The Brooklyn Rail

Together, the concurrent exhibitions Only The Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s and The Shape of Time, Korean Art After 1989 offer a glimpse of the breathtakingly rapid achievement of a people, built on reservoirs of memory and imagination, optimism, extraordinary resilience, but also on tragedy. Spirituality too fundamentally underlies postwar Korean culture. Empathy, which is unique to humans, makes possible the recognition of an “other,” and only between ourselves and that “other”—even when the other is within us—can we open a space in which to imagine the spiritual. As the evolutionary biologist Joseph Henrich has written, our tendency “toward dualism—thinking of minds and bodies as separable and potentially independent … leaves us susceptible to beliefs in ghosts,”¹ and to the sense of invisible forces that connect us as humans.

Only The Young narrates a history of Korean art from the traumas of the Japanese occupation (1910 to 1945) and the Asia–Pacific War, the Korean War (with nearly five million casualties and a persevering division of the peninsula and its people), autocratic dictators who visited civilian massacres on their own people and repressed individual expression. Only in 1987 did South Koreans establish a genuine democracy. Along the way, they also transformed one of the poorest countries in the world into a G20 powerhouse over just two decades, and despite the repressive regimes, they persisted in connecting with the global avant-garde and envisioning a different future. Although the internationally known Korean artist Nam June Paik lived in Japan, West Germany, and New York, the young Korean avant-garde nevertheless kept abreast of his pioneering Fluxus performance works and his investigation of television and video recorders beginning in the early 1960s. Lee Ufan, born and raised in Seoul, studied and worked in Japan; yet his minimalist encounters with materials and space (in both his art and writings) deeply affected those artists too,² even though Paik and Lee exiled themselves.

Always on the edge of eradication, the growing community of utopian experimental artists who remained in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s railed against autocracy. Lee Kang-so is paradigmatic; for Disappearance—Bar in the Gallery of 1973 he created a working bar inside an art gallery, promoting drinking and socializing to reenact the mundane actions of everyday life. Influenced by contemporary Fluxus in the West, this odd and seemingly innocuous performance clashed with the increasing state repression of non-conformist expression and social interaction. Less overtly political but also subversive Seung-taek Lee used strips of fabric, hung from a line, to articulate the movements of air in Wind-Folk Amusement, a performance of 1971, alluding to uncontrollable, unseen forces. Jung Kang-ja more blatantly confronted the establishment in public performances such as Transparent Balloons and Nude Happening in 1968. Inspired by Yves Klein's 1958 Paris performances with naked women as “human paintbrushes,” Transparent Balloons and Nude coincided with a government crack-down on the length of women's skirts and men's hair. Accompanied by the music of John Cage on speakers and flashing colored lights, Jung came to the stage dressed in white and sat on a chair, while male performers and members of the audience cut away her clothing, as in Yoko Ono’s 1964 Cut Piece. Leaving her topless in nothing but her underpants, they covered her with clear balloons and then pressed their bodies onto the balloons until they popped. The public was shocked. In September 1969, Chung Chan-seung and Cha Myung Hi performed Nam June Paik’s composition Sex on the Piano, and on Korean Independence Day in August 1970 the so-called Fourth Group staged a mock “Funeral For Mainstream Art and Culture,” a procession protesting the authoritarian regime in the arts; the Korean Central Intelligence Agency interrogated the organizer and shut the group down.

At fifty, Chang Jia is still in her stride as a mature artist, continuing to focus on women’s bodies, on pleasure and pain and bodily desires. Simultaneously with The Shape of Time, the erstwhile performance artist Lee Kang-So showed extraordinarily beautiful, painterly canvases at the nearby Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, with gesture derived not from personality, as he explained to me, but from undisclosed, even mystical forces in nature.³ While the authorities in the 1960s and 1970s accepted the abstract art of the older generation, younger artists rejected it in favor of objects and experiences from everyday life, testing free will and subjectivity against an increasingly nationalistic and repressive state. Their “anti-art,” wrote the critic Lee Yil, emanated not from “formal concerns but of a keen interest in rediscovering life and reclaiming reality.”⁴

Only The Young depends on texts and the catalogue to tell the origin story of the lively youth counter-culture that provided the intellectual underpinnings of the brilliant successes with which we all familiar now—from the artists in The Shape of Time, as well as others not included, to K-Pop, Squid Game, Parasite, and Crash Landing on You. But The Shape of Time exhibition aspires to something quite different: it intends to show the variety and vitality of the contemporary art of South Korea and the Korean diaspora. In an essay for the catalogue, Sook-Kyung Lee points out that “the attempt to offer a coherent picture of a nation’s contemporary art may seem futile,” but that “exploring the epistemological commonality of a generation of artists who came of age when neoliberalism and globalization replaced the era of nationalism and the Cold War,”⁵ grounds The Shape of Time and imbricates it in a range of specific thematic threads.

Shamanism, mysticism, the uncanny, the wild, the unpredictable that continues to destabilize modernization is one such theme to which Alexandra Munroe dedicates her catalogue essay. She points to Park Chan-Kyong’s films, the ritualistic quality in the work of Haegue Yang, what Minouk Lim calls the “invisible histories” of modern Korea,⁶ referring to her creative process as a “methodology of shamanism.”⁷ Juree Kim made an enormous model, for the exhibition, of a traditional village called Evanescent Landscape—Hwigyeong: Philadelphia (2023). Her studio had been in Hwigyeong when it was designated a redevelopment zone in 2008. Day by day, as the museum staff waters the piece, constructed from unfired clay, we watch it literally dissolve; it evokes the memories and aspirations for those homes and the destruction of the past under relentless urban development. Displacement is another recurrent theme in The Shape of Time. Do Ho Suh made a life-size replica of the skin of his childhood home—called Seoul Home/Seoul Home/Kanazawa Home/Beijing Home/Pohang Home/Gwangju Home/Philadelphia Home (2012)—an evanescent ghost, sewn like clothing in translucent green fabric, hanging in the museum atrium. With all the other outstanding artists in the show, as well as the many notable artists who are absent, The Shape of Time means to present a deliberately disorganized, yet abundant layering of Korean art today, embedded in the complexity of today’s flood of global and local issues. We empathically grasp this. The Shape of Time elicits a portrait of Korean culture much like the era of which Dickens wrote, so long ago:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair … in short, the period was so far like the present.⁸

1. Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2020), 129-30. He adds: “...Of course, the best available science says that our minds are produced entirely by our bodies and brains, so they can’t have an independent existence.”
2. Lee Ufan published his seminal essay, “In Search of Encounter,” in AG 4 (1971), 