality,” these artists welcomed the possibility
reproducibility and dissemination are important in Chapters 2 and 3, but here, in Chapter
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Literature on the theoretical transition is outlined in Lee Dae beom, The Legacy of Minjung Art
(Korea National University of Arts, Masters thesis, 2010).
98
My analysis here is influenced by Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. Grant H. Kester,
Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004.)
82
!
conducive to mass education. The combination of the medium specificity and the format
of “artists as context-providers” was rapidly reproduced in other cities like Mokpo, Iri,
and Jeonju in the Cholla Province of which Gwangju is a provincial capital. Repeated
anew in different locales, the Citizen Art School formed an interregional network that
operated simultaneously across the nation. The network was inter-institutional and inter-
disciplinary as much as intersubjective and interregional. The Citizen Art School always
relied on existing institutions such as the Catholic Center to operate, and such
organizational dependency was further pursued when some of these artists renamed
themselves the Visual Media Research Group, the “visual bureau” of the cultural activist
headquarter called Work and Play (Il kwa nori) in Gwangju. Likewise, Tur"ng too
submitted itself to the theater Aeoge, which functioned as the clubhouse for cultural
activism, and starting in 1986, held folk art classes (mask dance, woodblock prints, etc.)
The talk of “participatory art” abounds in the South Korean art scene in the new
millennium, in which more and more artists cooperate with the cultural bureau of
residents. If the 2000s incarnation of such art has its partial origin in the problematic
policy of urban revitalization and “new public art” (the topic of Chapter 3), its 1980s
precedent is squarely located in an anti-statist, dissident art practice that, willingly and
83
!
deliberately, stepped outside of art history as it was understood back then and, as a
consequence, changed the way art history has been written about this period.
84
!
Chapter Two
“We do not want to belong in any categorical classification” is how critic Yoon
Jin-seob, in 1987, described the motto of the “new generation artists” (sinsedae misulga),
a group of artists born in the late 1950s and early 1960s defined by their explosive energy
of youth, interest in commodity culture, and refusal to submit to any theory or ideology
(that is, pure art versus engagement, modernism versus minjung realism that divided the
contemporary cultural sphere in 1970s and 1980s Korea).99 In 1990, for example, when
the representative artist of this generation, Choi Jeong-hwa (b. 1961), organized an
exhibition with his friends titled Sunday Seoul (following the most widely read yellow
paper in 1980s Korea), he presented a titular work in the form of installation art that
might seem to fit the motto of fin-de-siècle. On seven shelves on a white wall, Choi laid
out silicon models of grocery items, such as a large beef brisket, a foot-long tuna, two
rows of thinly sliced pork belly, and three cabbages. These ready-mades are no
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99
Originally written in 1987, and later quoted in 1990 writing. Yoon Jin-sub, “Aesthetics of
Denial” in Space Magazine (November, 1990). The theory about generation, which Karl
Mannheim’s sociology of generations has inspired (“Problem of Generations” of 1923), defines a
generation as a group that shares a common sense of destiny, but is essentially transideological.
In contemporary art, the 2009 group show Younger than Jesus revived generation discourse.
Lauren Cornell, ed. Younger than Jesus: The Generation Book (New York: New Museum;
Göttingen: Steidl, 2009). Either in the arts or in a general understanding of society, the generation
discourse is prominent in Korea, where the transideological characteristics of a generation is
complicated. The exception is the “new generation of the 1990s.” More on the generation
discourse in Korea is found in Sim Kwang-hy"n’s “Saedae #i ch!ngchihak kwa hanguk
hy!ndaesa#i chehaes!k ” (Politics of Generation and Reinterpretation of Korean Modern History),
Munhwa Kwahak. Vol.62 (Summer, 2010), 17-71.
85
!
Duchampian, because they lack an explicit statement or a provocation. [Fig. 2.1] The
same goes to My IQ Jump (1993), wherein fake gold trophies adorn a pyramid-shaped
pile of red plastic baskets for the work whose title refers to a monthly comic magazine
By 1990, however, Yoon made a more careful assessment: “their most fatal
work advances further, they might be able to destroy authority and escape the
predetermined path; yet they cannot open a new horizon.” He then concluded:
The art critic so easily dismisses the art of new generation artists by simply reiterating the
describes these young artists’ activities to be, while effectively demonstrating the
confusion pervading both artists and critics in the face of a new era. The slow dissolution
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
100
Seen in retrospect, Choi’s unrivaled success in the globalizing art scene in the 1990s—
beginning in the mid-1990s in full-scale, and effectively separating him from any of his cohort,
except for Lee Bul, and minjung artists—did him more harm than good, resulting in the lack of
proper study of his oeuvre that in fact contributed to the larger art and cultural scene in South
Korea. Compared to Choi, I have a different evaluation of Lee Bul, whose artistic practice began
as an engagement with the notion of public and has become more and more introspective.
101
Yoon Jin-sub, “Aesthetics of Denial” in Space Magazine (November, 1990).
86
!
of the iron curtain in the tail end of the Cold War had immediate impacts on South Korea,
a country built on anti-communism and American aid. The 1988 Seoul Olympics, the
first summer game in post-war period to attract countries from both worlds, forced Korea
to open up its market to free trade. This atmosphere of “opening up” coincided with the
anti-statist, pro-democracy movement that finally toppled the military junta of Chun Du-
hwan in 1987.
This chapter traces the visual language and discursive frameworks that came out
of the initial chaos dominating the late 1980s to the late 1990s, or more precisely the
decade of 1987-1997, bracketed by the end of democracy movement and the beginning of
the Asian Financial Crisis. But this era and its art productions cannot simply be
penetrating, and joining, the newly formed circle of the “global” contemporary art scene.
Considering the discourse surrounding the “new generation artists”—and in this chapter,
between the old (the 1980s dissident drive in the minjung cultural movement) and the
new (the 1990s rise of post-authoritarian, global culture) in South Korea, I will
investigate the conflicted site of artistic productions (artistic activities by artists) and the
criticism of art (writings by art critics) that also sought a certain “opening.” This opening
is not only to the outside but also to the history of Korean art built in the 1970s and 1980s,
as discussed in Chapter 1. The case study in point of Chapter 2 is the art of Choi Jeong-
hwa, the representative artist of this generation who is now known as one of the most
prolific artists in contemporary Korean art history and as the moniker of “Korean pop art.”
87
!
In addition to introducing Choi’s works, lesser known as much as better known, I will
explore how critics in the collective Art Criticism Research Group (Misul Pipy"ng
Y"nguhoe or, in short, “Mipiy"n”) interpreted Choi’s art. Active between 1989 and 1993,
Mipiy"n members consisted of young critics born in the 1960s with a few senior
members, most notably Sung Wan-kyung (b. 1944) of Reality and Utterance (the most
well-known minjung art collective and the subject of Chapter 1) as well as art historians
like Lee Young-wook (b.1957) and Park Sin-!i (b.1955). The criticism activity of this
group is thus considered to have followed the overall political and ideological stance of
Reality and Utterance (1979-1989), even though Mipiy"n never officially joined the
Association of Minjok Art, the parent association of multiple minjung art collectives
responses to Choi’s art has a two-fold goal: firstly, I am interested in the shift in art
criticism of Choi’s art, a negotiated shift that marked the end of minjung ideology and the
emancipatory possibility in Choi’s art and how his work expands while altering the 1980s
notions of reality (hy!nsil and hy!njang). Choi’s art thus becomes not an illustration of a
certain Korean pop art after the American and British Pop Art, but an effective “post-
colonial pop,” which, I will argue, interacts with and replicates the shifting vernacular
minjung art movement, as manifested in Mipiy"n, seeks to bring the legacy of the 1980s
88
!
back to the discussion of the 1990s. Much of the forces dictating cultural productions
consumerism infiltrating the widest realm of the South Korean life; yet, the epoch
other productive discourses of “posts” that have emerged in critical theory over the past
break but rather as a discursive space in which we can locate the ambivalently shifting
relationship between the history and the ideal of the minjung social movement. I argue
public art, publication design, interior design, photo archive, etc.) proposes a new model
of producing “democratic art” beyond the minjung vocabulary as well as the dictatorial
oppression. To this end, I will not only outline and critique the discourse of “new
generation art” and the leftist art criticism of Mipiy"n surrounding Choi but also
investigate the notion of mimicry in Choi’s art through his replication of the
art, I will argue, constitutes a new vocabulary of resistance that complicates the
The New Generation Discourse and the Legacy of Minjung Art Criticism
energy earned them as much praise as accusation; however, it was not only directed to
89
!
artists. The discourse about art was subsumed to a larger discourse about the new breed
of Korean youngsters who were born in the 1960s, benefited from 1970s industrialization,
came of age in the 1980s, and were indulging fully in the flower of capitalism in the
Asian Tiger economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s.102 Beginning in 1990 and
reaching its height by 1993, the mainstream media’s reference to this generation as the
(sinillyu)”—began to mushroom, often tinted with caution against its blatant lack of
morality and its decadent life style. Frequently considered to share similarities with the
American X-generation, the explosive energy seen in artists of this generation gave them
the fame of “enfants terribles.”103 Who, then, were these artists rebelling against, if not
their parents, when the new breed of consumers was considered to challenge the society
that built its economic comfort based on stoic, savings-based moralism of the Korean
War survivors? For artists like Choi, the perversion of fathers might have been the
existing art institution and the dominating style (figurative expressionism), as much as
the ideological battle between modernism and minjung art. For instance, while still
enrolled in college, Choi submitted a painting to the 1986 Jungang Art Competition for
the sole purpose of winning the prize, or outdoing the system of art competition. His
effort to faithfully render expressive brushstrokes—the style that he assessed the jury
would appreciate—gave him the third prize, which provoked him to try again, and more
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
102
Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2005).
103
The first use of this Francophone term might trace to the 2000 Ssamzzie Residency Show
titled Mus!un Ayit#l, the direct translation of enfants terribles, including artists from its first
residency program of 1998, such as Kimhongsuk, Park Chan-kyong, Chung Seoyoung, Rhii
Jooyo, Hong Sun-my"ng, and Ko Nak-b"m.
90
!
rigorously, the following year and he ultimately seized first place. As Choi confesses
later in his quintessentially nonchalant manner, the award was valuable because of the
Korea and Japan—at a time when the South Korean government’s loosening of foreign
travel restriction spawned a rising tide of curious young Koreans to begin backpacking
abroad.104
Even though this defiant act, coupled with the fact that Choi abandoned painting
for good shortly after 1987, may only perpetuate his fame as an unquestionably talented
young rebel, Choi’s post-1987 path resembles less the decadent life style of ultra-
consumerist, globe-trotting nouveau riches than the group of young critics in Mipiy"n
described it to be.105 It is important to note that, though their activities did not cross paths
until 1992-1993, Mipiy"n and Choi shared interests in creating a new path for the
aesthetics corresponding with the new era; but even then, the critics of Mipiy"n often
mis-recognized Choi’s aesthetics despite their comparable goals. Mostly born in the early
1960s like Choi, the critics who founded Mipiy"n aspired to continue hy!nsil-driven art
criticism by picking it up where 1980s minjung art criticism left off. Mipiy"n’s early
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
104
This trip, as well as Choi’s trip to Japan in 1987, functioned as an important inspiration for
Choi for reasons that I will develop in the third section of this chapter on nostalgia and retro
culture.
105
Here I mean the “Orange Tribe (orenji jok),” who in 1992-1994 gave birth to Seoul’s
Gangnam district, its infamous fame of limitless consumerism and personal desires. The Orange
Tribe is stereotyped as a new breed of Koreans in their twenties and early thirties, comprising rich
college students, who sometimes studied abroad thanks to their nouveau riches parents, and
young professionals, who either inherit their family business or launch their own businesses with
their family money. The nuance of the self-made man, which Korean society has long cherished,
is absent; the emphasis on vulture-like consumerism and the decadent sex life of the “West”
prevails, hence the metaphor of American “orange,” which symbolizes foreign, as opposed to the
smaller clementine kyul of Korea.
91
!
Wolfgang Friz Haug and his commodity aesthetics theory, which examines the reflection
fetishism.106 His deep and long-lasting ties with the Frankfurt School is thus not a
minjung art criticism. The group’s investment in commercial circulation of images and
media spectacle seems only natural when considering that its central and outstandingly
senior member was Sung Wan-kyung, the former Reality and Utterance member who,
back in 1982, edited the publication Vision and Language: Industrial Society and Art
(Sigak kwa !n!: San!psahoe wa misul) by compiling texts by Korean critics (Won Dong-
suk and Kim U-chang) in addition to translated texts originally written by Euro-American
critics (Hans Peter Thurn, Ernest van den Haag, John Berger and Susan Sontag) and
foreign).107 [Fig. 2.3] This publication, dating from the earlier days of Reality and
Utterance, proved a pivotal departure for Mipiy"n and their faith in the value of
of the commodities.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
106
The particular channel through which these South Korean critics have adopted Haug’s
scholarship as their own requires future research, but the highly visible focus given to Haug is
noteworthy.
107
The publication includes Hans Peter Thurn’s “Soziologie der Kunstvermittelnden
Institutionen” from Soziologie der Kunst (W. Kohlhammer, 1973); Ernest van den Hagg’s “Art
and the Mass Audience” in Art in America (July/August, 1971), an excerpt (chapter 6) from John
Berger’s Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Book, 1972), and an excerpt (chapter 1) of Susan
Sontag’s On Photograph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
92
!
The urgency to reconcile with the shifting aesthetic of everyday urban life and the
kitsch—prevail amid the group’s discussion mobilized by the determination to value and
learn from popular culture, albeit with a deep-seated discontent. Mipiy"n member Beck
scene. Unlike minjung practitioners, Beck does not apply the Adornian dichotomy
between art and urban visual culture wherein the former is in the threat of the latter;
rather, she commends the latter for its “honesty,” “authenticity,” and in short, for its
proximity to reality. For her, the city (tosi) is an “ethnographic” object, and the
Right off the main gate of Gyeongbokgung (the Chos"n Dynasty’s main palace), the
Élysées, and Seoul’s main public space surrounded by historically important buildings
such as the Sejong Cultural Center for art and performance and the Tong’a Daily
Headquarter. Walking along the avenue to catch the last bus at night, Beck accounts, she
cannot help but compare the lights emanating from the Sejong Center (the epitome of arts)
and the electronic commercial billboard atop the Tong’a building (the pure commercial
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
108
This ethnographic turn to the commercial and vernacular architectural structures in urban
Seoul rhymes with the rhetoric of Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of
Architectural Form (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. The
English term ethnography is Beck’s own word written in parenthesis and in English alphabets.
But her Korean expression is “minjok ch!k (ethnic or ethnocentric),” instead of “minjokhak ch!k
(ethnographic).” The context of her writing informs me to designate the Korean word as a
mistaken translation of ethnography—an interesting mistranslation because her search for a
location of politics in the ethnographic analysis of urban space is precisely a move away from the
ethnocentric minjung politics. Beck Ji-sook, “Tosi taejung munhwa” (City Mass Culture) in
exhibition catalogue for City Mass Culture (Tosi taejung munhwa) at T"kwon Misulkwan, Seoul
(June 17-23, 1992), 6.
93
!
enterprise for profit): “ironically…the latter light seems to possess the power of reality
(hy!nsil ch!kin him) than the cultural center’s light.”109 Beck’s continued praise of the
florescent light of the billboard for its value as “a thoroughly everyday culture founded
on the desire of the basic necessity [and] also a culture that does not pretend to sublimate
the everyday and that is straightforward and shameless.”110 Beck as a critic and curator
favors artists who, like herself, fully acknowledge their location of speech, which is fully
embedded within the urban life and its landscape, and yet simultaneously removed so that
they can make sense of the larger picture. This larger picture, unlike the ameliorative goal
of the 1980s, is never simply given, and it may never be obtained. But the process of
analyzing the society as a picture (or a text) in the hope of providing a prescription is
what Beck and others valued. Thus, this impulse to cognitively map media-driven mass
culture, on the one hand, puts Mipiy"n closer to the 1980s artists active in Reality and
This is why when Lee Young June, another member of Mipiy"n, visited Choi’s
studio for the first time in 1991, he felt compelled to base his critique of Choi’s art on the
commodity aesthetics theory. To Lee, Choi’s work, which appropriates plastic imitations
of vegetables, plastic baskets, and plastic figurines, lends itself to an uncritical use of
fetishistic aesthetics of mass reproductions. He felt the urgency, with a certain excitement,
to strike up Choi with commodity aesthetics theory, something that could essentially
astonishment, the artist looked intrigued, not agitated at the critic’s aggression, and in a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
109
Beck, ibid., 8.
110
Beck, ibid.
94
!
rather calm demeanor asked the critic to explain what he meant. The critic, who later
befriended the artist, let his guard down and explained “Marxism and sorts” (Lee’s words)
to the artist who seemed surprisingly captivated and at times nodded in agreement. This
culture working in early 1990s Korea, and perhaps also the artist’s cool victory over the
suspicious critic armed, and overheated, with theory. Essentially, the difference between
Lee (the Mipiy"n critic) and Choi (the enfant terrible) was that between the outright
suspicion of the aesthetic quality of commercial products and the belief in the possible
play with the mass-produced objects. While the critics were stuck with the mandate of
critiquing commodity culture or how rapidly the global art market had infiltrated Korea
since the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Choi, through a play, found another way to experience
between such terms like “subjective” interpretation and “objective” presentation of kitsch
pornographic calendar spread with a nude photograph of a woman—by painting over her
body the drapes of pre-modern fairy outfit and giving it the ironical title of Biographies
according to Lee. On the other hand, the display of mass produced objects seen in Choi’s
work is “cool-headed, objective kitsch.” [Fig. 2.4] The degree to which the artist
interrupted and manipulated mass culture seems important for these critics, who clearly
distinguished the “good” from the “bad” ways of being influenced by urban, mass culture.
95
!
Interestingly, the images as representation of mass culture, rather than the objects
themselves, are more prone to apposite criticism of mass culture, and no less to the
engagement with mass culture to the realm of media representation (that is media
spectacle) than the mass produced objects themselves (that Choi in most cases
On the question of agency, which is at the heart of the discussion for these art
critics, maintaining too much distance (the seeming lack of opinion) also means having
no distance at all (the fatal attraction to the mass culture), because they both signify the
insufficient presence of agency. Writing “Our Art and Kitsch” in 1992, art critic Kim
Hy"n-do expresses his sympathy for the “kitsch generation” such as Choi Jeong-hwa,
whose ceaseless incorporation of kitsch items into art means little more than the
“kitsch.” Here, the only way for this segment of artists to recuperate their agency is via
“help” from a critic, who would call attention to the sociocultural structure in which the
only value of the artist’s weak agency is drawn from their forthright honesty about the
fictionality of their identity and of the superficial world of mass commodities.111 Such a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
111
Kim cherishes the “honesty” of artists whose works reflect the “real” world (i.e. world
surrounded by popular and mass culture). Kim Hy"n-do, “Uri misul kwa kich’i (Our Art and
Kitsch)” Misul segye (Winter, 1992), 27-32. Lee Young-wook (1992/3) differentiates art criticism
that critique the life of Kitsch (or popularized forms of cheap, uninventive arts) and artworks that
performs such a critique; the latter, instead of transcending kitsch, demonstrates the inescapability
of kitsch in contemporary Korean life. Lee Young-wook, “K’ich’i Chinsil Uri Munhwa” (Kitsch,
Truth, and Our Culture), Munhak kwa sahoe (Winter, 1992), 1221-1236. The lamentation of this
96
!
recuperative formula is faulty for two reasons: it not only assumes the critic’s external
position from which to critique the society but also considers the artist either as a medium
(that transparently reflects the society) or a symptom (that points to the larger social
force). And Choi, who never calls his work “kitsch” and who sustains his ambivalent or
rather fan-like affective relationship with the objects, colors, styles, and display tactics he
chooses to appropriate for all of his practices (art installation, film set design, interior
design, publication, etc.), is already outside the tradition of leftist moralistic hatred
toward mass culture that the Mipiy"n critics and others like Kim Hy"n-do, who have
inherited Marxist and (some) post-Marxist theories. The early readings of Choi fail to
attend to his innovative productions, precisely because the recognition of something new
in Choi quickly fell into a simplistic dismissal as a mere reflection of the early 1990s
Of course, few people back then, critics or otherwise, knew what to make of this
an unprecedented, exceptional chaos. Even before someone like Fredric Jameson visited
Seoul in 1990 and declared that South Korea was both the first and second world and the
third world, everyone whose daily life depended on the social fabric of South Korea
knew this unlikely hybrid as a fact.112 Then and now, to place art squarely within such a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
inescapability was earlier seen in the Reality and Utterance member Min Jeong-ki’s self-claimed
“kitsch paintings,” or “barbershop paintings,” that faithfully followed the naïve, ostensibly
untrained painterly application of cliché scenes such as the rural landscape or still life with
flowers.
112
As famously noted in the dialogue between Paik Nak-chung and Frederic Jameson during the
latter’s visit to Seoul in 1990, South Korea is in flux of both the first and second world and the
third world, posing as an exceptionally chaotic society that gives a complex texture to the post-
97
!
vague grasp of the tumultuous years of 1987-1993 is only further barring any adequate
understanding of the art objects and their implications, aesthetic or social.113 In order to
shed new light on both Choi’s work and the cultural logic of 1990s South Korea (if there
the art critics’ emphasis on the hierarchy of copy and original firmly within the history of
postcolonial politics. Only then it becomes possible to reconsider the politics of Choi’s
For these leftist art critics, the place reserved for kitsch in modern Korean history
is well-defined: the signifiers of modernism that originated elsewhere (read: the West or
Japan) was transposed to Korea only to be reborn as kitsch, that is, as the replicated form
of the original signifier but without the original signified. Or, in the Korean soil, kitsch
acquires a new signification—the lack, and subsequently a cover-up for the lack. For
example, as Sung Wan-kyung and Lee Young-wook note, the Korean abstract painting
chandelier hung in a low-middle class living room is an effective and necessary cover for
the shoddy construction of the apartment itself.114 It truly is a fetish, a visual spectacle,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
industrial consumerist society because it also coexists with a third-world mentality. Paik Nak-
chung “Conversation with Frederic Jameson: Marxism, Postmodernism, and Minjok Cultural
Movement” in Ch’angchak kwa Pipy!ng (Spring, 1990), 291.
113
Literary theorist Ackbar Abbas’s analysis of image politics in pre-handover, 1990s Hong
Kong likewise makes the mistake of triumphing the postmodern superficiality as indicating the
absence of essence that is the Hong Kong identity. For Abbas, art reveals truth only in so far as it
is so blatantly fictional and postmodern. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of
Disappearance (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997).
114
The story with the chandelier comes from Sung Wan-kyung’s biographical reference in his
essay on new generation artists. According to Donald M. Lowe’s three-level analysis of
postmodern commodity value, the chandelier is the signifier (the cultural value) of the signifier
98
!
that sutures the lack. Yet, Mipiy"n members’ dystopian declaration—that all Korean
cultural forms eventually are kitsch and signify a lack—comes dangerously close to a
In other words, even in lamenting the colonization of culture, these critics have deeply
Bhabha terms “colonial mimicry,” which is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable
Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite.”115 Recognizing
the self (in the periphery) as the “other [who is] almost the same but not quite” (with the
center), the early 1990s art critics, as well as 1980s minjung critics, turned to an
obsessive and masochistic internalization of one’s own lack and, eventually, to a futile
search for a truth with which to fill this space of lack. The battle with kitsch for neo/post-
colonial Korea, in the 1980s or in the early 1990s, was thus an inevitable search for a
truth—the truth that would speak to the unjust history of modernization that was the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(the exchange value) of the signified (the use value or the accumulated labor). Lowe,
“Postmodenity and Postcoloniality,” Positions 1.1. (1993): 282-3.
115
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122.
116
Unlike theorists like Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler who in the early 1990s recuperated the
subversive power in mimicry—colonial mimicry, for Bhabha, as both “resemblance and menace,”
(123), and drag, for Butler, as expropriated act of gender performance—the Korean critics were
not quick to deconstruct the truth claims. The “correct version” of truth—or “our truth”—was
thus manifested in the various forms of the myth of self-creation and self-reliance, promulgating
the signifiers of minjung in their consolidated images, figures, and essential qualities such as the
moral superiority, ethnicity, and collective memory of oppression. Bhabha writes: “Under cover
of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative
knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at
the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its
“otherness,” that which it disavows.” p.130.
99
!
Here, I am not quick to criticize this history of Korean art criticism as naïve or
theorists working in Europe and America at the time, like Bhabha and Butler, who found
in mimicry and drag the deconstructive potential to undermine the normative ideals such
as the white race and the heterosexuality. The Korean critics misrecognized Choi’s work,
not because they considered it a copy of the Western model, but because they did not see
that it was a copy of something else. When it comes to the history of modern and
contemporary art, Choi’s art thus complicates the center-periphery mimicry that Korean
art had with the imperial metropoles like New York, Paris, and Tokyo. It is not a copy or
reveal in the following section, Choi mimics the “spontaneity” of vernacular culture,
thereby beginning an effective critique of the colonial mimicry albeit a different one from
Bhabha’s. For Choi, it is the visual ways in which mass produced objects are presented
and used in the everyday urban space that he documents as street photographs and that he
replicates and mimics in his installation work, interior design, and curatorial projects.
Furthermore, the newly forged mimetic relationship—which moves away from the
the internalized cultural flunkeyism hidden behind the excessive privileging of “Korean
Choi calls his street photographs the “image collection.” The photo archive’s
sheer size gives it a weight, revealing the degree to which Choi cherishes the sceneries
and objects of his fascination, and moreover desires to give them eternal life in the ways
they are used in situ. These images are not only collected into his archive but are shown
on his website and during his public talks. Those who have attended Choi’s artist talks,
which he gives rather frequently, must remember the abundance of Choi’s street
triggers our admiration for the artist’s diligent fanaticism.117 One photograph, dated
March 30, 1987, captures the back of a peddler’s handcart full of household items. [Fig.
2.5] From bright blue buckets to stainless strainers, orange dustpans, hot pink and blue
plastic packing strips, and heavy-duty broomsticks with wooden handles and neon green
plastic brushes, the peddler has it all. The contour of the cart is not visible, hidden
beneath the cluster of domestic articles. Even the cane of the peddler, from which he
gains the much-needed extra push forward, is barely seen. The large part of the
composition devoted to objects, in addition to their vibrant color palette, rivets our
attention to these plastic things, especially because the background is an otherwise banal
street scene of Seoul, or any other city in Korea. A non-descript, five-story brick building
is simply there. A large blue truck, frequently seen on the streets even today, stands still
on a dark-grey asphalt road, or it was moving so slowly that Choi was able to capture it
without a blur. This photograph, like dozens of others, demonstrates that Choi is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
117
The immense scale and the obsession with which Choi accumulated street photographs as well
as the particular aesthetics (cropping, composition, colors, and a focus on objects) were well-
known among the circle of contemporary artists in Seoul. Author’s interview with Jeon Yong-
suk.
101
!
inherently drawn to a group of objects that together form a world of their own, often
made in plastic with a vibrant color scheme. Interacting with one another, these objects
shape a scene with a certain narrative of togetherness thanks to the composition. Each
one of the photographs represents the explosive, live energy of street life—and together,
in their seeming infinity, they compose a world of objects, colors, and food items that
Choi likes to be surrounded by and rubbed against, while constantly interacting with
them.118
documentation of the vernacular life of objects. Another photograph that Choi almost
always shows in a public lecture is that of a chair. [Fig. 2.6] It is not a usual chair; it is a
composite of three broken chairs assembled by someone who was in need of a simple
seat. An orange plastic chair without legs but with its seat and back intact is tied to a stool
with four legs with the help of cheap white plastic strips. Another set of legs had to be
tied to the chair’s malleable back to make it stay straight. This, basically a combination of
six wooden legs and one legless chair, is what Choi proudly introduces to us as his
relationship in martial arts. By this appellation, Choi pays homage to the talent of the
street that cleverly assembles the broken, seemingly useless items, giving them a new
life. Here, Choi’s philosophy coincides on many levels with that of Michel de Certeau
and Henri Lefebvre in their emphasis on the “practice of everyday” and the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
118
Lee Young-june, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” Imichi Pip!ng: Kkaetip m!ri put!
inkongoeis!ng kkachi (Image Criticism: From Leaf-style Hair to Satellite) (Seoul: Noonbit
Publishing, 2004)
102
!
Lefebvre’s 1968 Everyday Life in the Modern World came out in 1990, and the Cultural
Studies turn in South Korean academia and the increasing attention paid to popular
culture began to ruminate in the early 1990s.119 The creative use of urban space and
eventually a new social space. In the lived urban site, the model of anti-dominant practice
is born, conjuring moments and space of resistance against the normative use.
But more importantly, what Choi’s photographs are best at capturing are Korean
vernacular culture and its post-colonial inflection.120 If popular culture and mass culture
are implicated in the binary of high/low, the notion of vernacular culture is burdened with
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
119
La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne by Henri Lefebvre (originally published in French
in 1968, English translation published in 1971; the Korean translation published in 1990).
Everyday life in the modern world. trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Hy!ndaesaegye #i ilsangs!ng translated by Park Ch"ng-ja (Seoul: Saegye Ilbo, 1990). These
practitioners including the by-then former members of Mipiy"n like Lee Young-wook translated
parts of de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday in 1994 to be included in an anthology Culture,
Everyday, Masses: 8 Inquiries about Culture with also featuring the writings of Stuart Hall, John
Fisk, Tony Bennett, etc. Even though these critics did not consider the everyday theory to shed
positive light on the “kitsch generation,” they were aware of it and the discourse was part of the
early 1990s circle of criticism, both in art and literature.
120
Critics Koh Dong-yeon and Shin Jeong-hoon have argued this before elsewhere. Koh Dong-
yeon, “1990 ny"ndae ret!ro munhwa !i t!ngchang kwa Choe J"nghwa !i p!llas!tik paradais!”
(The Emergence of Retro Culture in the 1990s and Jeonghwa Choi’s Plastic Paradise), Hankuk
kicho chohy"ng hakhoe, Vol. 13. No. 6 (December, 2012), 3-15. The English translation of the
title is Koh’s. Shin Jeong-hoon, “K"ri es" paeuki: Choe J"nghwa !i dijain kwa sopiju!i
tosiky"ngkwan” (Learning from the Street: Choi Jeong-hwa’s Design and Consumerist Urban
Landscape) in Sidae #i nun: Hankuk k#nhy!ndae misulkaron (The Eye of the Period: Theorizing
South Korean Modern and Contemporary Artists) (Seoul: Hakkochae, 2011), 309-343. While
Koh links the retro impulse in an earlier Choi with what she understands with the recycling
impulse of a later Choi and Shin’s article effectively charts the resistant spirit in Choi’s objects,
but both do not situate Choi within the larger discourse of art, urban space, and politics of
minjung/post-minjung that my chapter seeks to parse out.
103
!
slave,” the vernacular gains its connotation of being “native” against the imposed, foreign
culture from elsewhere asserts its normativity. For Miriam Hansen in particular,
modernity (emphasis mine).”122 Both photos, of the peddler and the chair, are
“vernacular” not only for their presence in the everyday street life and outside the modern
institution of high culture, but also, more importantly, for their opposition to the
most aptly simulating the logic of global finance capital in 1990s Seoul. For instance, the
249 meters-high, or 816 feet-tall skyscraper called “6.3. Building” in the financial district
of Yeouido and designed by the Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill, was completed in 1985, setting a standard for all other glass towers to spring up
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
121
In language, for example, a dialect can be a dialect only in so far as there is the “standard”
form of speaking that language. Kobena Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. ed. Kobena
Mercer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Institute of International Visual Arts, c2007).
122
An advocate of the term vernacular modernism rather than popular modernism, Miriam
Hansen writes: “The dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, combined with the
connotation of language, idiom, and dialect, makes me prefer the term vernacular, vague as it
may be, over the term popular, which is politically and ideologically overdetermined and
historically just as unspecific…I develop the concept of vernacular modernism, as a cultural
counterpart and response to technological, economic, and social modernity.” Hansen, “Fallen
Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism” Film
Quarterly 54.1 (Autumn, 2000), 10-11.
104
!
in Seoul and to fulfill the desire to welcome the yet once more improved capitalist (post-
)modernism.123
Noting the vernacular nature of Choi’s work, critic Lee Young-june, the cynical
critic who gradually became Choi’s closest friend, introduces the term Chasaengch!k
munhwa, which he translates to English as the “spontaneous culture” and which refers to
describes the type of cultural practice that Choi cherishes—the kind that has “actively
evaded the structure, standard, codification and such, which intellectuals and cultural
professionals define and according to which they rate [the works’ value].”124 The color
blue, so vivid without a single trace of fading, found in the large tarpaulins to cover
goods in traditional markets, such as that of the Namdaemun Market in Seoul or the
life energy that is only possible because its maker did not consult the blue of “van Gogh
painting or Koryo Dynasty celadon vases.” This absence of reference is not obtained
an ignorance accompanied by an active will not to copy, follow, and emulate the
From this refusal, we can thus locate an ample effort of resistance and alternative spirit
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
123
Not that Korea has not undergone modernity of the early and mid 20th century, but the changes
in the early 1990s were immense. Only in the post-Olympic era, the homogeneity of glass-and-
steel towers hovering over previous building structures has become a norm. In the pre-Olympic
era, technological modernism was signified by the Corbusier-inspired concrete block buildings
such as the Seun Arcade and the Samik Apartments constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. The shift
to International Style occurred, for Korea, in the mid-1980s.
124
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” 218-219.
105
!
because such a defiant move against the dominant always requires a spirit of resilience,
persistence, and tenacity. In other words, even though that which is spontaneous does not
express its intention to claim resistance, it is full of antagonistic power because, as Lee
claims, it “escapes all the powerful forces of dominance and insists on hanging in there”
What lies behind Choi’s ostensibly casual remarks about his preference for certain
things, is the fundamental desire of the artist to center the new relationship of art and life
on the visuality of such “spontaneous” aesthetics that disrupts the presently dominant
hegemonic system. With the act of archiving scenes and objects imbued with spontaneity,
photographs with even more viewers in a range of settings like public talks, books, essays
in magazines, and artist websites. To this extent, I would advance my argument so far as
to insist that the enormous amount and equally vast kinds of Choi’s artistic projects—
publication design, interior design for bars and cafes, architecture planning, curating
cultural events like experimental performance and independent music concerts, and art
directing for cinema, as well as producing installation art pieces—concerns the central
spontaneity from the urban streets, he mimics such aesthetics in both his installation art
and interior design. The ways in which the colorful plastic and nickel-silver plates spread
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” 219.
106
!
over the market floor and form an organized chaos [Fig. 2.7] are transferred to a light
fixture installation in a gallery or a lighting device in the café Plus Minus, whose interior
Choi designed in 1994. [Fig. 2.8 and Fig. 2.9] Choi has always engaged with a broad
spectrum of activities that might evade the categorization of art, which is most apparent
in the fact that Choi made his fame as an interior designer in 1987, when he joined an
interior design firm called A4 before he founded his own in 1991. At a time when cafes
in Seoul were undergoing major stylistic renovation, Choi participated in designing a few
that, instantly or gradually, became cultural hubs in Hongdae and Taehakro, the two
districts, Hongdae and Taehakro are two of the half dozen districts most prone and
vulnerable to up-to-date fashion and style in the Seoul metropolitan. But the Choi-
designed cafés stood out as an anomaly at the time of the shift from tapang (literally “tea
room”), typically displaying chunky sofas and dim lighting, to k’ap’e (café), filled with
light filtered through large glass windows for the youth and young adults. In short the
brightness and transparency of international style was the language for interior design at
this time. In the café/bar Ozone executed in 1991, Choi, by contrast, utilized recycled
wood panels and bars to build a wall, leaving bare the uneven texture and sometimes
discoloration of the used wood. Long town hall tables make the seating communal, not
private. What is most peculiar about the use of material and design in Ozone is in fact the
chairs, which resemble the three foot-long benches quoted, or perhaps recycled, from the
indicate Hakka food stalls) and wrapped up with cheap, brown packing tape at a time
107
!
when the previously ubiquitous scenery of p’ochangmach’a, along with tabang, began to
When fragments of vernacular architecture are caught on Choi’s radar, they make
mimicry therefore reveals that the criticism of Choi’s work on the basis of the derogatory
For Choi, a claim to originality always gives him discomfort; for example, he is always
reluctant to insert his signature to installation works, even when museums request it upon
acquisition. He also welcomes the copies of his “copy aesthetics”: the discovery that a
China, where a patron hired a Chinese artist to produce a “Choi Jeong-hwa,” thrilled the
artist so much that he added the very work to his own portfolio (instead of filing a lawsuit
culture as kitsch (the formal copy of an original), Choi’s mimetic art advances a different
logic of mimetic relationship. What Choi tends to replicate is not the form of the signifier
but the newly acquired signified by the activities of use or display. In the case of the
plastic baskets in My IQ Jump (1993), what is replicated is the spontaneous way in which
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
126
Choi’s interview with Im Geun-jun in March, 2013, as a public event attended by author. His
1992 interview with Kim Mi-kyung was titled “Oh, there too goes my work!” and indicates the
two-way mimicry constituting his art-making. He is always busy and diligent to learn from the
streets, and does not shy away from claiming the aesthetics that he likes, or he would’ve created,
as his “work.”
108
!
they are displayed en masse in the market or on the peddler handcart, and not the original
use of containing things within the basket. The amalgam of broken chair parts is an
inspiration (or a “master instructor”) precisely due to its roughly composed, spontaneous
togetherness, which Choi repeats in his clever combination of objects and materials for
interior design. Choi’s work essentially replicates the situation in which a “look” delivers
a new signified, that is, the aesthetics of spontaneity; all copies are thus re-contextualized
Choi’s productions are not mere reproductions of an existing art style per se or an object;
instead, they are enacting an active mimicry with the vernacular manifestation of
spontaneous culture, which sits on the changing commodity culture, the shifting
“spontaneous culture” exists. Yet, it is certain that the formally fundamental elements of
color, rhythm, and composition play a significant role in making a cultural manifestation
environment, any object or material can trigger the beholder to experience the aesthetics
of spontaneity. The objects that might not resemble materially can also exude a similarly
spontaneous air; in other words, in a given setting two different objects could “look
similar” to each other while looking spontaneous. In the range of mediums and practices,
Choi has developed what Walter Benjamin has conceptualized as “mimetic faculty”—the
practice through dance, astrology, and even language, such as children’s mimicking
animate and inanimate beings, astrology’s equating the stars with humans, and shamanic
mimicry of non-human creatures.128 Many of the words used by Choi to summarize his
saeksaek (diversity, a light breath, or repetition of the Sino-Korean word for color/lust),
others, to a certain degree, considered vulgar in their status as slang, these onomatopoeia
are all embedded in a rhythmic repetition or can be uttered with a playful emphasis in the
tone. (Curiously, minjung cultural practitioners never played with onomatopoeia in their
emphasis on the essence of “Korean culture,” as if they were uncomfortable with non-
serious playfulness and lightness.) But by and large, the mimetic aesthetics of Choi is
manifest most powerfully when the agency of Choi (as an artist and as an author)
becomes weak because he seeks to be similar to the objects he likes. The identification is
minjung art, but is to the spontaneously erupted environment composed of objects that
Choi’s mimetic art, and its radical recontextualization of postcolonial politics and
that do not begin with the notion of human agency. In other words, rather than asking the
questions of labor, nation, and ethnicity that culminated into the notion of oppression
strictly tied to the figuration of suffering minjung, Choi’s art demonstrates that resistant
aesthetics take center stage. Soon afterwards, by 1994, critics in Korea began to see
Choi’s work in a different light, recognizing a potential, in Choi’s art, to reinvent the
political art after minjung art—or, even further, to re-evaluate the legacy of minjung art
itself. One can say that minjung politics is a lens through which to analyze Choi’s art. For
the reasons that I will explore in the following section, it would not be incorrect to argue
that Choi’s art brought the discourse of minjung politics to another level. Without the
figural depiction of minjung and its suffering, the “creative potential” of minjung erupts
from the dynamic formal, material, and spatial elements in Choi’s work.
Temporality of Resistance
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
Roger Caillois discusses the depersonalizing effect of mimesis. Although he considers this as a
disease, in the name of psychasthenia, the relationship between renunciation and mimesis is
helpful to understand the weak authorship that Choi promotes. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia” (1936) translated by John Shepley in October 31 (1984),!12-32.
111
!
In his 1994 essay based on an interview with Choi, critic Lee Young-wook is apt
to detect the key aesthetic concepts with which to reconsider Choi’s work. Much
deserved attention to Choi’s words and his work is paid here, allowing the critic to do
away with the existing theoretical framework, and see for the first time what he finds in
the work. His observation therefore begins with an impression, as opposed to an analysis,
and this impression is first and foremost an olfactory one. These “objects, spaces, signs,
and publications [exude] Choi Jeong-hwa’s odor,” writes Lee. Even though Choi never
used an explicit perfume or odor for his work (except in one occasion), Lee describes
encountering Choi’s work infused with synesthetic symptoms, as Choi’s work triggers
something more than what is visualized within.130 I argue, this transference of the
visual—to the smell, the sound, the fear, and even an all-encompassing experience such
and display of mass-produced objects such as plastic baskets, anime masks, and body
scrub towels. As discussed earlier, the compilation of such objects en masse recurs in his
installation work, while photographs also represent a similarly obsessive aesthetic logic.
Such a synesthetic experience, for Lee, is acquired from these photographs as well as
objects that Choi avidly collects. Lee’s placement of equal weight on Choi’s images and
objects emphasizes the importance of the overall ambiance, or the “odor,” created by the
collection or in between the individual oeuvres that make up Choi’s artistic world. “The
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
130
Despite the danger of underplaying the Korean/Asian philosophy on the vision and the smell, I
bring Adorno and Horkheimer here. Adorno wrote “When we see, we remain what we are; but
when we smell, we are taken over by otherness.” Adorno and Horkeimer, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1946; 1972), 184.
112
!
plates spread over the market floor,” “the harmony of unsophisticated but lovely colors,”
“the pleasure derived from freedom and inartificiality of those [objects] scattered in
negligence,” “the vigor felt from the sounds, different and diverse but all vivid, echoing
feeling emanating from Choi’s work. All of these descriptions are subsequently followed
by the final word of the above quoted paragraph, with a question mark: “minjung-ness
(minjung s!ng)?”
The question mark that Lee adds after “minjung-ness” (or the characteristic
essence of minjung), and the word’s singular presence without any syntactic context,
expresses the critic’s uncertainty about such an assertion. Like an afterthought, Lee does
not seem to know how to elaborate on this remark. Indeed, anyone with a slightest
understanding about the 1980s art’s manifestation of the notion of minjung might detect a
profound disconnect, or a logical leap, in this association. The operation of minjung art,
whereas Choi’s art defies such an ideology-driven mechanism of signifying. But we also
have to note that the notion of “minjung”—the social and cultural signification
recognized by the public when one utters the word minjung in relation to art—has
changed by the year 1994. In December of 1993, the multicultural turn in the 1993
Whitney Biennale was restaged in Seoul because the National Museum of Contemporary
Art in Korea imported the entire show for the Biennale’s only overseas touring occasion.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
131
A phrase coined by Milan Kundera, which Lee quotes in his earlier kitsch article from 1992,
and repeats in this 1994 essay too.
113
!
Despite the controversy about artistic imperialism, the artistic manifestations of identity
and social issues on the American soil delivered a fresh shock to many in Korea, at least
on the diversity of formal experimentation and the conceptual spins on political messages.
In February 1994 the same national institution hosted 15 Years of Minjung Art, 1980-
1994, the state-sponsored retrospective of minjung art that was hastily put together less
than a year after the first civilian president, Kim Young Sam, had taken the office.
Everyone knew that the show was driven more by political motives than an art historical
agenda. As critic Sung Wan-kyung regrettably agrees with many others who called it “the
funeral of minjung art,” the exhibition seemed to mark the end to an era. The funeral was,
however, a belated one, coming several years after the actual death, which might have
coincided with the end of the social movement (1987), or even the beginning of
postmodern discourse and the emergence of the new generation artists like Choi (1987-8).
Between the actual death and the symbolic death of minjung art, the shift in newly
envisioning socially relevant art production had already been under way, so much that
Mipiy"n, unofficially but widely known as the second generation minjung critics,
Lee in 1994 therefore signifies not only the recuperation of politics from Choi’s art but
also the reoriented understanding of minjung art.132 After all, the term “minjung-ness”
appears out of syntax. Behind Lee’s cautious claim of minjung-ness resides something
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
132
Mipiy"n members journeyed on separate paths. Lee was one of few who stayed in art criticism,
while Beck developed her career as a curator and Park and Lee Young-chul departing to the U.S.
for further studies.
114
!
quite radical: Lee conceptualizes the reclaiming of the minjung revolutionary spirit in
more visual and sensual terms than ideologically rigid class division. To emphasize, the
markets and traditional markets (sichang)—the main sources of inspiration for Choi—as
the site of economically and socially marginalized people. Instead, colors, pleasure,
harmony of seemingly unrelated objects, and the emancipatory feeling from the very lack
of order are the terms in which a new possibility for a change comes to vision. Even
though Lee does not articulate it, I would press that: if Choi had previously posed as a
problem case for Mipiy"n critics, a possibility to reevaluate Choi’s art within the
lingering aspiration of the minjung art movement has effectively erupted from Lee’s 1994
essay. I would even go as far as to argue that Choi’s ability to trigger a certain
emancipatory feeling is more liberating than 1980s minjung art ever could be. And this
second, or a brief sniff at a fleeting scent. It can only be triggered, in other words,
The ephemeral temporality signifies the refusal of essentialism and stability. “The
new in Choi’s work is vulnerable to imminent deterioration; the old in Choi’s work looks
new,” notes Chan-kyong Park in 1998.133 In the most transparent way, Park seems to
refer to Choi’s installation, Rotten Art, Degradable Art (1992), wherein two dozen photos
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
133
Park Chan-kyong, untitled, in Mom Magazine Vol. 36 (November, 1997), p. 45.
115
!
of grocery items in various stages of decomposition over time are installed side by side
across a gallery wall. [Fig. 2.11] But in his plastic series, like Plastic Paradise or in the
picture of the peddler carrying plastic stuffs too, it is not hard to sense on a visceral level
the imminent use and disuse that these items face. They can be tossed away at any
moment. Also in the photographs of food in his image collection, such as the extreme
close-ups of vibrantly red turnip Kimchi or a mount of fish entrails found on the fish
market floor, the rawness and liveness of the photographed highlight their fast-
approaching decay. [Fig. 11] Vulnerable to an imminent conversion into something else,
the objects captured in the still photographs almost look “moving” as if captured in
moving images. Young-june Lee too notes that the most valuable aspect of Choi is
an unstable space of contingency.134 Here, Lee’s comment operates on the aesthetic level,
about the moment of visceral encounter between the viewers and the work, whose
intensity is augmented because of its momentariness. In its movement, the object (or the
Another case in point, in which the notion of short-lived temporality is in full play,
is the 1995 curatorial project called Pp!: Instant Gallery (inst!nt# gael!ri or ilhoeyong
gael!ri). [Fig. 2.12] The Korean word pp! is literally translated to skeleton, but in the
context of the exhibition the tense sound usually pronounced in fortissimo has more of a
sonic value than a denotative one. This is apparent in the impromptu, hand-written banner
attached atop the entrance as a welcoming marquee: Pp! (written in Korean language
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
134
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa.”
116
!
han’g#l) and the subtitle “instant gallery” (written in roman alphabet). Two elongated,
probably recycled, chipboards vertically also hang below the title banner, each reading
inst!nt# gael!ri (which literally translates to “a gallery for/with convenience foods”) and
ilhoeyong gael!ri (“a gallery for one-time use”). In fact, the temporary space of this
“one-time gallery” was open 24/7 during the time of exhibition; a variety of
“convenience foods” were at anyone’s disposal to consume. The “instant” nature of the
structures and the foods add to the temporary nature of the exhibition as an event, housed
demolition.
exemplify his understanding of temporality, just as his image collection reveals much
about his approach to the vernacular aesthetics of the everyday urban space. The café
safe house for the most radical performance events in the early 1990s hosted by Choi. He
was the curator and event planner of the café-cum-art gallery-cum-theater. Between
December 19 and 23 of 1991, for instance, a daily performance event titled Bio
Installation Ozone (paio ins#t’olleisy!n ojon) invited a group of energetic performers and
artists like Lee Bul, Kim Hyong-tae, and Kim Sa-ha to occupy the space. The rough and
ready aesthetics of the event poster is indicative of the provisional or even subcultural
nature of Choi’s curatorial projects, as the event title and timeline were silkscreen printed
(for letters) and crudely handwritten (for numbers) on weeks-old newspaper spreads. [Fig.
2.13] The paper’s ultra-thin layer, in conjunction with its dated nature, emphasizes the
117
!
instant quality—quick, cheap, and easy to consume and waste. Even though this re-use of
major daily as one poster collapses the announcement of performance (which at moments
involved naked bodies and most often loud screaming out of joy) and the announcement
of politically punctuated worldwide news (which included the first African-born Nobel
human rights, Korea’s loss to Cuba in a handball game, and Nelson Mandela’s visit to the
UN), such a layering does not have the same politically motivated effect in 1980s artists’
use of newspapers such as Kim Gun-hee’s (Chapter 1). Kim’s is a silkscreen montage
linking the newspaper dated May 1980 (of the Gwangju Massacre) with a commercial
advertisement for popsicles in order to critique the mass media’s complicity to the
dictatorial regime. In Choi’s Bio Installation Ozone poster, the use of newspaper as
fragile, inexpensive material gains a political meaning, only when juxtaposed to the
aesthetics and materiality of the more and more ubiquitous fancy printing culture of
homogeneity supplementing the equally numerous big-budget arts events that aspire to
Many have noted that the extremely playful, garishly colorful, and even
mischievous aesthetics of the poster, banner, installation art, exhibition, and performance
event, can be associated with the adolescent regression and individual desire. Some of the
youth culture. Think of My IQ Jump (1993) with the cheaply made golden plastic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
135
This trend began with corporation-supported art foundations instituted in the 1990s, starting
with Daewoo’s Art Sonje Center (est. 1994) and Tong’a Daily’s Ilmin Cultural Foundation (est.
1995).
118
!
trophies most frequently given to the winners of various adolescent competitions in sports
and arts, in addition to the title’s reference to youth comic magazine. Either referring to
the youth culture or the by-now adults’ rekindling with its memory, this regressive
overtone might be present in Choi’s work, sometimes even propelling the association
repetition. But for my argument, such a gesture of “returning the clock” is important
regression, Choi’s work radiates something of a retro impulse—a desire to bring back the
mundane objects and inglorious cultural activities of the recent past, which, per Svetlana
outmoded objects punctuate the increasingly standardized urban space and inject the
disseminating, albeit briefly, the kind of visual resistance smeared with Choi’s odor.
During an interview in 1992, Choi was asked about what would happen if the
sites of his inspiration cease to exist: “If ‘that place’ from which you always snatch
something disappears [one day], how will you produce work?” “As a place of human
habitation, the place in which [something] is produced and wasted cannot disappear,”
responded Choi.137 This is telling of Choi’s conception of reality, and more precisely his
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136
Svelta Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
137
Kim Mik-yung and Choi Jeong-hwa, “There, again, is my work: Contemporary Art and
Material” in Choi Jeong-hwa (Seoul: Kain Design Group, 1995), 185.
119
!
being obsolete,138 Choi seems more interested in the possibility of continuing intervention
into the constantly changing urban space that is his “playground.” To be sure, the word
Choi has with the everyday reality. Indeed, the commentary on the disappearance is
Interviewer: After switching the places of A and B, another change will be called
forth. What will you do then? Switching them back [to the original state]?
Probably not.
Choi: There must be another way. The point is that the notion of “switching place”
means a desire to propose [the possibility of] change—not just a single way but
many ways of change.
[…]
Interviewer: To change our ways of seeing, one has to engage not only with issues
of visuality but also with issues pertaining politics, society, and culture. Is it true
for you?
Choi: [Yes, so that’s why] I want to have courage, and not be lazy… like a visitor
or an investigator.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
138
The fascination with urban scape on the verge of disappearance is nothing new in the history
of modernity. Think of Benjamin’s Arcades Project or Eugene Atget’s street photographs.
120
!
Interviewer: If “that place” from which you always snatch something disappears
[one day], how will you produce work?
Choi: As a place of human habitation, the place in which [something] is produced
and wasted cannot disappear.
Choi has always avoided the title “artist” with alternatives such as “emotion-emitter
the hy!nsil that he recognizes, and interferes the visual norm by injecting and emitting
than the low/high of pop art and kitsch discourse, it is the spatialized urban practice that
diligent persistence, like an overactive spinning wheel that is constantly at work but does
time or pursuing a life outside global capitalism. Choi seems to envision a group of
just below the point of breakdown so as to repeat the empty spins over and over again.
transition into liberal democracy ten years prior, abysmally popped. Writing amid the
Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8), Chan-kyong Park’s reading of Choi’s The Joke (1997)
121
!
clearly had in mind the bankrupt nation whose breakneck speed industrialization was put
[The operating logic of our time is] ‘the more the better, the bigger the better.’
Choi Jeong-hwa is aware of [another logic]: ‘the more the lighter, and the bigger
the smaller,’[which has led to] a splendid failure. Just like the repetition-
compulsion of penis growing and shrinking in the stages of pre- and post-
masturbation, the [energy of] bombastic over-exaggeration has reached the realm
of truth. In the very place where the repetition of quantity and size absorbs and
simultaneously eliminates any “meaning,” Choi’s work becomes terribly sobering.
Witnessing as the fabric crown [The Joke] swells up, we become utterly
speechless. In our speechlessness, we cannot help but accept the cultural,
psychological bankrupt of the rushed development and the failure of bubble
desire-economy.139
As bright and clear as this reading might be, the post-IMF Crisis reception of Choi
became once again vulnerable to misrecognition, as if the late 1990s economic crisis did
harm to Choi, whose work now seemed to have a more stable meaning as a critique of
The Korean economy recovered sooner than the one-sided reception of Choi, as
critique the non-Western society of their origin—and Choi’s art seemed to fit the role
perfectly. The inflatable balloon installations soon became Choi’s best sellers abroad,
of late 1980s to mid-1990s South Korea of which Choi’s art was a part. Mounts made
with plastic baskets, especially starting from Plastic Paradise of 1997, also proliferated
around the world. [Fig. 2.15] A towering installation of neon yellow-green plastic baskets
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139
Park Chan-kyong, untitled, in Mom Magazine Vol. 36 (November, 1997), p. 45.
122
!
in ten different sizes, Plastic Paradise displays cynicism even in its title. Two round
baskets of same size make a single “sphere,” and these spheres are mounted on top of
each other, with the largest sphere at the bottom, hence making a fairly balanced, cone-
shaped tower. A total of 19 towers were then laid out in an equilateral triangular form
like billiard balls on a pool table, against a backdrop of flaring red composed with staked-
up plastic baskets in red. We are told that despite the careful composition, the imminent
collapse of the green towers is unavoidable and the fall will be all the more stunning
For the artists to come after Choi—in post-IMF age which also happens to be the
Internet age—the ever more forceful tides of neoliberal logic are manifested in various
shapes. The recuperated role of the state in shaping the rules of economy in collaboration
example of this. The intensified proximity between the domestic art scene and the
international one also, more than ever, affected the vernacular everyday on the ground.
Even though “a place of human habitation... the place in which [something] is produced
and wasted” did not disappear, a new spatialization of the vernacular and a new
persistent interference or empty spinning might no longer be valid in the post-IMF era.
123
!
Chapter Three
Now that we have achieved liberty and equality in the political and economic sense,
we must bring our attention to “forms of life” on the most concrete level.
– Sim Kwang-hy"n (1998)
In October of 1998, a display of unusual objects occupied the Sungnam city hall
lobby. Vertically erected TV monitors on the floor screened black and white videos of
Sungnam streets; lined up six by eight, a 48 green foam brick oasis stood on the floor like
an architectural model for a miniature city; unfinished sweaters with strands of yarn were
pinned to the wall. [Fig. 3.1 and 3.2] All these objects composed a mixed-media
installation by a group of seven artists in their twenties and thirties called Sungnam
Project. A satellite city adjacent to Seoul’s Southeast corner, Sungnam was the first state-
planned modern city in Korea, built on top of rice fields and mountains, to which the state
government relocated residents from multiple slums spread across Seoul in the 1970s.
From its birth, Sungnam was thus marked by its socio-economic marginality. As
Sungnam Project’s research revealed, each evicted family was granted 20-py!ng
extremely hast manner without much notice or time for preparation. By the late 1990s
when the artists stumbled upon the city, the small, narrow houses covering the hills
quietly told the tragic stories of forced migration. The artists faithfully documented what
they saw, shooting the video on a motorcycle while driving through the sloppy alleys of
124
!
To encounter these objects neatly displayed in the lobby would have intrigued
some viewers visiting the city hall, but it is also plausible that many of these works might
have gone unnoticed as an “art exhibition.” This confusion was deliberate for it had been
the artists’ intention to carefully maintain the lobby’s calm and orderly “administrative
look.” Even the slim, four-page black and white brochure accompanying the exhibition
(which the artists called “catalogue”) feigned the look of a modest promotional flyer
distributed free of charge. After all, the lobby was already decorated with several
building forests in the 1990s. Hung on the wall, these electrically back-lit, full-spectrum
color photographs advertised the city’s newly acquired, or aspiring, middle class identity
Despite its ostensibly insignificant appearance in the lobby, this exhibition titled
Sungnam and Environment-Art (S!ngnam kwa hwanky!ng misul) marked the beginning
question. These methods used ethnographic research of the residents (gleaned through
reference for another group, FlyingCity, which formed three years later in 2001. All three
125
!
geographic research about particular districts in Seoul and as a group likewise spent
(2003-2009), which takes its name from the neighborhood of the Cheonggyecheon (or
In 2002 the City of Seoul proposed an urban renewal project along the
completion in 1968 had covered up the stream for a faster inner city circulation of traffic
and then by transforming the restored stream into a public park with flowing water,
few months after the mayor’s announcement of the redevelopment plan. The group’s first
steps involved conducting ethnographic and urban geographic research of the street
vendors and small-scale metal workshop owners, who faced eviction or the loss of their
livelihood because of the renewal plan. The workshop owners— themselves craftsmen
who have worked in the district for as much as three decades— became FlyingCity’s
major inspiration for producing the research-based works consisting of texts, drawings,
Both Sungnam Project and FlyingCity took interest in urban areas subjected to
state-driven urban developments first under the military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s
and then the democratic administrations in the 1990s and 2000s. It is through such on-site
126
!
investigation of urbanism and urban space in transformation that a new search for critical
art (pip’an ch!k misul) began in late 1990s Korea. Instead of making general critiques of
“South Korean reality” or “the oppressed Korean people,” these new groups of artists
development (both policy and the capital) and the ecology of urban life in all of its
formal aspects of critical art vis-à-vis the 1980s political art in South Korea; unlike Choi
Jeong-hwa and his cohort, who in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s sought to start
from a ground zero (Chapter 2), the artists in Sungnam Project and FlyingCity were
the urgency to discover a new artistic form of political engagement in the post-minjung
era. The decade of 1998-2007, for some artists, was thus a period of “re-learning” the
In 1998 cultural critic Sim Kwang-hy"n wrote that by 1996, very few people
would have disputed a presiding “failure” in the South Korean political system: that the
political reform propelled by the June 1987 revolution had failed to deliver its promises
of economic equality and social stability. The 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis further
brought back the memories of dictatorship—this time the IMF—in South Korea,
spreading the ample belief that institutional democracy had little to say about the tides of
“flexible” global capitalism that affected every corner of South Korea. “The era when we
believed that politics would provide answers to all problems has ended with the IMF,”
127
!
wrote Sim.140 The unemployment rate tripling from 2% (1996) to 7% (1998) was only
one indication of social instability while the rising homelesness and a sharp increase in
the suicide rate caused by economic duress may be have been others. As I have shown in
the previous chapters, the politically active and creative artists of the 1970s and 1980s
became political by standing against military dictatorship, while those of the early to mid-
1990s became political by appropriating commercial culture that stood outside the rigid
structure of ideology (either statism or anti-statist activism). The end of the 1990s,
however, posed different challenges. The government was considered democratically run,
and had learned to work with cultural practitioners like artists: the influx of governmental
and quasi-governmental support (i.e. funding agencies under the Ministry of Culture and
municipal cities) rose as major player in the contemporary art scene. As the practice of
working with the government and its subsidiaries became the most viable option for
artists, the key questions surfaced: how can artists work with a democratic institution that
is not fully exercising the ideals of democracy? How does politics arise outside simple
consumerism or embracing it? Of course such dilemmas do not belong solely to this
period, but the late 1990s posed a particular challenge to the artists plunged into the
The artists of Sungnam Project and FlyingCity respond to this new political
environment. The state government ceased to become the target in this period, not simply
because the government was considered democratic (and thus a viable collaborator) but
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140
Sim Kwang-hy"n, Seroun ‘misul undong’ !n pilyohanka? (Do We Need a New “Art
Movement?), Forum A Vol.2 (July 30, 1998), unpaginated.
128
!
precisely because its “democratic nature” was deemed irrelevant for the type of artistic
endeavor that locates a new site of politics and a new form of political aesthetics.141 The
urgency to find a new form of visualization compelled the artists in Sungnam Project and
consumption coincide and creative actions result— even if they might not constitute the
quintessential spaces of dissent (i.e. streets and squares). As Sim further noted, “Now that
we have achieved liberty and equality in the political and economic sense, we must bring
our attention to ‘forms of life’ on the most concrete level.” 142 In the era when the
question political liberty became a matter of formality and an ineffective trophy achieved
from the bygone minjung period, it was in concrete forms and aesthetics that new politics
That artists’ attention turned to urban space and urbanism is not an entirely new
artistic strategy; but there are important particularities and points of divergence between
Sungnam Project and FlyingCity, on the one hand, and other Korean and non-Korean
examples on the other. Compared to minjung artists, especially those of Reality and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
141
The question of irrelevance became apparent in the mid-1990s through the two incidents, or
public spectacles of mourning: the sudden crumbling of the S"ngsu Bridge in 1994 that killed a
dozen citizens and over thirty injured, and the collapse of the Sampung Department Store in
1995, which resulted in over over 500 deaths. The inexcusable corruption and irresponsibility in
maintaining built structures that resulted in such massive casualties forced South Koreans to
question the ethical foundations of society.
142
Sim Kwang-hy"n, “Misulsa roput" !i talchul: sinch’ech"k sak"n kwa kamkaknolli !i hoebok
!l wihay"” (A Flight from Art History: To Recover the Event of Body and Logic of Senses,” in
Konggan #i p’akoe wa saengs!ng: S!ngnam kwa Pundang sai (The Destruction and Formation
of Space: Between Sungnam and Pundang). ed. Kim Tae-h"n (Seoul: Munhwa Kwahak, 1998),
11. Park Chan-kyong also wrote a text for this edited volume accompanied Kim Tae-h"n’s solo
show on Sungnam. For the exhibition, the three-story gallery in Sungkok Museum in Seoul
presented six bodies of work in mediums of photography, painting, drawing, and “pin-up” style
photo installation of public art sculptures found in public schools.
129
!
Utterance, the artists in this chapter do not rely on the generalized and coherent binary of
the rural and the urban space, and instead seek the particular material manifestations of
interrogate the country’s urbanization and development of mega cities in the 1990s,
which coincided with the general consensus on the utilitarian value of arts and culture in
urban space. In this moment, public commissions for eye-sore sculptures in so-called
public spaces abounded, while cities were busy initiating urban beautification projects,
which often propelled “local folklorism” (per FlyingCity) that explicitly engineered
promotional values of the local cities or neighborhoods.143 This phenomenon is not unlike
culture in urban spatial politics in 1980s and 1990s New York, wherein the public art and
architecture projects signified a democratically open space while in truth served to cover
up or transcend economic, political, and social inequalities that existed at the site.144
Substituting genuine debates of publicness and public space with what Deutsche
Seoul (the capital with 10 million residents) and Sungnam (the first and largest satellite
city off Seoul) threatened rather than fostered a critical inquiry into how the notions of
democracy and publicness might be perceived, performed, and fostered on the ground. As
I will later discuss, the pursuit of publicness that Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s work
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
Jeon Yongsuk, “Chiy"k ju!i e k!nk"han tosis"ng !i chaemaekrakhwa: por"m ei (Forum A) !i
!iche” (Recontextualization of Urbanism Based on Regionalism: Agenda of Forum A), The 4th
Gwangju Biennale Invited Group’s International Workshop_Community and Art (Gwangju:
Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2002), 2-6.
144
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996),
xiii.
130
!
visually expressed is substantially different from the model of critical, and thus
commendable, public art proposed by US-based art historians Deutsche and Miwon
Kwon, because of these Korean artists’ conceptualization of the role of artists and the
temporality of publicness. This chapter will therefore demonstrate how the newly
invested interests in the politics of urban space examined in Sungnam Project and
FlyingCity interact with the oppositional politics of minjung and the vernacular aesthetics
of Choi Jeong-hwa, as well as the discourse surrounding public art and site-specificity in
group,” whose members included Kim Hong-bin, Kim Tae-h"n, Park Yong-s"k, Park
Chan-kyong, Park Hye-yôn, Im Heung-soon, and Cho Ji-eun.145 The group’s intense
during which the members focused on learning about the city’s history of urbanization,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
145
The group’s collaboration lasted for two years. Among these members, Cho Ji-eun and Im
Heung-soon in 2002 launched a collective called Mixrice, which explored the life of migrant
workers in South Korea, starting with holding a media education class for migrant workers
mostly from other parts of Asia. Mixrice as it is currently constituted with Cho Ji-eun and Yang
Chul-mo has, since 2006, waged multiple projects focusing on the neighborhood of Masôk, once
known as a relatively secure haven with autonomy for migrant workers. Im went a separate way
under his own name but his practice still revolves around examining particular communities—
housewives in Geumcheon, Seoul or that of female activists participating in the minjung
movement during the 1970s and 80s—through the mediums of video and installation. Park Chan-
kyong became a renowned photographer and video artist by the 2000s and in the late 2000s began
his second career as a film director, collaborating with his famous film-director brother Chan-
wook Park, a Cannes award winner. The Park brothers together founded a film production
collective called Parking Chance, showing their work in festivals like Jeonju, Berlin, Rotterdam,
etc.
131
!
rather than theorizing their artistic mandate (like Reality and Utterance of the 1980s in
Chapter 1) or studying art theories (like Mipiy"n of the 1990s in Chapter 2). In contrast
collective brainstorming of the project’s contour.146 Together, they gathered and studied
texts, ranging from the municipal city-generated records about the genesis and
administration of Sungnam to 1970s minjung literature about the dire living situation for
the then newly relocated residents. Taking photographs of Sungnam and sharing them at
the meetings for further discussions were important too, as they were not only part of the
somatic experience but also an integral part of the eventual installation. 147
The story of how this group came to be is worth narrating in detail. In spring of
1998, Park Chan-kyong proposed to make a collective work with other artists, when the
curator Lee Young-chul (Park’s former colleague at the art criticism group Mipiyôn)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
146
In its group structure, Sungnam Project differs from the previous art collectives (i.e. Reality
and Utterance, Tur"ng, Imsulnyôn, etc.) and art associations (i.e. the Association of Minjung
Artists) active during the 1980s whose fairly rigid structure reflected the groups’ belief in the so-
called larger causes (i.e. providing an alternative to the status quo of abstract painting and serving
as propaganda team of pro-democracy movement), or from the coteries of artists and musicians in
the 1990s whose unsystematic and spontaneous collaboration took the neighborhood of Hongik
University as a stage. Such collaborative method as Sungnam Project’s would reappear in many
more contemporary collectives in the 2000s. The more contemporary exemplary of
interdisciplinary collaboration among designers, architects, artists, musicians, and filmmakers are
Listen to the City, Part-time Suite, etc.
147
As Cho Ji-eun recalls later, the younger members like herself lacked the awareness that their
documentary photographic practice shared similarities with the 1980s reportage-style minjung
photographs. Cho is right to assume that Park Chan-kyong and Kim Tae-hôn would have
recognized the connection but their inability to share this knowledge demonstrates the idea of
promoting or forming a certain “lineage” with minjung was not pertinent in the beginning. The
most important part was to observe the city and learn from it. The reference to the minjung period
appears in Park’s essay included in the exhibition catalogue. Author’s interview with Cho Ji-eun
on June 20, 2014.
132
!
invited him to Lee’s upcoming curatorial effort on city life and urban architecture: 98
City and Media: Clothing, Food, House, soon to be known as a landmark group show of
contemporary Korean artists held at the Seoul City Museum of Art (October 16 –
November 4, 1998).148 At that time, Park had just written an essay for Kim Tae-h"n’s solo
exhibition of Kim’s three yearlong art productions in and about Sungnam. With Kim,
Park invited other members, then young graduates of Ky"ngwon University (in
Sungnam) and Kyewon University (in Anyang, another satellite city off Seoul), where
Park was a lecturer of art, to prepare a research-based mixed media installation for a
show in October. The group thus presented at the Seoul City Museum of Art Sungnam
and Modernism, an almost identical installation to the one described earlier at the
Sungnam city hall lobby. Both exhibitions took place simultaneously, and the city hall
lobby edition was in fact planned as an additional, duplicate exhibition for the purpose of
showing the resultant works to the Sungnam civil servants.149 What this story tells us
about Sungnam Project is that firstly, the group was representative of a wider range of
artists and practitioners who, by the late 1990s, gave a serious thought to urban life and
spaces in Korea. Secondly, a more flexible relationship between art and the government
was envisioned, at least on the part of the artists in Sungnam Project, with the belief in
communicating with those in decision-making positions. And thirdly, from the process of
production to that of display, the group practiced the act of collective learning and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
148
At that time Park had returned from his studies with Allen Sekula at Cal Arts (1996-7). His
1997 homecoming solo exhibition Black Box: Memories of the Cold War Images, which uses
photographs as documents and texts as part of critical investigation of the North-South Korean
relationship, is thus the influence of his time in LA as much as the continuation of his activities in
Mipy!n.
149
Author’s interview with Cho Ji-eun on June 20, 2014
133
!
sharing, thus making the exhibition’s underlying premise a certain form of storytelling
The final works included in the exhibition were therefore executed in various
mediums that were more expository than expressive. At the city hall edition, to which I
will now, each of the works and its display method were intent on showcasing the
research findings. On the topic of the slanted slopes of Sungnam, Cho Ji-eun, Park Hye-
y"n, and Im Heung-soon cast nine cement blocks in nine locations with different
inclinations. [Fig. 3.3] The congregation of these nine blocks, (along with the plywood
box used to cast the blocks on the road) on a knee-high stand that belonged to the city
hall, was designed to reveal the broad range of slopes as well as the incredibly steep
average inclination of the road. 2. Install the mold on the slope. 3. On step 2, pour the
cement mixed with water. 4. Wait until firm. 5. Remove the cast.” The indexical
relationship between the block and the site is further emphasized in the neighborhood
names (Sinh!ng-dong, Taepy"ng 2-dong, etc.) written in black ink on the lower right
Arirang, intermixes the scenes captured from a camera held by Cho on a motorcycle
driven by Im through the narrow alleys with the post-production voice recordings of
Sungnam residents telling the story of surviving Sungnam. [Fig. 3.4] These anecdotes,
sometimes entering the screen as inter-titles, have a direct connection to the materiality
134
!
and history of development. For example, the saying that “In Sungnam, you can live
without a wife but never without a pair of rain boots” indicates that the hasty construction
skipped the process of solidifying the soft, swampy ground in these neighborhoods. Shot
with a camera tilted 90 degrees to the side and screened on two vertically placed
monitors, the video put a repeated emphasis on the verticality of the landscape forged not
by high-rises but by the narrow alleys dotted with mostly three-story residential
buildings.
One wall presented the materials gathered from an ethnographic inquiry into the
the installation included parts of clothing items made in the workshops. As the wall text
explained, these small workshops would receive commissions (including yarn, thread,
and design) to make parts of the sweaters (arms, bodices, etc.) which would then be
domestic consumption and Germany for overseas consumption. The fragments of sweater
became the objects that illustrated the production process. The black and white four-page
exhibition brochure available on-site, which the artists called “a catalogue that is part of
the works on display,” was printed on glossy A3 sheets and included diagrams that
illustrated this production network. Here, the rolls of thread, fluorescent ceiling lights,
ventilation fans on the wall, and the entrance to a workshop on the hill captured in the
documentary photographs were also rendered as simple line drawings in a diagram titled
The city hall lobby as a site of display resulted in a powerful play of juxtaposition.
Between the unfinished sweaters on the wall and the TV monitors showing rough
aesthetics on the floor, there was a 9 by 6 foot steel frame surrounding a full-color
glowing photograph was in its semi-permanent display at the city hall of Sungnam, a city
that by the mid-1990s sought to distance itself from its 1970s pioneering phase marked
by the influx of low class evictees. Reinventing itself as the largest satellite city,
between the folds of mountains, hundreds of apartment buildings rise to the blue sky, shot
in the photographic perspective that looks down from a mountaintop as if the camera-eye
has discovered a paradise. But what this promotional image emphasized is neither
Sungnam’s proximity to nature nor its perfect combination of nature and city but the
degree to which the gigantic apartment forest makes a city of its own with all the
conveniences of urban life, like those in Seoul, and thus generating a potential real-estate
investment value. Next to the self-promotional media play that the city government
buildings with a desirable urban life style, the Sungnam Project installation might read as
reality as analyzed in Kim Jeong-heon’s Life of Plenty (1980) in Chapter 1. The method
of juxtaposition indeed cast into high relief the politics of Sungnam Project, generally
speaking out an opposition to the new waves of urban development in Sungnam that
thrived on the lines of class division drawn between the old neighborhoods and the new
136
!
neighborhoods. But such juxtaposition was only one part of the project as a whole, as
Sungnam Project did not perceive the life in the old neighborhoods as an entirely
suffering one. Furthermore, the core of Sungnam Project’s work was reliant on another—
and more important—juxtaposition, one that at once moved away from the class politics
in the 1980s rhetoric by interrogating the notion of art in relation to city and publicness.
This new juxtaposition comes forward in the four-page brochure, packed with
textual and visual information (photographs, diagrams, a table, and essays) and stacked
on the floor. The brochure as a whole poses a central question: what if the everyday
objects re-appropriated by the residents in the hilly neighborhood for new uses are
examples of truly public art, especially when compared with the so-called public art
officially sanctioned by the city government and the state law? These two categories of
visual objects—what Sungnam Project calls “resident arts (chumin yesul)” and what the
Inhwang (a director at the Sungnam Culture Research Center and an avid supporter of
Sungnam Project), such an odd category as “decorative arts for architecture” has its
origin in the state law. In 1972 the South Korean state began to recommend an addition of
public art sculptures to newly constructed buildings. Starting in 1995—under the Culture
and Arts Promotion Law: Article 9 Installation of Art for Architecture—the state
mandated that all new buildings above a certain size dedicate approximately 1% of the
137
!
total construction cost to art works in or around the building site.150 The essay by Ma,
which runs on the brochure’s second and third pages, attempted to chart out the
repulsion” and “imposed authority” as if they are “remains of military culture” and “anti-
public” than “public”), the problem of the law, and even some suggestions on how to
envision a new direction for a more adequately public promotion of arts in urban space.
deadpan straight shots or contextualized within a park and a simple table listing facts
about 79 “public art” monuments (title, location, cost, and material). [Fig. 3.5] As readers
of Korean can easily discern, all works are large sculptures made with bronze, steel,
granite, marble, except a few oil and acrylic paintings. Most of the works were also built
not in the old town of Sungnam but in its new district, whose development of wide four-
lane streets and commercial district coincided with the year 1995, when more strict
When opened, the brochure’s fourth page rhymes with the first page, each
featuring photographs of a Sungnam slope (on top) paired with texts (at bottom). [Fig.
3.6] Featured in the photograph on the right side (on the first page) is a downhill slope,
with a line of compact cars parked on the right side and leaving just enough room for
another car to pass through the alley. In the photograph on the left (on the fourth page),
the cars have emptied out, perhaps during the day, replaced by what the residents call
“parking-free obstacles” such as plastic buckets, used tires, old chairs, and paint cans.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
Park Chan-kyong and Yang Hy"n-mi, “Konggongmisul kwa misul !i konggongs"ng” (Public
Art and Publicness of Art,” Munhwagwahak 53 (2008), 98.
138
!
The essay featured in the bottom half of the fourth page functioned as the Sungnam
Project’s manifesto and is titled The Pinnacle of Korean Modernity and Korean Modern
Art: Sungnam and Decorative Arts for Architecture. Composed by Park Chan-kyong, this
Gwangjahyôp that we have seen in Chapter 1. Here I will attempt to deliver the summary
and a few selected quotations from the text, despite the danger of doing injustice to the
sometimes poetic and other times declarative rhetoric. My analysis of the text will also
bear in mind how the rest of the mix-media installation operates according to the artists’
The essay starts by positing the particular genesis of Sungnam as a test case of
South Korean urban developmentalism in two waves (in the 1970s and then in the
1990s), exploring how the spatial logic of Sungnam is itself an imprint of an “intense
reality” (hy!nsil). “To experience the essence of modern Korea, one must climb up and
down the narrow slopes in the old neighborhoods of Sungnam.” The emphasis put on the
corporeal experience is a strategic move away from a grand, sweeping criticism of city
planning. It also prepares the reader for the ensuing juxtaposition made between art and
life. “In such a city,” Park asks, “what kind of art can surpass, if at all, the intensity of
reality (hy!nsil), the twists and turns of its commotions, and the rich exposures of life
traces—if art is not used as a tool to forget or escape reality and if, as often argued,
‘contemporary art’ is to be most faithful to its place and its time?” This question at once
posits art as an entity dependent on reality that at the same time has the capacity to
surpass it—what Sungnam Project seems to call for. As Sungnam Project’s research into
139
!
“decorative arts for architecture” has revealed, this call could not be met in the current art
scene, which was dominated in part by this law and its practice of reproducing the most
vulgar abuse of modernist sculptural autonomy in the form of atrocious plop art objects.
The only aspect of reality that these so-called public art works prompted, emphasized
Park, was the reality of corruption, wherein “certain dealers, sculptors, and painters
In the end, Sungnam Project contended that the call to find a new matrix of art
and reality—where art is coexistent with and contingent upon reality—could be realized
by “switching the location of art and reality,” and residents of the old neighborhoods of
Let us point out an example, where the location of reality and arts is
switched; this is an important case for the reasons of both aesthetics and
reality. When the city construction plan for Sungnam was launched, the
government at that time swiftly stripped off hilly slopes before distributing
twenty pyông to each evicted family who would then hastily build their
houses there. As a result, alleys that are too narrow for taxis to pass through,
let alone fire trucks, are innumerable. For a single car to climb through these
alleys, a stunt driving is inevitable. Since walking up and down the alleys is
even more strenuous, many residents drive their own cars, further
aggravating the parking situation, which is far worse than Seoul’s. So the
residents “install” various objects in front of their houses to prevent others
from parking at their spots. For those without cars and in need of securing a
pathway in and out of their house, “sculpting” permanent “parking-free
obstacles” in cement is frequently seen as a viable solution. From peculiar
items to refrigerators-turned-objets, they make up a large exhibition hall of
[everyday] articles in the most literal sense, delivering a powerful and clear
message.
The objects of everyday utility, such as refrigerators, have lost their original function;
they instead obtain a new meaning and a new role as “parking-free obstacle” sculptures.
140
!
When Sungnam Project unveils the residents’ creative act as art, it mimics the language
of art criticism with “to install,” “to sculpt,” “objets,” and “exhibition hall.” If residents’
art is a conceptual art practice that overturns the system of signification, Sungnam
Project’s framing of such a production as art and the officially condoned public art as
non-art rhymes such a conceptual move. The narrative of replacing “art” with “reality”
and vice versa is itself a conceptual practice. By the act of discovering and documenting
instances of art in the everyday reality, Sungnam Project thus challenges the existing
institution of art that recognizes the “decorative arts for architecture” as art and that
dismisses the aesthetics of everyday life in Sungnam. Even though the slide carrousel is
lost and no documentation of the slide show remains, artist Cho Ji-eun, who devised the
narrative order of the slides with Park Hye-y"n, recalls that the slide show also attempted
to highlight the contrast between art and non-art by lining up the documentary
Project revives: Who is to ask the definitional question about art? Who has the authority
to designate something as art? The brochure’s first page and a banner hanging from the
lobby ceiling featured an invented conversation among historical and fictional characters,
Bertolt Brecht (theater producer): But why do we have to continue the tradition of
calling those who wear nice clothes refined and cultured, but not calling those
who know how to make nice clothes as such?
Park Eun-ha (art lover): It’s because the act of making and the act of creating are
two different things.
Marcel Duchamp (artist): If someone designates it as art, it is art.
Park Eun-ha (art lover): Who designates what is beautiful art?
John Cage (musician): To say something is beautiful does not mean much besides
that we approve of it.
Park Eun-ha (art lover): … …
and American) and the fictional character Park Eun-ha (Korean), is the idea of production
ontological questions about art that conceptual artists, after Duchamp, have asked and
Sungnam Project sought to revisit. For Sungnam Project, this questioning was more than
But unlike the Duchampian question that gave more weight to the authorial power
of the artist (to say what is art, in the affirmative way), Sungnam Project sought to disrupt
the authorial power of the law and the institution of art. In Korea even now and especially
then, few art institutions can claim independence from the state because almost all large-
scale art museums are state-run and the curators in those institutions maintain their status
as civil servants. To this end, the question posed by Sungnam Project spoke to the
The time has come, Sungnam Project argued, to think about and within the institution,
142
!
rather than thinking outside the institution. The proposal of Sungnam Project was
sanctioned as art” and affirming “what could be, and should be, art”—which to a degree
echoed the binary between sunsu misul (pure art) and hy!nsil ju!i (aesthetics of reality)
envisioned by minjung artists. Yet what Sungnam Project denied in the examples of
kongkong misul (public art) was its very promise of publicness and democracy, requiring
us to examine the interface between publicness and reality as the focal point of Sungnam
Project’s criticality.
publicness or good public art practice in light of Rosalyn Deutsche’s analysis of spatial
politics (in particular Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc controversy), becomes extremely
important. Deutsche’s investigation into the urban development and public art in New
York throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s in relation to the question of democracy
brought her to the theories of Radical Democracy put forward by Chantal Mouffe and
Ernesto Laclau starting from the late 1970s. Deutsche thus became the first art historian
to consider the space of democracy as that of social relations and one lacking a coherent
image or a homogeneous public that is often assumed. Many more art historians and
critics have followed her lead since.151 If art were to be public (“public art”), following
Deutsche, it should reveal what democracy truly is—which is less about consensus and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
151
The earliest ones among them are Olivier Marchart, Miwon Kwon, and Claire Bishop.
Marchart, who studied political philosophy with Ernesto Laclau, has also nuanced his own take
on radical democracy theory and art. See Olivier Marchart, “Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s).
Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism, and political theory”
(eipcp.net/transversal, 2002)
143
!
universal sameness than dissensus and partiality. Serra’s Tilted Arc (1982-9), for example,
demonstrated precisely the conflict that erupted when a curved steel sculpture disturbed
the seemingly unifying space of the Federal Plaza in the 1980s. This conflict was one that
contested the “dictatorship of the people” as it was exercised by the federal state, that, in
the “name of the people,” claimed authorship of the space and denied the artist the same
claim.
For Deutsche, the work of Tilted Arc stopped being public once Serra began to
assert his rights to the artist’s free speech and when his followers began to base their
support on the myth of great art: an emphasis on genius and the heroic artist’s political
vangardism. Such a claim to an external location from which to see and critique society
dangerously echoed the neo-Marxist urban geographers’ totalizing impulse to map and
criticize the workings of late capitalism.152 “Public art,” for Deutsche, therefore, “must
disrupt, rather than secure, the apparent coherence of its new urban sites” increasingly
claimed by various parties—the government, the conservative politicians, the neo and
post-Marxist theorists with masculine vision—in order to recognize the space as social
relations constantly negotiated by multiple partial subjects and “[defend] the democratic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
152
Deutsche states: “For vanguardism implies the existence of sovereign subjects whose superior
social vision can penetrate illusions and perceive the people’s ‘true’ interests, and this idea has
itself been charged with authoritarianism—even with the attempt to eliminate public space.” See
Deutsche, Evictions, 268. Deutsche’s latter critique of the masculine, political vangardism is
useful in the Korean case when it comes to the mechanism of social critique developed by the
1980s artists. Only they could fight for the truth, and it was their truth that was the real truth.
153
Deutsche, xiii.
144
!
an image that reveals incompleteness and incoherence of the social—was less important,
however. For such a social space of negotiations was already visualized and practiced by
the “resident arts” and “parking-free obstacle” sculptures. “Public art” had already
existed even before the artist entered the picture and proposed his/her partial vision as a
tool with which to elucidate the false claims to democracy and publicness. The opposite
of usefulness—as promoted by the government officials for the utilitarian values of “new
public art” and urban “revitalization” projects—did not necessarily have to be useless-
ness. “Parking-free obstacle” sculptures were not only useful; they were also powerfully
public precisely in their claim to the injustice in the urban development history and their
daily negotiations of their rights to the city. For Sungnam Project, the relationship
between the site and the site-specific art also did not have to follow a contested model
theorized by Miwon Kwon. Even in their affectionate relationship with the site, the
space. The neat categorizations of public art that Kwon has laid out—“art in public
space,” “art as public space,” and “art in the public interests”154—may be less relevant to
Sungnam. Or even further, this categorization hides the possibility for excavating the
practices of publicness that have already begun their work in the urban space. The
powerful visuality of the chairs, the broken refrigerators, and the delivery boxes filled
with concrete, not only challenged the fixed image of uneven development as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154
Miwon Kwon, “For Hamburg: Public Art and Urban Identities,” Public Art is Everywhere. ex.
cat. ed. Christian Philipp Muller (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg and Kulturbeh rde Hamburg,
1997), 95-109.
145
!
reproducing injustice but also altered the very signification of the slope—not as a
symptom of the vicious cycle of capitalism but as a site of contested meanings and
reclaimed rights. As such, Sungnam Project incidentally provides a lucid critique of neo
What, then, is the relationship between artists of Sungnam Project and these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
Even at a first glance, Sungnam Project is informed by the South Korean cultural studies scene
that in the 1990s produced writings on urban spaces under the rubric of “ethnography.” Recall
Beck Ji-sook’s 1994 essay, cited in Chapter 2, which called for an “ethnographic look” at Seoul’s
urbanscape and its popular culture by comparing the neon signs (mass culture) with the art center
(high art). Writings by literary scholars such as Kang Nae-h!i (1994) in the field of comparative
literature and communications examine the districts of Hongik University and Sinchon, by
including their own participatory observation in the symbols of consumerist capitalism. These
accounts attempt to “read the neighborhood as a text” and their reliance on theories of urban
geography (David Harvey and Edward Soja) are explicitly stated. The method of cognitive
mapping promoted by Frederic Jameson, whose 1984 essay “Postmodernism: or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism” Kang translated in 1989, seemed to serve as crucial for these scholars.
Echoing the rhetoric of these American postmodern critics, Kang’s own essay “Seoul, Its
Everyday Dynamics” (1994) criticizes the fragmented urban space—and the fragmented
subjectivity of urban dwellers—subsumed in the late capitalist logic. Kang Nae-h!i, “S"ul, k!
ilsang gonggan !i tonghak” (Seoul, It’s Everyday Dynamics), Munhwa Kwahak 5 (January,
1994), 13-44. Also see: Im S!ng-h!i, “90 ny"ndae saeroun sobiju!i munhwa !i s"nggy"k—
hongdae chuby!n munhwa sarye buns!kt” (The Characteristics of 1990s New Consumerism—A
Case Study of Culture in the Hongik University District) in Hankuk!nronch!ngbohakpo 4
(August, 1994), 204-232. Compared to this tendency to textualize space in order to gauge a meta-
criticism about capitalism, Sungnam Project’s research is more modest in its scale. Its lengthy
research time and its focus on the designated city of Sungnam allow its members to “find”
concrete materiality that makes up the lived space rather than imposing an existing thesis onto the
abstracted space (i.e. infiltration of consumerist capitalism in urban development). More
importantly, while Sungnam Project implicitly acknowledges the mutual dependency between the
economic structure of capitalism and the organization of urban space—the two poles that
construct neo-Marxist urban geography—the artist group’s activities do not simply arrive at
positing the latter as a mere symptom of the former. The notions of “reality” and “art,” or
economic base and artistic/spatial representation, are indeed the key vocabularies; but they are
also reinvented and contested through the project, and the indexical use of documents illustrates
this point. Such a trajectory of Sungnam Project can make it seem as if the group has been well
aware of feminist art historian Rosalyn Deutsche’s criticism that these male urban geographers’
attempt to remap urban space only produces a masculine position of totalization (that accounts for
only economic difference and no other differences). Sungnam Project’s field research is not for
gathering information and knowledge that can then be transcended to an abstract idea of a certain
phenomenon or a class-based analysis of the district but for finding the format of reality as the
starting point of the debate that is both affected and reflecting the “excess value” of labor (care
and creativity) outside work.
146
!
public art objects? Where is Sungnam Project’s point of entry into this new equation of
publicness and reality? As Park Chan-kyong’s essay in the brochure makes clear,
Sungnam Project documented the instances of public art that reflected the intensity of
As our own method [of art-making], Sungnam Project prefers the genre of
‘documentary” or “reportage” where arts and reality crisscross and support each
other. Following footsteps of the early- and mid-1980s literature, Sungnam
Project believes that reportage as a genre takes importance because visual and
literary arts, rather than shaping reality and its dynamism, always rush around
belatedly. At the same time, it is not that art as “fact” and “exhibition value” is an
“accurate” reflection of reality, but what we actively expose to our audience is
that the fact that art is a fiction regardless of the ways in which it is fictionalized.
This exhibition (in Seoul City Museum and Sungnam City Hall) in particular
emphasizes what kind of clear information we provide, and “how” we process
such information. For example, the visual order created in such economical
methods as diagrams and statistics straddles the gap between image and language,
while at the same time playing a secondary role in showcasing the unfriendly and
boring repetition of bureaucratic system.156
is similar to the doubly-bound notion of the index. As a physical mark and imprint of
something that exists, an index conjures a one-to-one relationship with its referent. At the
same time, an index can be a list, such as we find in the back of a book, which points to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
156
Park seems to have learned his lesson from minjung literature, and documentary filmmaking—
for example, one of the most prominent examples of the latter is Sanggyedong Olympics, which
Park repeatedly mentions as one of his inspirations. The emphasis on the narrative structure of
literature becomes clearer in Park’s later works that merge photographs and texts.
147
!
location and content by way of a certain rule of categorization.157 Here, Park is implicitly
(if not directly) engaging with the 1980s paradigm of hy!nsil ju"i or the minjung
ideological apparatus (in Reality and Utterance, for example); and as performative
participation in the site of political demonstrations (in Gwangjahy!p, for instance). Park’s
re-conceptualization of the aesthetics of hy!nsil in this era (late 1990s and early 2000s)
should thus be read as a critique of 1980s realism through the author’s heightened
of artistic intervention. At a time when the mechanisms of power through which the
construction of diagrams and tables, this attention to the language of institutions gained
political import.158
At the same time, Park’s attention to the question of institution also responded to
what he learned from the 1970s conceptual art practices in America and where he thought
the 1980s minjung artists had fell short. Until the 1980s knowledge of visual styles and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
157
Mary Ann Doane,“Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” The Historical Film: History and
Memory in Media. ed. Marcia Landy (London: Continuum, 2001), 269-285.
158
Foucault said in 1979, “The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of
a perpetual statification (étatisation) or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which
modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of
investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local
powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not
just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it
has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple
governmentalities.” The technocratic mechanisms of governing is the “fictional forms” that Park
seems to be interested in. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978-79. ed. Michel Sennelart. trans. Graham Davidson (New York: Palgrave MaMillan,
2008)
148
!
techniques were transmitted through poorly reproduced, mostly black and white images
of original works flattened as a text without a context, and removed from the material and
context, Park’s reference to American conceptual art in his later writings should be read
not as a superficial citation but as a structural attempt to find the language through which
Park’s activity with Sungnam Project inevitably fostered his later conceptualization of
2000-1, a theory through which Park ambitiously sought to learn from and
simultaneously undo the politics of minjung hy!nsil ju!i (minjung realism) by critically
significant philosophy underlying Sungnam Project’s practice. Note that when Sungnam
Project zoomed in on “residents’ art,” the focus was on the everyday making of objects,
and not simply the objects or the makers. Compared to minjung reportage literature and
film that privileged the stories of people/residents/minjung and Choi Jeong-hwa’s art-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159
Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"m ch"k hy"nsil ju!i not'!: han p’y"njipcha !i chu” (A Note on
Conceptual Realism: An Editor’s Footnote) in Forum A. Vol. 9 (April 16, 2001), unpaginated.
160
Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"mmisul, minjungmisul, haengdongju!i r!l ihaehan!n kibonj"gin
kwanj"m” (The Fundamental Points for Understanding Conceptual Art, Minjung Art and
Activism), Forum A. Vol.2 (July 30, 1998), np. Also see Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"m ch"k
hy"nsil ju!i not'!: han p’y"njipcha !i chu” (A Note on Conceptual Realism: An Editor’s Footnote)
in Forum A. Vol. 9 (April 16, 2001), np. Forum A also ran a special edition on the 1999 Queens
Museum of Art exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, by including
Korean translations of two catalogue essays—Mari Carmen Ramirez’s “Tactics for Thriving on
Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980” and Peter Wollen’s “Global
Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art”—in Forum A’s 7th volume published on
February 28, 2000.
149
!
making that put inanimate objects before human subjects, Sungnam Project was
interested in the everyday practice of people—what Deutsche would call the constant
negotiations among situated citizens against dominant forces of capital and the state—as
such a practice was materialized in and through objects and their environments. This
explains why Sungnam Project’s representational tactics included not only documentation
of everyday practice but also production that required artists to replicate such practice,
journey in and out of neighborhood alleys, making cement sculptures (the slope
laying out these art objects-turned-everyday objects (or vice versa) in the space of
In December 2000, artist Jeon Yong-suk (who, in October 2001, would form
FlyingCity), criticized Sungnam Project by pointing out the group’s engagement with the
for the group. This misunderstanding is the lingering obsession with realism as an
aesthetic trope that holds onto faith in truthful depiction of the world as it exists.161 For
moment”:
vis-à-vis one’s surroundings. This position, which sits between reality and politics, takes
seriously the question of form. As Jeon’s more recent assessment tells, what drove his
activities as a member of FlyingCity all along was the search for “Ur-form (wonhy!ng),”
for it expresses and is ingrained in the dynamics and intensity of life.163 If interests in
urbanism and modernization link Sungnam Project and FlyingCity together, the latter’s
emphasis on the inevitable connection between desire and form stands out as a difference.
In other words, if Sungnam Project used fiction to dialectically present and deny reality,
FlyingCity sought to locate the desire, fantasy, and narrative within everyday life, and to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
162
Jeon, ibid.
163
Jeon at the first meeting of Chiy"k Misul Y"ngu (Local Art Research), which I took part in
between February and June, 2013. The research group members included Jeon Yong-suk, Cho Ji-
eun, Kim Hee-jin, Lee Young-wook, and staff members of the Alternative Space Pool.
151
!
Indeed, the inspiration to start the “urbanism research group FlyingCity” came
from a particular scene in the documentary film Sanggyedong Olympics (dir. Kim Dong-
realism that Sungnam Project sought to emulate. Director Kim had captured how the
evicted low-income families of the shantytown in the Sanggyedong district fought against
the government that had torn down the slum in 1986, just before the 1988 Seoul
Olympics torch march would pass by it.164 What caught FlyingCity’s attention was a
particular architectural structure that stood amid the demolished neighborhood in the film:
a makeshift watch tower the residents had built with metal pipes and tires and
affectionately called “Goliath,” after the moniker given to a gigantic shipyard crane in
Ulsan that had become famous as the site of ship-making workers’ strike. [Fig. 3.7] As
Jeon wrote later: “The tower stood there awkwardly among the demolished houses, like a
spaceship landed among ruins. This scene made a picture that was aesthetic (simmi ch!k)
and also earthy and real (hy!nsil ch!k) at the same time. The name FlyingCity directly
came into my mind, and it became our name.”165 A gush of energy springing forth from
the destroyed life is at once a response to tragic injustice and a powerful vestige of
utopian hope and resistance. When seen in person, this “spaceship”—like a “parking-free
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
164
Kim Dong-won follows the families to their first relocation to the Myongdong Cathedral, at
whose backyard they built tents to continue the struggles, and then to an empty field near
Sungnam, where the government promised a patch of land for them. The 27-minute film narrates
the three year-long documentation that required the filmmaker to live with the evicted in these
locations.
165
Quoted in Mark Kremer “See Seoul, Then Die: The flyingCity Experience,” Hermès Korea
missulsang (Seoul: Hermès Korea, 2004), 86-93.
152
!
obstacle” sculpture par excellence—must have exercised a fantastic and affective impact
on its viewers.
pûllaing siti, thus began its life in October 2001 as a loosely defined network of three
artists, including Jeon Yong-suk, Chang Chong-kwan, and Kim Gi-su. By that time, they
had executed individual projects in urban spaces and neighborhoods in Seoul, 166 and had
already become close friends by virtue of activity in two other networks: Forum A (a
discursive platform founded by artists, curators, and critics for workshops and publication
activities in 1997-2005) and Alternative Space Pool (an alternative art space founded by
many of Forum A members, from 1999 to present).167 These networks represent the
collective efforts among artists to rethink the history of Korean contemporary art and its
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
166
For example, Jeon Yong-suk curated a show titled Sinsadong yak’ul#t’# achumma:
p’yomy!nt#l (Sinsa-dong Mrs. Yogurt: Surfaces) in Gallery Ut"k in 2000, which invested a
particular neighborhood district (Sinsa-dong) and a profession (the delivery women, mostly
middle-age, who carries a refrigerated hand-cart and sells yogurt and milk).
167
Forum A, founded in October 1997 by Jeon Yong-suk and Park Chan-kyong, among others,
and continued until 2005, was a network of sixty some artists, curators, and critics in their
twenties and thirties whose main goal was to foster in-depth and critical discourse in the arts.
They sought to build a site of discussion, publish Forum A journals online and in paper (self-
designated as “quarterly tabloids of art criticism”) and expand its network beyond Korea by
establishing coalition with other artist and critic groups like Finger in Germany and
Protoacademy in Scotland. Some of the Forum A’s members, like Park Chan-kyong, Lee Young-
wook, and Beck Ji-sook, were members of Mipiy"n (1988-1993), as I analyzed in Chapter 2. The
eponymous quarterly of Forum A remains today the most lucid record of the art criticism that
reflects the questions, desires, points of reference, and vision of these practitioners between 1997
and 2005, until Forum A dissipated. Some editions, such as the seventh volume on avant-garde
(February 2000) presented the translated writings of Peter Wollen and Mari Carmen Ramirez,
thus introducing conceptual art not only from North America but also Latin America, the latter
playing an important source of inspiration from other “third world cities” (che samsegye tosit#l).
By February 1999 the members of Forum A launched a site of exhibition and discursive activities
called “Alternative Art Space Pool (taean kongkan p’ul),” an unprecedented exhibition space run
by a collective of artists and critics. Pool and Forum A were the networks of critically-minded
artists, which fomented the founding of FlyingCity in 2001.
153
!
engagement with social reality, the efforts that FlyingCity actively took part in.168 Since
its inception FlyingCity continued to draw new members from these networks, as it has
remained loosely defined and always open to other artists to join. With the exception of
Jeon Yong-suk who is active under the name FlyingCity even today, the artists who came
in and out of FlyingCity are plenty, including Ok Jung-ho, Song Sang-hee, Koh Seung-
wook, Lee Jin-kyung, and others. Such a flexible collaboration model, even further
evolved from that of Sungnam Project, signals the spreading interest in urban research as
a mode of artistic practice among a wide range of Korean artists, while increasing the
(2002) states that the group investigates the relationship between art and South Korean
alternative possibility that “rediscovers the abstractness of urban life from the level of
concrete reality (hy!nsil) and resocializes it.” In the beginning, FlyingCity’s practice was
influenced by the Situationist International and dematerialized art activities, which the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
168
Community and Art (2002) was a workshop among alternative art spaces sponsored by the
Gwangju Biennale, which resulted in a publication. The 4th Gwangju Biennale Invited Group’s
International Workshop Community and Art (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2002).
169
“Agenda for Urbanism Group ‘FlyingCity’” drafted by Jeon Yongsuk, and uploaded to their
website on March 13, 2002, two months after the group opened their website flyingcity.org. (last
accessed on March 11, 2014)
154
!
Something to Do on the Land of Destruction (2002, 18 min), where the artists violently
tore and destroyed objects left behind by their previous owners in an evicted apartment
building, and Shouting in the Mt. Bukak (2002, 14 min 45 sec), in which the artists
shouted out loud scripts of South Korean films about inter-Korean conflicts near the Blue
House, the South Korean presidential office and resident.170 [Fig. 3.8 and Fig. 3.9]
Photographs taken from daily strolls on Seoul streets were uploaded alongside
Today’s Objet (2002-2006). The first photograph uploaded on January 23, 2002 is a shot
of the newly built UFO-like Jongro Tower designed by Rafael Viñoly Associates, [Fig.
3.10] while the second page, uploaded the following day, is a text that asks the viewers to
dictator Park Chung-hee, without presenting the image. [Fig. 3.11] For a year, each time
the photograph rarely failed to attract comments from other artists and the online
public.171 To a more participatory end, the group offered classes to children helping them
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
170
In addition, Temporary Sculpture in Mangwondong (2001) documents how FlyingCity and
other artists build a temporary sculpture in a playground by using the recycled materials from the
neighborhood of Mangwondong.
171
At this point, South Korea already had its version of Facebook avant la lettre called Cyworld
(1999 to present), which quickly became extremely popular and promoted the online culture of
taking photographs, commenting on them, and then generating conversations on Cyworld pages
or other blog sites. The advent of the “selfie” (in Korean called selka, shortened from selpû
kamera) coincides with this period, and the culture of inserting one’s own opinion in considerably
short writing came with the necessity of the visual element, whether the picture included the self-
portrait or one’s subjective comment written in the casual manner. FlyingCity’s Today’s Objet
series benefited from this culture of commenting and communicating online on the verge of rise
in early 2000s.
155
!
neighborhood (such as the route from home to the kindergarten), and then had them make
corresponding architectural models out of cardboard. [Fig. 3.12 and Fig. 3.13] These
models and drawings, along with the videos of FlyingCity’s performances, were
that is, themselves playing the role of vessel through which the urban psyche is enacted.
Instead, they turned to a research-based method, by which the group sought to decipher
the abstractness (“the realm of senses that combines pleasure and politics”) from the
shift occurred from an act of performing the predetermined script or urban psyche to a
long-term process of learning and excavating. For the Cheonggyecheon Project (2003-9),
the objects of ethnographic research and partners of collaboration were the merchants and
which, in hindsight, made the early performance pieces an exception to the group’s
practice. As I will demonstrate below, the group in the early to mid-2000s was interested
not in claiming the fixed identities of urban residents or location but in tracing the
historical process and subject formation ingrained in an urban setting that the subjects
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
172
FlyingCity’s first “solo” museum exhibition (Invitation to Drift or Pyoryu eûi ch’odae) was
held in February 28-March 12, 2003 at Maronier Art Museum in Seoul.
156
!
It is this historical mandate that compelled FlyingCity to explore the materiality of the
Cheonggyecheon district and the social network of its actors built and transformed over a
duration of time. Moreover, this diachronic inquiry constituted the “general statement”
that Jeon had earlier designated as problematically lacking in the work of Sungnam
Project. For FlyingCity, the history is not only that of failure—the failed minjung
revolution and the failed achievement of economic equality even, and especially, after
institutional democratization—but also the utopian moments that always coexist and are
commingled with the tragic stories of urban development. Or perhaps, finding the
moments of utopian future in the history so as to recuperate them was the very question
In what follows, I will explore how FlyingCity’s activities, especially in the early
phase of its Cheonggyecheon Project, responded to the group’s agenda and have
motivated the group to continually reinvent their tactics of engagement with urban space.
My analyses will begin with This is not an electronic fan (2003), a mixture of text and
image in the form of a power point presentation, and end with All Things Park (2004), an
architectural model with which FlyingCity reached the pinnacle of its utopian aspirations.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
173
“Agenda for Urbanism Group ‘FlyingCity,’” Ibid.
157
!
change slides every 1-3 seconds for the duration of 3 minutes and 24 seconds. This
prompt speed necessitates that we give the texts and images a concentrated reading
before they quickly disappear from our eyes, a type of reading that the Quick Time-run
video of the Seoul-based web art collective Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (1999-
present) requires of its viewers. The content of the presentation derived from
FlyingCity’s ethnographic and urban geographical research of the metal workshops, such
documentation of their work environment, and the web-like map of the alleys. I single out
bring to the fore the utopian aspect of Cheonggyecheon workshops by enhancing the
The slide show begins with the Ch"nggye Jonghap owner Han Unyong’s story,
from which the slide show acquires its name. All the slides for this story have only texts,
except for one that shows a composite of machine parts that loosely make up the shape of
a fan. Below is the transcript, with the slash (/) indicating the turning of the slide:
had a good [profitable] time / Seeing this / the police / threatened. / “Why
without permission [do you] / make and sell / fans? %/ “This / is not / a fan.” /
“What I / made / is just a machine / that makes the wind”%/174
These phrases are truncated so as to be read within as quickly as a slide per second. They
are sometimes garnished with the musical note symbol. When seen in this format, the text
turns the audience into an amateur “rapper,” who would make the beat to the story that
has now become lyrical lines in a “song.” The phrases with bigger fonts would be
emphasized and they are usually placed towards the end of each sentence, thus creating a
crescendo effect. (For the purpose of transferring the PowerPoint presentation to its bare
textual form, I marked these big-font phrases in bold, although the effect is not
completely delivered).
The story, “This is not an electronic fan,” had in fact appeared earlier in
FlyingCity’s Today’s Objet a few months prior. [Fig. 3.14 and Fig. 3.15] In the web
layout of Today’s Objet, the story is in a longer, more prose-like, and less rhythmic text
than in the PowerPoint format. Here too, what accompanies the text is the
aforementioned image of machine parts which gives the impression of a fan, and which
produced machine parts in a shoddy and haphazard way.” The description, “in a shoddy
and haphazard way,” expressed in an onomatopoeia (“!lgis!lgi”), is how the actual fans
in Mr. Han’s story are portrayed because they were made with any available machine
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
174
The translation is mine. Even though I tried to keep the order in which each slide has the
words, due to the difference between Korean and English linguistic structures, I made minor
revisions in the syntax by swapping the order of words within the sentences. The added words are
in brackets.
159
!
parts like propellers, motors, and frames. In the absence of the actual fans allegedly made
by Mr. Han, FlyingCity provides the viewers with a fan of Cheonggyecheon as a network
in its entirety—a magically appearing machine that works and does its job against all
odds. This touch of magic is intensified, when the story is turned into a moving image or
a poem to be sung with a rhythmic beat. The fan is a metaphor for the Cheonggyecheon
community, with all of its tensions suspended between play and survival tactics,
originality and sloppy replica, enchantment and trickery. What is certain is that the
PowerPoint places its viewers in the world of Cheonggyecheon, between its fan and a
Leaving behind this ambivalent yet humorous first impression, the rest of the slide
surrealist wit. The introductory slide shows a chaotic drawing of color dots and curvy
lines intertwined with one another, with a subtitle “From the outside, [they say that the
senselessly disheveled.” The clean white page on the following slide reciprocates in
agreement: “That’s right. It’s not a misunderstanding but a correct understanding.” The
next slide has a simplified street map in scale, with main roads and narrow alleys. Cut to
another slide: colorful dots, similar to those previously seen in the first image of chaotic
mixture, are laid on top of the map. And the next slide has equally colorful lines linking
the dots. This step-by-step presentation gradually and ultimately informs the viewers of
the logic of representation FlyingCity pursues: the dots indicate individual shops, color-
coded according to their specialties—black for “casting (chumul),” dark blue for
160
!
“bending steel (sibori),” yellow for “wood patterning (mokhy!ng),” etc.—while the lines
refer to the inter-shop connections. [Fig. 3.16] The rest of the PowerPoint show
introduces the processes of casting, bending steel, wood patterning, and using a lathe, by
one hand, the presentation delivers factual information, teaching viewers what each
inside their workshops are helpful here—and how these small-scale workshops
subcontract each other in order to complete a final product. On the other hand, the
presentation is garnished with texts resembling folklores and heroic tales (e.g. “casting
leaves steel droppings like bats”; “sibori breathes enchantment into steel”; “Nobody can
defeat the superiority complex of wood pattern designers”; “Can you really make any
pattern? “Yes, everything and anything. Do you want me to make one of you now?”) and
the corresponding visuals (e.g. comic drawings and photographs) interwoven into these
aphorisms and quotations. [Fig. 3.17] Thus, any risk of mistaking the stoic expressions of
the craftsmen and the bulky metal tools surrounding them as reportage-style documentary
photographs is usurped through the witty puns and visual paraphilia decorating them.
workshops makes one thing clear: the heart of Cheonggyecheon is located the
connectivity among these multiple shops, a network that is in place and that is instantly
mobilized when a customer visits the district to make a commission, however small the
quantity might be. FlyingCity’s mapping highlights and traces this commission-based
production line, which depends on the human geography built over decades; this map, or
161
!
this remapping, thus serves as an alternative to the grid-like mapping or the real-estate
profit driven zoning. This reconceptualization of the network too has previously appeared
in Today’s Objet as a diagram titled Drifting Producers.175 [Fig. 3.18] Bubbles with the
workshop’s commercial names written inside float among curvy lines that indicate the
network that is “at once solid and flexible” and exists “in a chaotic order.”176 As a
something in fragments, and quickly went about his way. That was the latter giving the
former a subcontracting job.177 That is how tight the interdependency is—no need for an
official contract or even a complete sentence. This diagram and its appropriation in the
FlyingCity had previously learned from the Situationist International but has since
and distance are not only psychological but also entrenched in lines of production.
Even though FlyingCity does not pick an enemy or a straw man to blame for the district’s
declination and foreseeable eviction, the PowerPoint presentation enacts the politics of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
175
FlyingCity writes that this term comes from an analysis of an Italian region, where the family-
scale handcraft business has flourished after the mass-production model has lost its appeal.
176
FlyingCity.org (last accessed March 11, 2014)
177
Cheonggyecheon Festival News dated July 25, 2005. Accessed through FlyingCity.org (last
accessed March 11, 2014)
162
!
publicness.178 The revolutionary aspect of FlyingCity’s politics is that the group does not
begin with defining “who the public is” and “what the public good is.” FlyingCity is
they rely on, transform, and are transformed by the site. The “publicness” therefore is not
inherent to the identities of a certain people or a certain site. It is the transformative and
intersubjective social processes between peoples as well as between the social actors and
the urban space. Such a thought process is constitutive of the pursuit of publicness.
opposite the government’s logic for the Cheonggyecheon redevelopment project. The so-
promote the “public good” of a clean urban district viable for commercial interests of
tourist and financial industries. In this equation, “the public”—whose interests the city
protects and promotes— essentially comes down to the property owners, office workers,
and tourists. This post-Fordist turn with its emphasis on culture, tourism, and real-estate
crowd and then disappear the next day. Only the numbers—e.g. how many citizens
showed up? how much of trickle down economic effects was generated?—are important
outcomes of these usually exorbitant events, offered as evidence of good city governance.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
178
Artist Lee Eunu recalls interviewing FlyingCity in 2007 as part of her MFA degree at Korea
National University of Arts. She was surprised to hear that FlyingCity was not interested in
advocating the rights of the merchants. I argue in this paper that the politics of FlyingCity lies in
visualizing hy!njons!ng through new forms of representation.
163
!
For Cheonggyecheon, the city government’s proposal to create a public space depended
on restoring the natural stream and the pre-modern artifacts such as Choson Dynasty
bridges, both of which, according to the government, the lifting of expressway was said
to guarantee.179 Here, the relationship between the site (i.e. nature and artifacts) and the
human subjects (i.e. tourists, office workers, and property owners) is an ossified one built
squarely on the latter’s objectification of the former. The process of ossification also
operates on another level: the site cannot be transformed by the subjects who occupy it.
This understanding of the public, public space, and publicness encompasses the various
components that make up city life, by totalizing the public and urban space while
colonizing the potential for utopianism found in the everyday practice of publicness.180
premodern bridge) transplanted to a given site; it is a practice, just like the machine-
making culture that has flourished in Cheonggyecheon over the three decades. This
culture is not only a productive culture in the literal sense but also a productively
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
179
Of course this turned out to be untrue, as the government ended up injecting water from the
Han River to run this artificial stream (with a concrete bottom) because the tight construction
schedule (to be completedd before the mayor runs for president) disallowed a through ecological
possibility of a viable stream in downtown Seoul. The restoration of Choson Dynasty bridges and
other artifacts did not happen either, as the city ended up “burying under the concrete layer”
instead of properly unearthing the artifacts. The three (?) bridges we see now along the
Cheonggye artificial stream are reconstructed from the existing documents and images. Most
NGOs vehemently opposed the unsuitable restoration, whereas FlyingCity argues that what the
artist group wanted to focus on was neither the stream nor the artifacts but the social ecology that
would be destroyed because of this political acrobat. The tragic story begins after the alleged
restoration is complete, however. Many Seoul citizens are still under the spell of “real water
flowing at the heart of Seoul,” ignoring the structural lies, exclusions, and eradications that this
“naturalization” of the city has cost them all.
180
This entire paragraph is inspired by Rosalyn Deutsche’s theorization of art, democracy, and
urban politics, and especially her critique of rhetoric of the new urban renewal policies. The look
of backwardness, filthiness, and obscurity stands against the government’s redevelopment project
that privileges transparency, light, and cleanness. See Deutsche, Evictions.
164
!
imaginative one whose survival is contingent on the narratives of urban legend and the
fantasies of the entrepreneur craftsmen. This culture is also a public one, which
recognizes that hy!njons!ng (“the actuality as the quality of existing in the present
parts. And the ways in which FlyignCity visualizes the invisible forces of hy!njons!ng
involve rhythmic beats, swirly line drawings, and humorous aphorisms. These elements
are, I believe, the very forms of life that Sim Kwang-hy"n described in the epitaph. As
these forms are vulnerable to historical evolution—not a linear progress but a prolonged
provides new insight into the belief that locality is an entity to deny wholesale or else risk
nominated as one of the three finalists for the 2004 Hermes Prize, alongside Park Chan-
kyong and Jung Yeon-doo.182 For the competition exhibition, FlyingCity produced All
architectural model made with wood boards, sheets, and strips, all floating at waist level.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
181
Miwon Kwon, “Imagining an Impossible World Picture,” Sites and Stations: Provisional
Utopias (1995), 77-88.
182
Launched in 2000, the Hermes Prize has built over the years its reputation equivalent to the
Hugo Boss Prize or the Turner Prize in the U.S. and the U.K. respectively, thanks to many
reasons including the Prize’s generous grant to make new productions for the competition
exhibition. The reasons for the high reputation of Hermes Prize are plenty: its selection
committee is comprised of a mixture of Korean and foreign curators and critics; the three finalists
are each given a generous sum of KRW 30,000,000 (approximately $30,000) to make a new
production for an exhibition, according to which the final winner is selected; the winners of the
prize have all proven artists of great caliber; and the lack of other comparable prizes make it more
outstanding.
165
!
[Fig. 3.19 and Fig. 3.20] It was a model, or a proposal, for the Dongdaemun district of
Seoul that the city had promised to the Cheonggyecheon vendors as a potential
destination for their relocation. The city, more specifically, was preparing to convert the
Dongdaemun Stadium (previously used for professional and amateur baseball matches)
into a commercial mall. At a time when the details of this plan had not been confirmed,
FlyingCity decided to propose a sort of an industrial park that could house not only the
former street vendors, but also the metal workshops, garment worships, design studios,
and more industries from Cheonggyecheon—and as its name “All Things Park” suggests,
this park would have it all. Together, with proximity to each other, these industrial
sectors would spawn a synergetic production network, one that existed in the
space of alternativity that is at once a theme park, a factory, a market, and a playground,
as well as an ancient stadium and a residential space.”183 The flexibility of the site’s
function and the energy that it could generate for all of its participants and visitors,
seemed to be expressed through the model’s wood strips projecting like emitting
radiations. The unfinished nature of the model, in conjunction with its free-flowing state,
adds to the utopian aura. Here, utopia is a potential that can be realized. It is also a dream
that is called for, despite the dystopian direction most likely to be taken by the
government-driven urban regeneration project, because FlyingCity has seen and learned
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
183
Hermès Korea missulsang (Seoul: Hermès Korea, 2004).
184
Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs.
Aesthetics and Politics. (London: Verso, 1980); Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia:
166
!
somatic research, multiple concept drawings, and dozens of Today’s Objet—it is hard for
any viewer to recognize the depth of FlyingCity’s message. Instead, we are left to gaze in
awe at the impeccable craft skills and the imposing scale. In other words, the imaginative
The model All Things Park thus reveals little more than the sheer difficulty of
constructing as an image the spirit of optimism and creativity and publicness without
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). In her archeological study, Scott
goes back in time, to the 1960s and 1970s, to excavate the dynamic intersection and juncture,
where utopian dreams met dystopian complacency.
185
As one viewer notes in a blog, the model turned the exhibition into an “architecture major’s
studio.” Another viewer, who has left frequent comments on FlyingCity’s website and seems to
have personal connection with the group, expressed the following concern which I find accurate
and reasonable. She wrote: “FlyingCity exhibited the final edition of the Cheonggyechon Project,
spearheaded by the [architectural] model as the product of numerous all nighters and spewed
blood therein. It was the most labor-intensive work [in the exhibit.] It was possible for me to
understand the context and imagination driving the huge model, because I am fully aware of how
they crisscrossed the entire Cheonggyecheon on foot, made drawings, and gathered ideas. But in
the eyes of others, it is only the efforts of handcraft that is visible. If it were less perfect and
smaller in size, would they have appreciated it [more]? When the work’s size and density
become immense, does it automatically get understood as a spectacle despite of the production
process that leads to it? But what can be done in this case, for a model short of such caliber would
fail to deliver ideas?”
http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=bluetulip&logNo=70027193756 and
http://daradara.egloos.com/458189 (Last accessed June 25, 2014)
186
The metal workshops are existent even today, despite the decreased presence and energy from
the surrounding industries. The winner of the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival, Kim
Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) features a loan shark whose main customers are metal workshop owners.
The alleys and the metal objects encapsulate the film’s inexplicable darkness. A striking birds-
eye-view shot from the exterior staircase belonging to one of the 1960s buildings captures the
Cheonggyecheon workshops from above, as if a premodern village or a chaotic organism
enclosed by the otherwise bright, post-industrial city streets that surround it. By 2006 the
completion of the Cheonggye artificial stream enlarged the “temporal lag” as well as spatial
167
!
By 1998 the South Korean artists’ conflictive relationship with the government
(the institution) became complicated when Kim Dae-jung, the opposition party leader
who had participated in the country’s democracy movement, took the presidency. Not
only had many artists begun to see collaboration with the government as a viable option
but the government also actively sought to support cultural sectors through various
channels of newly instituted funding agencies. Dissident artists like Kim Jeong-heon
formerly known for their activities as part of minjung art collectives, for instance, took
leadership positions in the subsidiaries of the Ministry of Culture and advocated for the
artists whose allegiances are similar to theirs. By 2000, Alternative Space Pool began to
receive various governmental funds to continue its operation, and the alternative spirit
was no longer independent from the state governance.187 The forms of life to which Sim
Kwang-hy"n wanted to pay attention seemed to occupy the minds of both the artists and
the government.
Much of the hope that the artists invested in the opposition party’s administration
during the decade of 1998-2007, first under the president Kim Dae-jung and then Roh
Moo-hyun, was, however, proven a waste. This decade is now assessed as the beginning
of South Korea’s rapid march to neoliberalism, as Kim Dae-jung’s ascent coincided with
South Korea’s entry into the rules of the IMF. The ascendancy of the former Seoul mayor
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
difference between Cheonggyecheon metal workshops and the rest of the city, and the film profits
in the increased peculiarity of Cheonggyecheon as an isolated neighborhood.
187
Kim Jang-un, “Sangching kwa sot’ong—chik!m hankuk es" kongkongmisul !n "ti e
wich’ihako inn!nka?” (Symbols and Communications: Where is Public Art located in Today’s
Korea?) Visual, Vol. 7 (2010).
168
!
Lee Myung-bak (who bulldozed over the Cheonggyecheon district during his mayoral
deregulations.188 The making of art, while bearing in mind the fundamental goal of art as
a pursuit of publicness, posed a fundamental political dilemma, one that is linked with
multiple levels of governing structures within and outside the national framework. In the
case of critically minded South Korean artists active in late 1990s and 2000s, their pursuit
of publicness ended up putting them back to the extremely difficult position of “choosing
a side.” Even though the decade of 1998-2007 at first gave the impression that the state
government’s pursuit of publicness seemed viable, it quickly turned out that one must
both Sungnam Project and FlyignCity are at once a testament to the dilemma posed to
artists during this period and the artistic efforts to reconfigure the legacy of the 1980s
minjung oppositionality and the political impasse prevailing the 1990s into something
new.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
188
It is no doubt that South Korean nation has a long history of feeding its citizens with
entertainment, as seen in the 1970s and 1980s 3S policy as a foil and distraction of the otherwise
unfree administration or in the 1990s institution of large-scale festivals like the Busan
International Film Festival and the Gwangju Art Biennale all funded by the national and regional
governments. But the “festivalization” of the everyday urban space, which filled the calendar
with small, incessant, and never-ending cultural events spread across the city, is a more recent
phenomenon that came with the country’s entry to neoliberal governing in the late 1990s. The
neoliberalization of South Korea coincided with the Asian Financial Crisis and was later
propelled under Lee Myung-bak’s administration—the construction company CEO turned the
Seoul Mayor (2002-2006) and then the president (2008-2013) synonymous with neoliberal
deregulation.
189
As Deutsche emphasizes, one of the most important definitions of public space that came out
of the court hearings in support of Richard Serra was made by Douglas Crimp and Joel Kovel
who argued that “a distinction between public space and the state apparatus is essential to
democracy.” Deutsche, Ibid., 267.
169
!
aligns them with Rosalyn Deutsche’s privileging of publicness as social relations. But
unlike Deutsche, who suggests a form of conflict-producing public art, these Korean
artists turn their attention to the existing object-making practices at the site (or productive
practices in the district) as negotiating the multiple forces that affect both the site’s
human agencies and geographic shapes. Despite the widely received notions in Korea of
dialogical relationship between artists and viewers-participants, the late 1990s beginning
and fluid relationship. Thus these artists also betray the model of art-making proposed by
Kester, who places his belief in art’s ability to provoke “being in common” among
community members with existing conflicts. What then becomes ambiguous is the role of
the artists in Sungnam Project and FlyingCity. If Deutsche argues for a partial subject
who reveals the incompleteness of the social, and Kester constructs a “context provider”
who facilitates a task-oriented conflict resolution efforts or dialogues, the artists featured
in this chapter might straddle the roles of analyst and ethnographer. Compared to the
image of the vanguard visionary (for minjung artists) and a fan (Choi Jeong-hwa), these
“score” about the creative public practices, which can be disseminated and performed by
a wider audience. At the site that closely resembles the mechanism of hy!njang, the
170
!
understandings of reality and publicness collapse into one to give birth to the oppositional,
Chapter Four
One of the foremost public intellectuals in South Korea, Paik Nak-chung (b. 1938)
is best known for founding in 1966 the literary quarterly Creation and Criticism
(Ch’angchak kwa pip’yong), where he voiced his theory of National Literature (minjok
and 80s. In post-authoritarian South Korea, Paik’s continued inquiry into the shifting
cultural and political dynamics of South Korea began a more self-reflexive theorization
of South Korean society vis-à-vis its relationship to the North, or what he termed the
Division System (pundan ch’aeche). This system, or the political regime that rules the
the division system is a historically specific concept that “refers not simply to a territorial
cleavage but to the formation of a self-reproducing system of a sort in which the North
and the South are interlocked in a curious symbiotic relationship.”191 Hence, any analysis
of South Korean democratization—or, even more broadly, South Korea and South
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
190
Paik, “South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge,” New Left Review (January-
February, 1993), 71.
191
Paik, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Vol.14, No.1 (2013), 160.
172
!
Korean cultural production—must take into account the divided nature of the Korean
nation. The most fundamental value of Paik’s writings on the peninsula’s division system
can be located in its move away from the otherwise diplomacy jargon-laden, nuclear
philosophical prescriptions for the divided nation and his historically grounded analyses
of political subjectivity are therefore extremely helpful for the purpose of this chapter,
even though his writings lack close readings of literary and cultural works. What this
absence might signify, I believe, is that the complexity of Paik’s division system theory
did not originate from a group of art or literary works but is instead rooted in a
philosophical value. Its very complexity signals the difficulty of locating cultural works
that reflect similar levels of complexity. As a way of addressing and overcoming this
difficulty, this chapter seeks to analyze South Korean visual arts that seek to visualize the
realities of division, desires for unification, and fantasies about North Korea. Singling out
Paik as one of the most sophisticated cultural theorist and philosophers of the divided
peninsula, this chapter will activate and nuance his theory. The points of convergence and
divergence between visual productions and the larger sociopolitical shifts in the
peninsula, as they are highlighted in this chapter, will thus serve two objectives: first, to
introduce the discourse of visuality and aesthetics to the discussion of division system in
of South Korean artists’ critical engagement with the country’s divided nature.
173
!
The chapter’s historical discussion begins with the 1980s, during which artists
negotiated the authoritarian regime’s censorship, and continues in the 1990s and the
epistemological shifts when facing North Korea. This diachronic analysis, which is
interlinked with the development of Paik’s division system theory over the three decades,
will at once articulate and complicate the dialectical relationship between division and
democracy suggested in the epigraph. To this end, the second half of the chapter is
devoted to analyses of a South Korean artist Seung Woo Back’s photographic practice
that involved visiting North Korea and reimagining the democratic relation with the
Generally speaking, South Korean artists and citizens have experienced greater
freedom in speaking their opinions about inter-Korean relations, despite the fact that the
National Security Law, instituted in 1948, legally bans any praise of the North Korean
regime even today. The turning point was the resignation of the dictator Chun Doo-hwan
in 1987, after the 1987 June Uprising. But, although it may seem obvious, not all
the authoritarian regime, even if they all spoke to an inter-Korean relationship. Any
must begin with the mechanisms of censorship under the dictatorial rule. This chapter
will therefore articulate the distinction between the prohibited and the sanctioned
174
!
artworks in the 1980s, thereby revealing how the rhetoric of division developed under
Chun’s dictatorship.192 In other words, what was the matrix of division and
authoritarianism?
For the purpose of comparison, I will begin by analyzing two realist paintings by
well-known minjung artists: Sin Hakchul’s Rice Planting (1987; oil on canvas; 130 x 160
cm) [Fig. 4.1] and Oh Yoon’s National Longing for Unification (1985; oil banner
painting; 138 cm x 349 cm). [Fig. 4.2] In terms of the large-format depiction of human
figures, use of metaphors and symbolism, and reference to agriculture and the rural life,
the two paintings reflect the prevalent use of magical realism in the 1980s among artists
who comment on the contemporary Korean society as discussed in Chapter 1. And yet,
their fates took on different paths: Shin’s painting was deemed as violating the National
Security Law, resulting in the police confiscation and the artist’s 10-month imprisonment
in 1989, while Oh’s painting survives until today as a benevolent artistic gesture for
unification.
Sin’s Rice Planting follows the often-used trope of juxtaposing utopic and
dystopic visions of life. The upper half of the composition depicts rural life of farming
enriched by the successful harvest and life of plenty. The prelapsarian community whose
joyous atmosphere is demonstrated by smiles on the farmers’ faces and their dancing
gestures is located under what resembles the Mountain Paekdu—the mythical birth place
of all Korean people and the tallest mountain in the peninsula currently off-limits to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
192
Scholarly literatures and news reportings about the instances of censorship are plenty; so are
the writings about the artistic bravery to produce any commentary on division. But it is the
comparison between these two categories of art about division that this chapter brings to light.
175
!
South Koreans because of its location in the far northern boundary of North Korea. The
lower half of the composition, on the other hand, is filled with another group of farmers
engaged in hard labor. The time of joyful harvest is far in the remote future for this group,
because they are not only bending their back to transplant rice but also painstakingly
pushing a swarm of unwanted garbage off the field. The “garbage” is represented with a
composite of commercially available mass media images (coca cola, foreign cigarettes, a
tanks, an Uncle Sam hugging bombs, barbed wires coiling a plaque scripted with “38” as
an indication of the partition along the 38th parallel), and non-human monsters (a
screaming goblin and non-descript body parts). Such a pictorial collage of objects and
figures that explicitly refutes their original scale is characteristic of Sin’s representative
work, Korean Modern and Contemporary History (Hankuk kundaesa, 130 x 390 cm,
1983), for which the artist painted human figures and objects as if decontextualized from
other pictorial spaces and then “collaged” together as comprising a part of a larger
organism with a monstrous vitality.193 [Fig. 4.3] The rather surrealist depiction of the
garbage in Rice Planting, with its collapsing of space and scale, stands out amid
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
193
Sin, who did not belong in any of dissident art collective up until the early 1980s, is famous
for having abandoned his object-based sculptural practice of the 1970s when he in 1979
discovered a photography album of Korean modern history. Since then, his works developed into
photo-collages and paintings pictorializing collages of commercially available objects and
human/non-human figures. His second solo show in 1982 showcased these collage-based works
that the dissident art critic Hwang Jiwu noted as “breaking out of the [shell] of [Korean]
modernism from its back door.” Chan-kyong Park, “Shin Hak-ch'"l: S"min!i Y"ksar!l K!rida”
(Sin Hak-chul: To Draw People’s History,” Munhwa Kwahak 19 (Fall, 1999), 223-245.
176
!
The painting was submitted and presented at the 1st Unification Exhibition
sponsored by the Association of Minjok Artists (Minjok misulin hyophoe) in 1987. Its
image was then included in the calendar published by the Association in 1989. It is this
image, which a dissident youth group in the Inchon area used to adorn paper fans and
distribute to the public, that caught the eyes of the police. Two years after Sin painted the
picture, the police made an unannounced, early morning visit to his house and arrested
him on the charges of infringing the National Security Law. What frustrated Sin the most
during the interrogation, as the artist recounts, was the police’s own interpretation of the
painting regardless of the artist’s intentions. For the state authorities, the painting violated
the National Security Law because the upper half of the composition was seen to depict
“North Korea,” as utopically, while the lower half of the composition would depict
“South Korea,” dystopically. The artist, however, argues that the entire picture is about
unification and the upper half is an imaginative stage after the unification is complete.
unification as an accomplished fact; but this painting was never questioned as threatening
national security. Oh’s direct reference to unification in the title and the insertion of tiger
and bear—the two animals featured in the mythical tale of Korean nation’s birth in Mt.
people symbolizes the geographic shape of the Korean peninsula. In this metaphorical
space, the people of “Korea,” without any trace of ideological and political differences,
together are able to form the shape of the peninsula in its entirety. The premodern-style
farming clothes dressing the figures place the temporality of the jubilant celebration of
177
!
one-ness squarely in the past, as if the partition line first drawn in 1945 and the post-war
history of American and Soviet occupation of the peninsula can be lifted without any
trace. The future of re-unification collapses onto the past of one-nation. More research
needs to be done to find out how this work was first exhibited, because the large banner
format already hints at its use in an outdoor setting, but what is clear is that its image was
never censored by the government despite the multiple commonalities that it shares with
Rice Planting.194 They are both vertically hung paintings depicting farmers in an
The two paintings’ dramatically different fates mark more than the arbitrary
nature of censorship in general. Their divergent paths represent the larger ideology of
division in which the South Korean authoritarian government condoned; that government
selective survey of other paintings that depict the history of division or the desire for
unification, such as the infamous arrests of Lee Sangho and Jon Junho in Gwangju for
their banner painting A New Day of Reunification at the Foot of Mountain Pekdu (1987),
illuminate that the police censorship is not as arbitrary or farfetched as it seems. [Fig. 4.4]
It follows a clear logic, targeting the depiction of spatial separation with any indication of
praising the Northern half. Even if Sin argued that the upper half represents the future—
and not North Korea—such a temporal separation within the pictorial space failed to
register, at least in the eyes of the police. Any depiction of symbols solely belonging to
North Korea—the North Korean national flower, for example—also served as an easy
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
194
It began to circulate, at least through the 1990 publication celebrating the 10th anniversary of
the collective Reality and Utterance, in the public domain as an image of unification.
178
!
excuse for arrests in the case of Sin Hak-chul, Lee Sangho, and Jon Junho. Oh’s painting
precisely lacked depiction of any synecdochical objects that link to North Korea. As
importantly, what the censor’s attention to the circulation and distribution of such
“problematic” images reveals is that the meaning of artistic productions, for the
government authorities, was located in the display sites and distributive channels as much
both the authoritarian regime and the pro-democracy activists. The two major pacts
between the North and the South prior to 2000—the 1972 Joint Communique and the
which Paik argues as examples of “simultaneously containing and exploiting the popular
demand for reunification.”195 Reunification was never a concrete plan but a loose ideal.
For unification activists too, as Paik argues, reunification was less a questioned goal than
activists. Different groups questioned the values of the first two ideals in the triad slogan
unification.196 Cast in a retrospective light, it seems a mistaken step for the dissident
artists, whether self-claimed as “minjung artists” or not, to have too easily equated the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
195
In light of the fact that the two German governments steadfastly stood for the peaceful co-
existence and never reunification, this commonality linking the two Koreas’ reunification policy
is particular to the Korean context. Paik, New Left Review (1993), 72.
196
Even among the divergent activist groups, the unification agenda, due to its general and
abstract nature, did not prompt divisive lines in the dissident camp.
179
!
reality of division with the future of reunification, without recognizing the connection
that the understanding of division must have with the ideals of autonomy and democracy.
For its part, the authoritarian governments under dictators Park Chung-hee and Chun Du-
hwan figured out its relationship with division: the popular sentiment of longing for
reunification in the most general sense was the official government policy, while any
indication of representing or sympathizing with the Northern regime was met with a
harsh punishment under the National Security Law.197 The government suppressed any
voice of dissent that can be recognized as pro-North Korean, prohibiting its citizens from
establishing any contact with their compatriots from the other side of the DMZ. The
National Security Law is thus an anti-democratic measure par excellence, and its
continued existence is, as the historian Bruce Cumings designates, one important
Here, I am not simply stating the fact that some self-designated dissident artists
unwillingly aligned with the dictators in their uncritical proposition for reunification
while other artists, in their unknowing triggering of the National Security Law, uncovered
the undemocratic practice of the government’s division politics. The more significant
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
197
Since the split, authoritarian governments on both sides of the border have refused to accept
the impossibility of a coherent Korean national identity. For both Koreas, nationalist identity
could not be legitimated, while one-half of the Korean nation remained outside national borders.
And thus, the most convenient way of disavowing this contradiction was to declare the other
Korea as guerrilla and therefore an illegal state. The equally dictatorial regimes in two Koreas
during the three decades of 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, took extreme measures in their national-
building efforts: such as mandatory conscription, martial law, sanctions on labor unionization,
censorship of the press, nationalization of major industries, continuation of Confucius patriarchy,
and gender inequality. Although South Korea achieved a formal democracy in 1987, the “reality
of division” has always already granted the state government with the power to maintain the
“state of exception” in Agambenian sense.
198
Bruce Cumings “The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American
Experience,” New Left Review I/173 (January-February, 1989): 5-32.
180
!
point here is that the totalizing logic of opposition (an enemy to kill) or togetherness (we
are of the same kin) hijacked the 1980s politics of division, and it is this political naiveté
that calls for criticism. The for-unification stand of the minjung activists mostly clearly
movement. In the field of minjung art in particular, artists’ apparent failure to critically
possibility of creatively visualize both the “reality” of division and the artists’ critique of
The Sunshine Policy (1998-2007) and the Civic Participation through Photography
“democratic” regime operated in the still continuing reality of division? What this
shifting democratic nature of South Korea in the age of the post-authoritarian regime. In
the early 1990s, the German unification case stirred a great deal of interest among South
Koreans, instigating a more practical and concrete inquiry into the possibility of
activities also altered the focus of public discourse about unification in South Korea: “[in
1993] the main issue is no longer the right to seek and discuss unification but rather the
kind of unity to be sought and ways of achieving it.” For many in South Korea, the
sobering lessons from the German case, in addition to the increasing disparity between
181
!
South Korean and North Korean living standards, helped to spread a certain popular
sentiment against unification and for coexistence. In the post-socialist era, too, the
political rhetoric of North Korea seemed to share more in common with feudalism than
more similar to feudalism than that of communism, and any South Korean political
movement that takes the North’s claims at their face value was seen suspicious and naïve.
The difference in sociocultural practice, use of technology in everyday life, and economic
prosperity is too much to be simply ignored, even if the two Koreas belong to the same
ethno-nation. By the time Kim Dae-jung, the leader of the opposition party and a long-
time democracy fighter, took the presidential office in 1998, the only way unification
could have occurred, in the minds of both the public and policy makers, was through a
gradual process, after helping the North open up to the capitalist world as well as to the
South more specifically. Hence, Kim’s institution of the famous “Sunshine Policy”
(haetpy!t ch!ngch‘aek), with a telling pun on Aesop’s fable The North Wind and the Sun.
Included in the Sunshine Policy was the economic exchange, floods of aid in food and
energy, and, most importantly for this chapter, the possibility of engaging various civilian
actors from South Korea—as business entrepreneurs, cultural practitioners, and tourists.
My analysis of this period—the years leading up to the Sunshine Policy as well as its
effective years of 1998-2007—focuses on the role of South Korean civilian actors in the
changed dynamics of division when they cross the border with cameras and produce
The possibility of civilian participation in any type, level, and stage of exchange
between the South and the North, which only officially opened up with Kim Dae-jung’s
182
!
tenure in 1998, has a political implication that had long been conceptualized and desired.
When Jurgen Habermas visited Seoul in 1996 to deliver a public lecture titled “National
Unification and Popular Sovereignty,” the philosopher recommended that the two Koreas
build a strong civil society before and towards reunification, for the lack of such civil
society caused tremendous problems for his own country of Germany after unification.
participation of the public” towards reunification. Paik’s response to the public sphere
theorist is brief and to the point: “But how shall we ensure such a way of proceeding in
Korea when it was not possible in Germany?” 199 Until the Sunshine Policy came into
effect, citizens from neither side could simply cross the DMZ, let alone form a common
public sphere to debate on reunification. Those from the North who crossed the border to
South Korea (usually via China and Laos, eventually taking asylum in the South Korean
the North, their returns were improbable. Not only did North Korea readily offer
permissions to South Korean citizens to depart its territories, but South Korean
government seldom accepted these cross-border renegades with open arms. For instance,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
199
Paik Nak-chung, “Habermas on National Unification in Germany and Korea.” New Left
Review I/219 (September-October 1996): 16.
200
Kyung Hyun Kim, “mea cupa” in Virtual Hallyu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Kim
argues that South Korea’s neo-orientalist gaze at North Korean defectors serves as the basis for
the most recent South Korean popular cinematic representations of North Koreans.
183
!
in the case of South Korean writer Hwang Suk Young, his “crime” of visiting Pyongyang
in 1989 forced him into political exile in East Germany (1990) and then into a 5-year
sentence in a South Korean prison (1993-1998). The artist Hong Sung Dam was sent to
the prison for mailing photo slides of banner paintings to the Pyongyang Art Festival in
1989.201 Retrospectively, the Sunshine Policy did change the mechanisms of “civilian”
involvement to a degree unimaginable to Paik and many others in South Korea during
the late 1990s and continued until 2007, as a direct result of the inter-Korean
government in the South and the reemergence of hostile inter-Korean dynamics put a stop
to this brief decade of unique civilian exchange, barring yet again Southern citizens from
crossing the border. The historical significance of this period is however tantamount,
despite or perhaps because of its temporariness. This brief decade of 1998-2007 also
marks a historical break for South Korean visual culture and artistic production, as these
unprecedented physical encounters between the two Koreas were represented, especially
distributed as parts of travel journals, photographic albums, and online blogs. Despite the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
201
Choi Yeol, The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994),
202
In South Korea, it was only in the 1990s that the national security law’s ban on the production
and circulation of North Korea-related documents, especially those with the portraits of the
dictators, was lifted. Multiple efforts to abrogate the National Security Law tout court have been
unsuccessful, however, and many South Koreans, such as the congressman Lee Suk-gi and the
civilian Park Jong-nam, have been subject to treason, espionage, and instigation of pro-North
sentiments as recent as in 2012 and 2013.
184
!
asymmetrical nature of this exchange—the North, unlike the South, refused to send
troops of tourists, government officials, and various social actors across the border—the
facilitating a new inter-Korean narrative forged “from the bottom” by South Korean
relationship that the two governments have dictated as appropriate and thus legitimate,
the South Korean people’s production of North Korean images manifested a paradigm
shift in the larger economy of visual images allowed to travel beyond North Korean
borders.
“democratic” South Korea. Not only is it driven by millions of ordinary citizens, this
phenomenon of photographing North Korea gives a new sense of diversity to, and
expands, the limited spectrum of photographs about North Korea mostly controlled by
the few in power. But many of the terms with which such representation is discussed and
understood are dangerously squared with tourism and, perhaps, its neo-imperialist
representation shares a root with tourism; it is the democratization of travel that propelled
the invention of the medium. Led by the development of railroads in late 18th century
185
!
Europe, an unprecedented number of non-elite, mass tourists who desired to seize fleeting
moments and exotic landscapes sought a proper medium with which to express such a
desire. It is therefore the collective desire and ethos, rather than the genius of a single
individual, that gave birth to the photochemical technique—one that coheres images of
scenes and people onto a light-sensitive surface such as copper plate, paper, glass, etc.203
demands for such visual form, facilitated a rapid increase in production and re-production
of photographs. For instance, the 19th century European imperialist desire to capture the
unfamiliar landscape and people of North Africa and Middle East—the then newly
site and then sent to those back in the home country. Photography was born where the
sight (with the dictatorship of the ocular) collapses onto the site, giving form to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
203
Photography historian Geoffrey Batchen discusses the collective desire for photography that
was on the rise in Western Europe in the early 19th century, during the first revolution in
transportation history, hence the difficulty of identifying Daguerre of France as the sole inventor
of photographer while denigrating Talbot of England to the position of a copier. Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning with Desire (MIT Press, 1997), 22-53. As revealed by photography historians,
multiple individuals “invented” various forms of photography in separate locales in France and
England around 1830, thus confirming the periodic desire for such medium. Carol Crawshaw and
John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel
and Theory. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 180. Dolf Sternberger, “Panorama of the 19th
Century” in October 4 (Autumn, 1977), 3-20..
204
The mass tourism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century was inherently different from
the kind of elite travel of the 17th and 18th century, where European elites traveled to the South
(i.e. Italy) on the Grand Tour.
186
!
“burning desire” for a new kind of production of memory, circulation of images, and
formation of (inter-)subjectivity.205
In the late 1990s, the influx of South Korean journalists, businessmen, and
tourists participated in such collapse of the sight onto the particular site of North Korea,
as the Northern territories became accessible to visitors for the first time since the end of
the Korean War. The amount of significance placed on the historic opening of North
Korea corresponds to the desire to capture the exotic life of the “other” Koreans in film
the South Korean government’s permission, took trips to the capital Pyongyang; the
number of visitors augmented to thousands by the 2000s. But it is the Mountain Diamond
Head tourist district, located along the Eastern sea of North Korea and jointly developed
by the South Korean government and corporate investments, that South Korean citizens
were allowed to visit with relatively affordable package deals. The Mountain Diamond
being the most beloved pilgrimage site for centuries, as was recorded in multiple
travelogues of literati and artists, its opening to South Korean citizens after a half-century
ban, attracted close to two million tourists to the site, each of whom producing personal
images of North Korea or of themselves posing for the camera in front of majestic
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
205
In the Korean peninsula photography was introduced through the Japanese colonizers who
brought with them the tools and techniques of photography; the main function of photography
was to visually document the colonized land. See Gyewon Kim’s article for visual and cultural
analyses on ichthyology and the early use of photography in colonial Korea. Gyewon Kim,
"Unpacking the Archive: Ichthyology, Photography, and the Archival Record in Japan and
Korea,” in positions: east asia cultures critique 18.1 (2010): 51-88. About the use of first video
camera in the Korean peninsula, see Soyoung Kim, “Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial
Surveys, Post-Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity” in Journal of Korean
Studies. Vol. 16, No.2 (Fall, 2011): 285-301.
187
!
mountain gorges.206 Some also willingly shared their tourist memory with others upon
their return, as seen in such photographs that are now readily available on numerous
infrastructure of the North’s Kaesong Special Economic Zone enabled repeated border-
crossings for those involved in the ambitious economic revitalization project. Business
trips to Kaesong were never purely about business; more than often, they included
The accessibility to the territory by the masses has therefore resulted in the rise of
Koreans came to possess when facing North Korea—a medium that was certainly not
available to artists in the 1980s whose only means of depicting North Korea was through
their imagination. Even though an extensive scholarly and media attention has been paid
to South Korean filmic representation of North Korea during the Sunshine Policy era—
perhaps due to the blockbuster success of such films as the Joint Security Area (2000),
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
206
Between November, 1998, when the first tour embarked, and July, 2008, when the South
Korean Ministry of Unification put a temporary ban on the tour after a killing of a tourist by
North Korean soldiers’ gunshots, a total of 1,955, 951 civilians visited the Diamond Head tourist
district. At first the ferry left the eastern shore from the South to arrive at the mountain resort in
the North, but a road that cuts cross the DMZ was built to transport the tourists by bus.
http://www.mtkumgang.com/ and http://reunion.unikorea.go.kr/ (accessed December 10, 2009)
207
South Korean secondary schools took students on school field trip to Mt. Diamond. Some
exemplary blogs are: http://blog.naver.com/ghks201/90038845210 (2008 trip);
http://sycho.kr/70097732768 (2002 trip). (accessed April 25, 2011)
208
This Korean blogger engages in trade business, and was invited to make investment in the
Kaesong Special Economic Zone in 2008, right at a time when this Economic Zone (located off
the North Korean side of the DMZ along the Yellow Sea) loses the initial optimistic projection of
profit expected from the successful precedence of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in Southern
China: http://blog.daum.net/toogary2/15801719 (accessed March 28, 2011)
188
!
photography was rarely recognized as an artistic and popular medium with which to
express, articulate, and re-imagine the South’s relationship with the North.209 Addressing
this omission, this chapter seeks to rearticulate photography as a crucial medium that
reflects and propels the formation of new inter-Korean subjectivity in the Sunshine Policy
era, during which South Korean citizens, although provisionally, took on the role of
producer, initiator, and visionary in re-shaping the North-South relationship. Even though
this inter-Korean relationship did not result in the “broader discussion and opinion
the public” that Habermas had hoped for, what we have instead is the exchanges in the
visual and performative registers in spite of the absent transaction of rational ideas, verbal
or textual.
which I will develop in this section through works of artist Seung Woo Back, operate
precisely on the terms with which Paik Nak-chung envisions “overcoming” the division
system. The division system leading up to the Sunshine Policy period has already been in
crisis, as Paik’s 1997 book title of Division System in Crisis anticipates, because, as
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
209
The Joint Security Area (2000, dir. Chan-wook Park); TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War (2004,
dir. Je-kyu Kang); and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005, dir. Kwang-Hyun Park).
189
!
symbiotic relationship between the two Koreas began to erode in the 1990s.210 The
balance upheld by the dictatorial anti-democratic regimes crumbled in the 1990s, gave
recent years, Paik’s privileging of actors with multiple interests in mind (over the mostly
policy-driven state government) eventually returns to, or at least rhymes with, the
Habermasean belief in the role of civil society. Paik’s most recent address of the process
beyond the division system designates civil society, which includes corporations and
individual citizens, as “the ‘third party.’” For Paik, these nonstate actors with their
alternative, reconciliatory thirdness would overturn “the two parties of North and South
system in crisis, my analyses of Seung Woo Back’s photographs of North Korea will
complicate such notions of the “third party” and designation of “nonstate actors,” by
questioning the “non-political” motivations of these individual actors and introducing the
from his 2001 visit to Pyongyang illuminates the dynamics of the discontinued
reconstruct the South Korean citizen’s desire to cross the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ)
before his journey, his confrontation with North Korean censorship in the Northern
I will articulate the photo-taking South Korean subject’s negotiation of the North-South
rather than dispels, division. My close analysis of Back endeavors to reconsider the
photographic desire before his Pyongyang trip journey, which points to a larger cultural
automatically given the chance to visit Pyongyang; he had to “work” for it, because even
during the Sunshine Policy era a South Korean could not casually enter the Northern
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
213
According to my interviews with curators and artists who visited North Korea during this brief
decade, they made distinct efforts to visit Pyongyang (the capital) and not the Mt. Diamond
Tourist District (the mountain gorges). Because Pyongyang was off limit to regular tourists, they
191
!
house was planning a show in Pyongyang—and this fashion show required a border-
crossing of not only clothes and models, but also a fashion photographer.214 Back sought
out the fashion designer, the well-known hanbok specialist Lee Young-hee—who was at
delivering “small presents,” like confectioneries and rice cakes to the fashion house for
three consecutive weeks, the very duration of the trip the designer finally granted to
Back. The measures that Back took to cross the border demonstrate his desire to seize the
rare opportunity to produce creative, unique imprints of the particular locale, if not the
world’s last remaining terra incognita but at least a place of “exotic” civilization.215 The
primary motivation for him to enter North Korea, reveals Back, was not to photograph a
fashion show but to roam the streets of Pyongyang and arrest moments of North Korean
This photographic desire for North Korea, which Back shared with many other
South Korean visitors, is deeply rooted in a particular historical moment of the Sunshine
Policy era. When compared with the Cold War era’s outright anti-communism, the South
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
had to follow tours unrelated to art or cultural scenes and sporadically and discreetly made
available through the South Korean government or peace-keeping NGOs whose main purpose
was to promote amity in the most general sense. These tours repeated the predetermined route of
visits and hardly fostered any artistic exchange; yet setting foot in the only country previously
unreachable to South Koreans functioned as personal reasons for joining the tours.
214
Back accompanied the internationally known chosonot (traditional Korean costume) designer
Lee Younghee, who now claims the title of the first South Korean designer to hold a fashion
show in the North.
215
The influx of tourist and journalist-generated digital photographs of North Korea is a more
recent development of the past several years, after digital recording technology became virtually
available to anyone with a smart phone and especially after the Associate Press’s launched the
first foreign desk in Pyongyang in 2013. When Back visited Pyongyang in 2001, it was extremely
difficult for the outsiders, especially South Korean citizens, to access photographic images of
North Korea.
216
The artist’s interview with the author on July 15, 2011.
192
!
Korean perception of those living on the other side of the DMZ in the post-Berlin Wall
era entered into a new phase, where the strong will to demonize and eradicate the
“commies” gave way to the liberal notion of converting and reforming North Korea to fit
in the post-modern world of global capitalism. This photographic desire from the tourist’s
vantage point illustrates Paik’s historical account of shifting perceptions of North Korea
among the South Korean public in the 1990s. Doubtlessly, this liberal desire is already
reflected in the Sunshine Policy, wherein the economically superior South Korea sought
to exercise “soft power” (i.e. fashion shows) as much as a hardliner diplomatic push on
the insular, obsolete regime of little economic power. It is therefore not with a gun (to
shoot the enemy) but with a camera (to shoot the fashion show) that Back was able to
obtain the South Korean government’s permit to cross the DMZ. When the South Korean
self, empowered with the power to “shoot,” faces the camera-less North Korean
photographed on the streets, the subject/object relationship of photography laid onto the
What makes Back’s street photography of North Korea decidedly “touristic” can
original, creative photographs that look different from all the other photographic images
photography, Carol Crawshaw and John Urry note the net of inevitable, external
influences that affect image-making at the site. The tourists’ photographic memories
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
217
South Korean blockbuster films, wherein North Koreans are depicted as ethnically otherized
subjects, cast a “neocolonial” gaze onto sanguine brothers. Kyung Hyun Kim, “Mea Culpa:
Reading the North Korean as an Ethnic Other,” in Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global
Era, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 101-122.
193
!
tourist sites are often invoked because of particular visual images which they have seen in
advance or seen while they are visiting. [M]any of the images that we visually consume
when we are travelling are, in effect, the memories of others.”218 As Crawshaw and Urry
conjecture, Back’s preoccupation with the originality of his photographs is also his
others.” This rhetorical move away from typical tourist photographs that mimic the
archetypal shots of the given sites, however, is itself typical of tourist experience, falling
into what Jonathan Culler calls the “semiotic articulation of tourism.” For Culler, all
tourists—even the most snobbish and sophisticated ones—enter into the semiotic exercise
of reading tourist markers, because they are constantly compelled to locate the signifiers
of the authentic and the inauthentic.219 Participating in the semiotic interpretation of the
North Korean sites, Back’s photographs indeed invoke the tourist obsession, and
dilemma, surrounding the binary of authenticity and inauthenticity, and their desire to
locate what they perceive as genuine, candid everyday life. The striking absence of
spectacular icons such as the Juche Tower and the Mansudae Monument in Blow Up
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
218
Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Touring Cultures:
Transformations of Travel and Theory. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179.
219
Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism.” In Framing the Sign. (Norman, Oklahoma:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1988),153-167.
194
!
might explain this particular touristic desire to witness the “ordinary,” “real,” and thus
Where the epistemologies of tourism and the photographic desire are mutually
implicated, the outsiders’ gaze laid onto the land and people of North Korea thrives as
part of cultural politics during the Sunshine Policy era. Yet, all images produced in North
Korea are also afflicted with another powerful ideological expression—the North Korean
provokes a site of contestation over authorship and authority, wherein the photographic
and control. On the one hand, Blow Up embodies a South Korean citizen’s fight against
such obstacle to freedom of expression. On the other hand, it points to an exit out of the
binary of individual freedom and authoritarian censorship, a binary that our individual
The censorship industry in the North is well accounted for in the North Korean
history, and reaches a critical point in 1967, when Kim Jong-il consolidated the
propaganda department under his leadership.221 Especially for temporary visitors from
the South, the North Korean authority’s suspicion (of Southerners posing a threat to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
220
Tourist guides to Pyongyang organize their narrative around these monuments and a map that
locates them. Chris Springer. Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital.
(Budapest: Entente Bt., 2003).
221
In 1967, the Central Committee’s 15th meeting of the forth term became the infamous site
where Kim Jong-il purged several leading figures in the propaganda bureau and took control of
North Korean arts of propaganda.
195
!
regime) provides an excuse for the arduous imposition of censure.222 Against such
restrictions of freedom to speak and travel, visitors responded with intense eagerness to
defy authority. At stake here is the authorship to photographic images, which no longer
Korean authority—therefore further compelling South Koreans to insert their voice into
the frame. Innumerable accounts narrate North Korean censorship; Back’s fight against
censors is not unique. But it serves, in this chapter, as a vehicle with which to situate such
struggle within the larger context of ideological division that dichotomizes the peninsula.
The physical presence of a North Korean “minder,” combined with the authority’s
exercise of censorship of Back’s negatives, renders all the photographic records of North
Korea resembling one another by taking a certain form: a form that keeps the façade of
the North Korean regime, whether they are taken by foreign visitors or North Koreans
taking photographs and secondly reiterated at the inspection process—Back was able to
see the highly fabricated nature of his photographs.224 Perhaps, the powerful, immediate
presence of the North Korean minders in Pyongyang gave him the conviction that the
remaining negatives all together coalesced too well with the Northern regime’s narrative
about itself. In the end, what Back naively believed to be a subject-forming experience of
his picture-taking did not occur, as his individual subjectivity depended, perhaps too
profoundly, on the rules of the North Korean authority that have always already been
film strips, his photographs would have made cliché examples of an individual’s fight for
highlighting the omnipresence of the meta-border, the DMZ, in every descriptive gesture
that South Koreans attempt to make about North Korea. Indeed, the utterly disappointed
and discouraged Back leaves the returned negatives buried in his personal archive for
four years. It was only in 2005 that Back revisited, for the first time, these archived
materials anew. This time, however, he felt “lucky” to have found a way to counter
censorship and photographic memory, and re-insert his subjective interpretation into the
out of the North into the South Korean search for individual freedom against the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
224
The artist tells me that the “minder” did not allow him to take photographs of, for example,
dirty street corners.
197
!
While re-examining his negatives, Back located intriguing details that he had
previously missed. One photograph, for instance, presents two children, a boy and a girl,
playing a keyboard to demonstrate their skills in front of the visitors. [Fig. 4.6] What
posters and paintings that visualize one of the phrases that tourists repeatedly hear in
North Korea, “we are happy.”225 In this quintessential propagandistic scene, the brand
Yamaha is a Japanese brand, the North Korean inspectors working for a staunchly anti-
Japanese regime should have caught this error, thought the artist. It is a flaw in the theater
of a regime that constantly professes its self-sufficiency through the rhetoric of Juche
the use of the English language or the Roman alphabet, in conjunction with the fact that
in “Yamaha” a Japanese brand name has been transliterated to the Roman alphabet, adds
to a sense of irony. So Back decided to repossess this detail from a corner of his original
Back also tells of his experience with a mysterious jogging woman in the
photograph on the bottom row, second from the left. [Fig. 4.7] This shot captures two
women on the sidewalks with an urban car street that separates them. The woman across
the street is running towards the right side of the picture plane, while in the foreground a
policewoman stands, with her back towards the viewer, looking also to the right. The
street. In front of his hotel, Back witnessed this jogging woman in chos!not (a variation
of Korean traditional costume adopted for everyday, contemporary use in the North)
passing by his hotel every morning at eight o’clock, as if a character out of The Truman
Show, the 1998 Hollywood movie about life that is staged, simultaneously “live,” on air,
and in real time.227 The fact that chos!not is not usually considered suitable as exercise
outfit, coupled, for this South Korean witness, with the sense of mystery about such
suspicion. The woman might, after all, have been hired by the regime to feign the look of
leisurely morning exercise for the audience of foreign tourists who stay at the Koryo
grants him the possibility of refusing the particular ways in which South Korean
individuals—as “third parties”—have to remember North Korea and its people. This
refusal, revealing the existence of a room for “play” within the seemingly impenetrable
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
227
Back makes the reference to the Hollywood movie in his interview with the author.
199
!
imagination where one can disobey and re-interpret the ideology of division. But can this
“play,” and refusal, be on its own automatically and effectively read as the South Korean
citizen’s praise-worthy political critique of the Northern regime? Would not this play
only reinforce our own perception of freedom, which has its roots in the bourgeois
censorship does not signify the regime’s ban of all photography—both photography and
film are the most significant mediums of propaganda—but the regime’s own rules
interpretation of the Juche ideology.228 Symptomatic of the clash between different norms
inevitably written in the language of division that haunts the peninsula even today, is it
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
228
A cultural study on North Korean journalist photographs that are published in the Rodong
Daily (rodong sinmun) details the ideological implications of photographic techniques in the
North. For example, the preference of full shots since the 1970s has substantially reduced official
appearance of close-ups in all visual mediums including photography and film. The close-ups are
considered “too formalist.” These manuals follow the directions noted in Kim Jong-Il’s articles:
Y!nghwayesulron [Theory of Filmic Arts] of 1973 and Uri Dang-ui Sinmunmaechewo
Chulpanmul [Our Party’s News Media and Publications] of 1974. As another point, the leaders’
portraits receive utmost attention from North Korean photographers, as both Kims should always
be in the center of picture frame. The Propaganda Bureau’s establishment of the manual to formal
details reveals that the photographic language functions to serve the ideological content. See
By"n Y"ng-wook, Kim Jong-il jaypiji imijiui dokj!m [Kim Jong-il.jpg: Monopoly of Image],
(Seoul, Hanwool Publishing), 42, 75, 119.
200
!
gives rise to the potential of dangerously affirming individual liberalism at the expense of
assertion of the self who triumphantly discovers and photographically documents the
oversights of the regime, one makes the mistake of simply accepting the terms with
which South Koreans are compelled to vilify Northern “others” and elevate the position
of the Southern self. The degree to which this discovery is significant to Blow Up—this
series is essentially made around the unintended details discovered after the 2001 trip—
problematically rhymes with the level of excitement with which South Korean bloggers
flaunt the few photographs that they are able to take when the North Korean guards are
looking away. These blog narratives are essentially written around the cherished
moments of individual triumph. The South Korean tourist’s search for “authentic” scenes
of North Korean life perilously merges with a detective-like quest for the “truthful”
images, or the moments of “truth” about the regime; these photographs in turn enable the
individuals. North Korea stands out as a unique site of photographic quest for truth-
searching from the daily lives of others especially in the era of emerging visual and
phones allow the largest number of individuals in history to take their own photographs
and instantly make them available for anyone with Internet access to see. It is, however,
simply unthinkable, due to the regime’s strict surveillance of its people, that North
Korean civilians would capture honest portraits of daily life and self-broadcast them on
201
!
the web. (The irony here is that the age of digital photography depends on the cell phone
technologies for which South Korea is so famous.) Bearing in mind the highly fraught
North Korea that perpetuates it, I see Blow Up as Back’s play on our fantasy of asserting
the liberal (or neoliberal) self by profiting from the rare chance to photograph “truthful”
North Korea. Here, we are those who live outside North Korea (including South Koreans)
And yet again, the remarkably complex visuality with which Blow Up represents
North Korea nonetheless defies a singular reading. The South Korean citizen Back
visualizes not only the very problematics of this fantasy game but also an alternative to
the paradigm in which the act of praising the photographer as an individual genius or a
tragic hero against state authority reinscribes the very coordinates with which the binary
operates. How then does this alternative arise in Blow Up, an alternative sensibility that
takes into the ethics of representation—and furthermore the ethics of division? Where the
act of representing the other in the language of the self is highly contested and when the
task of learning the other’s language of representation is equally challenging, what kind
of intervention can Back as a South Korean citizen envision on the level of both
executed back in South Korea actively imagines the possibility of eradicating the Cold
Back’s post-production process (i.e. editing and enlarging) was first and foremost
motivated by his discovery of certain details that had been captured by the camera.
Back’s photographic production therefore involves not only his struggle against North
Korean authority but also the recognition of the third player in such a production—the
camera. The very language with which he was able to produce his photographs—not
importantly, it was the camera that planted the details that evaded the eyes of the
photographer as equally as the censorship board. The camera is more than an extension of
the photographer’s eye in Blow Up: the camera functions in place of the photographer’s
eye, while the “camera’s desire to see” facilitates the non-physical, non-verbal encounter
that Back had with North Korean subjects on Pyongyang’s street. 229 In short, it is not the
photographer but the camera that is “the third party” per Paik’s theory. Such use of
technology and renunciation of authorship—first to the North Korean authority and then
Furthermore, locating the camera at the threshold between the two competing
as productive metaphors of in-between space that transcends the opposition between the
two nationalistic states. This liminal space is not simply made up of the physical borders
of the DMZ. Rather, it is a space of potentiality in which one can re-formulate the
concept of border itself as a site of constant negotiation. What kind of visual strategies—
metaphor of shifting border zone, or, in other words, a counter-visuality to the system of
division?
focus. In the absence of clarity—resulted from diluted colors and unclear contours—the
high-rise apartment buildings, the National Library, the profile of a guard in uniform, and
a grove of deciduous trees seem to dissolve into the air. These abstracted, de-stabilized,
excitement built around the indexical images of North Korea, by refusing to give away a
proper set of information or data about the reality that lied before Back’s camera. Not
unlike Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cult film Blow-Up, to which Back pays an explicit
homage by way of the title, Back’s photographs do not deliver forensic evidence for the
Back’s photographs, what is destroyed (or murdered) is the very search for the
corners, edges, and margins of the original negatives, usurps the North Korean logic of
always features a “group photograph” on its front page, featuring the leader Kim standing
in the center of a front row of officials, with dozens of party cadres lined up behind him.
[Fig. 4.8] Here, the individual faces fade into the background, the photograph acting
merely as vidence of the leader’s “generosity,” standing with the people. This type of
“class photograph” aptly represents the current state of the regime, which upholds only a
particular notion of collectivity—one that subsumes everyone into a group that can then
be led by the dictator whose body always marks the center of the composition and is
by the state’s official rules of representation; only the leaders—the Great Leader Kim Il-
sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il—ever merit a particular kind of close-up: the
double-portraits that adorn every public building and private home, even after their
deaths. When Back zooms in on a schoolgirl and blows up her image as large as Kim Il-
sung’s head, placing her next to the re-taken portrait of the leader from an obtuse angle,
Back effectively nullifies this photographic logic. Back’s disruption of the North Korean
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
230
Byon Yongwook, Kim Jong-il.JPG (Gim Jongil. JPG) (Seoul: Han’ul, 2008). In a rather
simplistically critical depiction of the Northern regime, National Geographic Explorer: Inside
North Korea (season 21, episode 14, aired on February 27, 2007) captures fascinating and
poignant scenes in which the North Korean minders direct the camera man to capture the portraits
of the dear leader and the great leader only at a straight angle.
205
!
“insignificant” details such as a grove of leafy trees or a partial view of a North Korean
contentious, and agonistic than depicted in the Northern regime’s image of national
collective.
In terms of display method, Back has chosen a way to defy the “totalizing eye” on
North Korea—imposed on the territory by both the foreigners and the regime itself—by
corresponds to disconnected pieces of memory from disparate times that refuse to form a
comprehensive narrative, but nonetheless interact with one another. The diversity in the
depicted referents does not synthesize into a complete picture but rather indicates the
display (except for two) do not fit into the uniformly sized frames. With the photographs
being surrounded by blank photographic borders on different sides, the picture frames in
Blow Up do not merely demarcate the end of the picture and the beginning of the real
space. They also point to the unyielding mechanisms of his process of “working,”
“editing,” and “compiling”—one in which each of these steps is accomplished only to the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
231
German photographer Andreas Gursky’s Pyongyang series, which captures frontal scenes of
the mass games of the Arirang Festival, exhibits large, glossy C-prints singularly, effectively
formulating a totalizing photographic vision onto the regime.
206
!
To add another layer to the visual complexity, not all blank spaces are equal in
shape and size. The presentation of two kids standing by a Yamaha piano is, for example,
squeezed by two vertical blank spaces on the left and right sides of the frame. The frame
as a grid does not suffocate the image; in contrast, the blank space of emptiness gives a
breathing room to each image, a room for movement. This room for dynamic movement
gains another function, when the viewer connects a blank space in a frame with other
blank borders in other frames. The recognition of the frame between two blank strips
meets the possibility of crossing it, while the disruptive movement of back and forth
between the empty spaces produces a border zone that function as a link between
practiced by the viewer’s active looking—is also furthered to include breaking, crossing,
In viewing Blow Up, the spectator is invited to perform the simultaneous act of
recognizing and breaking the frame, linking individual pictures together; through this, the
spectator remains, however long she may, in the liminal space of perpetual lingering,
without asserting the material “division” between each unit. This elimination and refusal
of concrete borders contrasts with the ways in which the inter-Korean relationship is
increasingly has been considered a sum of two distinct units that solicit a game of
comparison.232 Art critic Park Chan-kyong articulates the visuality of such binarism
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
232
Comparisons can of course be helpful especially when a critical engagement with the
similarities between the two Koreas serves as a critique of South Korea, as well as the North. Cho
Han Hye-jeong and Wu-yong Yi, eds. T’alpuntan sitael#l y!lmy! - namkwa puk, munhwa
kongchon#l wihan mosaek (Opening an Era beyond Division: Toward Cultural Cohabitation
between the South and the North). (Seoul: Samin, 2000)
207
!
found in the War Memorial’s display method. At the South Korean state-run War
Memorial in Yongsan, Seoul, the audiovisual material shown at the Museum’s theater
juxtaposes two screens on which similar scenes in North and South Korean histories are
projected side by side. As Park poignantly observes, when the right screen shows a
photographic documentation of the U.S. military occupying South Korea, the left screen
features a group of the Soviet Union soldiers marching into North Korea. This method of
double projection, Park believes, demonstrates the opposition between the two countries
in the “literal form.”233 The simultaneous presentation of division and linkage between
of the double framework. Because the visual language confirms and conforms to the
framework of identity and difference, the viewer is left to constantly linger within the
closed system of self and other. Park also notes that the current situations in the South
and the North, when presented as a pair, establish a temporal linearity, as if the South and
the North exist in different time zones, with the former always surpassing the latter.234 In
Blow Up it is precisely our inability to identify the North Korean others and to contain
them in an isolated frame (or past) that serves as the starting point for the non-
Such a relationship may be possible only when the outsiders (including South
Koreans) come to realize that it is utterly impossible to completely know, identify, and
make judgments about North Koreans. Between the recognizable and the unrecognizable
lies a space where the ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, lingers
beyond the “reality of division.” A ghostly photograph in the left center column
visualizes this ethical dilemma of representing the unknowable. [Fig. 4.9] Like a proto-
photograph on a glass pane, the silhouette of the North Korean subject fully exerts its
presence over there; but this semi-transparent, semi-opaque glass pane also blocks our
view, retaining details of the subject (such as gender and age) we cannot know. What we
do know is that we are brought closer to this abstract representation of a human subject, a
North Korean other, with whom we share photographic space. This sense of sharing is
not solely spatial; it is also temporal. Back’s post-production and the viewer’s activation
of photographs re-invigorate the strong sense of refusal to linear temporality that puts
North Korea into our past, as succinctly captured in such dictums as “the past is a foreign
country.”
This chapter argues against the claim that the process of democratization is not
yet over because the system of division is still presiding over the peninsula.235 First of all,
process that is never over. And, if we slightly shift our perspective to the 1987 regime
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
235
Paik, “South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge,” New Left Review (January-
February, 1993), 71.
209
!
change, what South Korea achieved in 1987 is not “democratization” per se but the very
“division” means in the peninsula. The democratic struggle then and now should be
against the totalizing system of opposition, whether the line of division is drawn
chapter outlines, this fight against the opposition should never place the pursuit of
consensus and sameness as its ultimate aim, especially when the consensus-building
efforts in the Sunshine Policy era have been written in explicitly neoliberal market-driven
terms. Democracy, I might argue, is about living with division, even if it means a
constant battle with the self as much as with the other and a constant questioning of the
self, as much as of the other. This lesson—that democracy can be only in its coexistence
with division—is what the visuality and performativity of Blow Up adds to the theory of
division system in crisis. The overcoming of the division system can only be about
By putting art in conversation with the division system theory, this chapter also
brings to light the ways in which the political imagination of South Korean artists, in the
1980s or in the present day, have always reached beyond the national borders of South
Korea. What stands out as a shift in the aesthetics of such imagination is that the artistic
language of Blow Up, when contextualized within artistic practices of the 1980s like
National Longing for Unification and Rice Planting, demonstrates the heightened
awareness of the implication of the self and the subjectivity that South Korean artists
began to portray in art. The artist’s own subjectivity is always implicated in his/her
210
!
making of art. There is no preset formula for being “politically engaged.” Only in
engaging in the present progressive tense does the artist become a political subject.
Here then we arrive at an important dilemma that this chapter faces: if this process
awakening for the artist, is it ever possible that an artwork, as a product of this process,
can effectively transfer its message to its audience members in plurality? In other words,
is this process of political engagement and the looking out on the self and the world only
possible in the individual? Even though the self—here, the artist Back or the viewers of
his photographs—might have learned the ethics of living with differences, the
understanding of this “democratic way of living with division” was not mutually agreed
upon with the ostensible other, that is, the North Koreans Back photographed. Perhaps
this question can only be addressed beyond the point of deadlock, when civilian
when millions of North Koreans travel outside its national boundaries and simultaneously
and photo-sharing.
211
!
Epilogue
Over the past several years, I have had many occasions to say that I was writing a
dissertation on Korean contemporary art. This statement was often met with a question:
“Is it about Nam June Paik (b.1932-d.2006)?” This question implies: how could one
possibly write a history of Korean contemporary art without addressing the “father of
video art” and the twentieth century’s single most recognized Korean-born artist. And
yet, this dissertation does precisely that: it is a contemporary art history of Korea without
Nam June Paik. Its primary aim is attending to the artists and cultural practitioners active
in Korea (as opposed to New York, where Paik ultimately found his second home), and
weaving together their words, desires, ideals, cynical self-criticisms, and art production,
all of which comprise the field of contemporary art in that country. I place an equal
emphasis on analyzing how these practitioners engage with constantly shifting socio-
political, art historical, and material cultural contexts in order to mold a new aesthetic
language of democracy. In short, this dissertation investigates how Korean artists of the
last thirty years have transformed the hy!njang—a scene, a site in constant flux, or a
I do not, however, simply evade the question of the global. My position as an art
historian based in North America writing a doctoral dissertation about Korean artists in
the English language forces me to consider two different audiences speaking two
fieldwork in Korea has also taught me that most artists consider, or even “internalize,”
the expectations and desires from outside Korea, thereby sometimes producing what a
Seoul-based art historian Tae-hi Kang has called certain “bilingual” art. When invited to
Asian art at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2004, Kang was acutely conscious of the
double frameworks that her reader was also exposed to: “the artists handpicked by the
Western gaze that has exercised such influence on the formation of contemporary art in
East Asia are introduced from the position of an author who shares their nationality and
cultural references. The hope is that the reader, then, will gain information about and
interpretations of this exhibition through a kind of ‘dual lens’ that combines an American
curator’s perspective and my own, providing a more diverse and refracted overview.”236
“Refracted” or fraught with intellectual and discursive tensions, my own position has
establishment of “global contemporary art” and “Asian contemporary art”) and having a
command of the Korean language, well as a connection with its art system, on the other.
This dual position has made my thinking acutely self-reflexive during both my fieldwork
locate the nuanced and intertwined workings of the local and of the global in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
236
Kang Tae-hi, “Contemporary Artists of South Korea: A Refracted View,” Past in Reverse. ex.
cat., text by Betti-Sue Hertz and others (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art), 44-5.
213
!
And of course, in a way, Nam June Paik is featured in this dissertation. Due to
this hy!njang-driven agenda, however, Paik is not “the” subject but one of many forces in
the field. Or to be more precise, Paik is featured as a “cultural diplomat” who contributed
to shaping the new Korean art hy!njang in the 1990s. In 1993, he initiated the travelling
of the 1993 Whitney Biennale to Korea at a cost offset with his own money. (The
influence of this traveling exhibition on the Korean art scene is noted in Chapter 2.) Also
that same year, after receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his TV
installations in the German Pavilion, he persuaded the City of Venice to give Korea a plot
of land in the Giardini to build a national pavilion that his home country had lacked.
When Venice refused, citing the over-crowded nature of the Giardini, Paik argued that
this pavilion would be for both Koreas, and that Venice should recognize its diplomatic
world peace. Indeed, it was a diplomatically astute and artistically creative claim. By
1994, South Korea was granted the last national pavilion to enter the Giardini. Even
though no North Korean artist has yet exhibited in the Korean Pavilion, this pavilion
became an important stage for many South Korean artists and curators. Through this
effort, Paik was consciously creating a hy!njang that makes an imaginative leap beyond
the present reality of divided Korea and of politics in the space of art. If not world peace,
this proposition also imagined a different world for contemporary art that increasingly
leaves behind art works produced in countries like North Korea by relegating them into
Venice, Paik gestured toward a democratic future for global contemporary art that would
214
!
My contention is that the hy!njang-driven art works in South Korea have so far failed to
connect with other worlds of contemporary art due to its lack of a hy!njang-driven art
history. By a hy!njang-driven art history here, I mean an art history that aspires to engage
with the locally specific socio-cultural conditions and that also reaches out to hy!njang
elsewhere. Much of Some Korean art criticism has conspicuously imposed theories,
mainly from Germany, France, and the U.S., onto the art objects of the Korean hy!njang
without articulating the necessary translation and the location/position of the critic. Such
criticisms have created an unethical gap that obscures the political and creative potential
between and across different hy!njang (e.g. between New York and Seoul). These are
examples of art history-making that I work against. Only hy!njang-driven art historical
studies, I argue, can form what Chantal Moufe and Ernest Laclau theorize as “a chain of
equivalences” across multiple struggles in multiple locations that together aspire a real-
izing of a democratic future, for art and for politics. Thus, this conceptualization of global
art history consciously refutes the expansionist model that has been put in place since the
late 1980s and that has followed the logic of global capitalist expansion. With this
hy!njang-driven art history on Korea, I hope to connect with other art histories beyond
Bibliography
Abbas, Ackbar, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1997.
Ablemann, Nancy. Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent: A South Korean Social
Movement. Berkeley: UC Press, 1996.
Adorno, Theodor W. and Horkeimer, Max. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. trans. John
Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1946; 1972.
Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs.
Aesthetics and Politics. London: Verso, 1980.
Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon, 1969.
Armstrong, Charles K. ed. Korean Society: Civil Society, Democracy, and the State. New
York: Routledge, 2002.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
Beck, Jee-sook. Battle of Visions: Korean Minjung Art from the 1980s to the Present.
Seoul: Arts Council Korea, 2005.
. “Tosi taejung munhwa” (City Mass Culture). Tosi taejung munhwa (City Mass
Culture). exh. cat., Seoul: T!kwon Misulkwan, 1984, 4-9.
Benjamin, Walter. “On the Mimetic Faculty. In Reflections, 331-6. New York: Schocken
Books, 1986.
Bishop, Claire. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-79.
Boym, Svelta. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Brooklyn Museum of Art. Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art. ex.
cat., text by Linda Nochlin and others. Brooklyn, 2007.
Butler, Judith and Joan W. Scott, eds. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York:
Routledge, 1992.
By!n, Y!ng-wook. Kim Jong-il jaypiji imijiui dokj!m (Kim Jong-il.jpg: Monopoly of
Image). Seoul, Hanwool Publishing, 2008.
Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
Carol Duncan, Civilizing Ritual: Inside Public Art Museums. New York: Routledge,
1995.
Cho Han Hye-jeong and Wu-yong Yi, eds. T’alpuntan sitael"l y!lmy! - namkwa puk,
munhwa kongchon"l wihan mosaek (Opening an Era beyond Division: Toward
Cultural Cohabitation between the South and the North). Seoul: Samin, 2000.
Choi, Jeong-hwa, ed. Choi Jeong-hwa. Seoul: Kain Design Group, 1995.
Choi, Min and Sung Wan-kyung, eds. Sigakkwa !n! I (Vision and Language I: Industrial
Society and Art) Seoul: Y!lhwadang, 1982.
Choi, Yeol. Hankuk hy!ndae misul undong "i y!ksa (The History of Korean
Contemporary Art Movement). Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994.
Clark, T.J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1999.
Cornell, Lauren, ed. Younger than Jesus: The Generation Book. ex. cat. New York: New
Museum; Göttingen: Steidl, 2009.
Crawshaw, Carol, and John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye.” In Touring
Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, edited by Chris Rojek and John
Urry, 76-95. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Crimp, Douglas, ed. AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1988.
259
!
Cumings, Bruce. “The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American
Experience,” New Left Review I/173 (January-February, 1989): 5-32.
. Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2005.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 2002.
Deutsche, Rosalyn. Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1996.
Doane, Mary Ann. “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe.” In The Historical Film: History
and Memory in Media, edited by Marcia Landy, 269-285. London: Continuum,
2001.
Fore, Devin. Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of art and Literature.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually
Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25 (1990): 56-80.
Geumho Art Museum, Black Box: Memories of the Cold War Images. exh. cat., text by
Allan Sekula and others, Seoul, 1997.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgois Society, trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1991.
Hansen, Miriam. “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as
Vernacular Modernism.” Film Quarterly 54.1 (Autumn, 2000): 10-22.
260
!
Hughes, Theodore, Jae-yong Kim, Jin-kyung Lee, and San-kyung Lee, eds. Rat Fire:
Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire. Ithaca: Cornell University, 2013.
Janelli, Rogert, L. and Dawnhee Yim Janelli, Ancestor Worship and Korean Society.
Stanford: Stanford University, 1982.
Kang, Nae-h!i. “S"ul, k! ilsang gonggan !i tonghak” (Seoul, It’s Everyday Dynamics).
Munhwa Kwahak 5 (January, 1994): 13-44.
Karp, Ivan, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Thomas Ybarra-Frausto, eds. Museum
Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006.
Kee, Joan. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Methods.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Kendall, Laurel. The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1988.
Kim, Elain, and Chungmoo Choi, eds. Dangerous Women. New York: Routledge, 1997.
Kim, Gyewon. "Unpacking the Archive: Ichthyology, Photography, and the Archival
Record in Japan and Korea.” positions: east asia cultures critique 18.1 (2010):
51-88.
261
!
Kim, Hy!n-do, “Uri misul kwa kich’i (Our Art and Kitsch).” Misul segye (Winter, 1992):
27-32.
Kim, Jang-un. “Sangching kwa sot’ong—chik"m hankuk es! kongkongmisul "n !ti e
wich’ihako inn"nka?” (Symbols and Communications: Where is Public Art
located in Today’s Korea?). Visual, Vol. 7 (2010).
Kim, Jong-yeop, ed. 87ch'aejaeron minjuhwa ihu hanguk sahoe "i insikgwa sae j!nmang
(A Theory of the 1987 System: The Understanding and New Vision of South
Korean Society Since Democratization). Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 2009.
Kim, Kyung Hyun, Virtual Hallyu. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Kim, Samuel. Korea’s Democratization. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Knight, Christopher. “1993 Year in Review: Art. It's Called Art, Not Politics,” LA Times
(Los Angeles, CA), Dec. 26, 1993.
Koh, Dong-yeon, “1990 ny!ndae ret"ro munhwa "i t"ngchang kwa Choe J!nghwa "i
p"llas"tik paradais"” (The Emergence of Retro Culture in the 1990s and
Jeonghwa Choi’s Plastic Paradise). Hankuk kicho chohy!ng hakhoe, Vol. 13. No.
6 (December, 2012): 3-15.
Koo, Hagen, ed. State and Society in Contemporary Korea. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993.
Kremer, Mark. “See Seoul, Then Die: The flyingCity Experience,” Hermès Korea
missulsang (Seoul: Hermès Korea, 2004), 86-93.
Kwon, Miwon. “For Hamburg: Public Art and Urban Identities,” Public Art is
Everywhere. ex. cat., edited by Christian Philipp Muller, 95-109. Hamburg:
Kunstverein Hamburg and Kulturbeh rde Hamburg, 1997.
262
!
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985; 2001.
Lee Dae-beom, The Legacy of Minjung Art. Korea National University of Arts, Masters
Thesis, 2010.
Lee, Namhee. "Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-gk, Ritual, and
Protest." positions: east asia cultures critique. Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 2003): 555-
584.
Lee, Sohl. “Seung Woo Back’s Blow Up,” Korean Pop Culture Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2014).
Lee, Young-june, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” Imichi Pip!ng: Kkaetip m!ri put!
inkongoeis!ng kkachi (Image Criticism: From Leaf-style Hair to Satellite). Seoul:
Noonbit Publishing, 2004.
Lee, Young-wook. “K’ich’i Chinsil Uri Munhwa” (Kitsch, Truth, and Our Culture).
Munhak kwa sahoe (Winter, 1992): 1221-1236.
Lefebvre, Henri. Everyday Life in the Modern World. Translated by Sacha Rabinovitch.
New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Lunn, Eugene. “Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of Brecht
and Lukács,” New German Critique, no.3 (Autumn, 1974): 12-44.
Mercer, Kobena. “Introduction.” Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures, edited by Kobena
Mercer, 6-34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Institute of International
Visual Arts, 2007.
Mouffe, Chantal. Interview by Rosalyn Deutsche, Branden Joseph, and Thomas Keenan.
“Every Form of Art Has a Political Dimension.” Grey Room (Winter 2001): 98-
125.
National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea. Fifteen Years of Minjung Art. exh. cat.
Text by Sung Wan-kyong and others. Kwachon, 1994.
Oh, Sang-gil. 20 seki hankuk misul untongsa (The 20th-Century Korean History of Art
Movement) (Seoul: ICAS).
Olivier Marchart, “Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s). Some basic observations on the
difficult relation of public art, urbanism, and political theory”
(eipcp.net/transversal, 2002), unpaginated.
Pai, Hyung Il and Timothy R. Tangherlini. Nationalism and the Construction of Korean
Identity. Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Press: 1999.
. “South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge,” New Left Review
(January-February, 1993), 71.
Park, Chan-kyong and Yang Hy!n-mi, “Konggongmisul kwa misul "i konggongs!ng”
(Public Art and Publicness of Art,” Munhwagwahak 53 (2008), 98.
Park, Chan-kyong. “‘Criticality’ in Korean Art and the ‘Interests’ of Artists: Minjung Art
and the Present” in Journal Bol. Vol.10 (2008), 20-45.
. “Kaeny!m ch!k hy!nsil ju"i not'": han p’y!njipcha "i chu” (A Note on
Conceptual Realism: An Editor’s Footnote) in Forum A. Vol. 9 (April 16, 2001),
unpaginated.
Park, Soyang. Postcolonial Visual Culture Theory: memory and haunting in the minjung
democratic art movement in the postcolonial space of South Korea during 1980s.
Ph.D. dissertation, Goldsmith, 2005.
Park, Sunyoung. “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006): 165-192.
Portal, Jane. Art Under Control in North Korea. London: Reaktion Books, 2005.
Potts, Alex. Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday
in Postwar European and American Art. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2013.
Queens Museum of Art. Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s. exh. cat.,
text by Jane Farver and others. New York, 1999.
Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated
by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004.
Raunig, Gerald. Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century.
Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2007.
Reality and Utterance, ed. Reality and Utterance. Seoul: Sigak kwa !n!, 1985
Ryu, Junpil. “On national literature and the division system.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies,
Vol. 11, No. 4. (2010): 552-565.
Scott, Clive. Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson. London: I.B. Tauris,
2007.
265
!
Shapiro, Ian. The State of Democratic Theory. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
c2003.
Shin, Gi-Wook. Ethnic nationalism in Korea: Genealogy, Politics, and Legacy. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006.
Shin, Jeong-hoon. “K!ri es! paeuki: Choe J!nghwa "i dijain kwa sopiju"i
tosiky!ngkwan” (Learning from the Street: Choi Jeong-hwa’s Design and
Consumerist Urban Landscape), Sidae "i nun: Hankuk k"nhy!ndae misulkaron
(The Eye of the Period: Theorizing South Korean Modern and Contemporary
Artists), 309-343. Seoul: Hakkochae, 2011.
Sigak Maeche Yonguso, ed., Misul Undong (Art Movement) (Seoul: Kongdongchae,
1988), 54-66.
Sim, Kwang-hy!n. “Misulsa roput! "i talchul: sinch’ech!k sak!n kwa kamkaknolli "i
hoebok "l wihay!” (A Flight from Art History: To Recover the Event of Body
and Logic of Senses,” Konggan "i p’akoe wa saengs!ng: S!ngnam kwa Pundang
sai (The Destruction and Formation of Space: Between Sungnam and Pundang),
edited by Kim Tae-h!n, 8-23. Seoul: Munhwa Kwahak, 1998.
Song, Jesook. South Koreans in the Debt Crisis: the Creation of a Neoliberal Welfare
Society. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.
Springer, Chris. Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital. Budapest:
Entente Bt., 2003.
Sternberger, Dolf. “Panorama of the 19th Century” in October 4 (Autumn, 1977), 3-20.
Stimson, Blake and Gregory Sholette, ed., Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of
Social Imagination after 1945. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Sung, Wan-kyung. “From the Local Context: Conceptual Art in South Korea.” Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, edited by Luis Camnitzer, Jane
266
!
Farver, and Rachel Weiss, 119-126. Queens, NY: The Queens Museum of Art,
1999.
. “The Rise and Fall of Minjung Art.” Being Political Popular: South Korean Art
at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010, edited by Sohl
Lee, 188-203. Seoul: Hy!nsil Munhwa; Seattle: University of Washington, 2012.
Thompson, Nato, et al. Interventionists: Users' Manual for the Creative Disruption of
Everyday Life. North Adams: MASS MoCA, 2004.
Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002.
Wells, Kenneth, ed. South Korea’s Minjung Movement: The Culture and Politics of
Dissidence. Honolulu: University of Hawaii, 1995.
Yoo, Hye-jong. “The Candlelight Girls’ Playground: Nationalism as Art of Dialogy, The
2008 Candlelight Vigil Protests in South Korea.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic
Journal for Visual Culture 15 (Fall 2010).
http://minjung.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_15/articles/yoo/yoo.html.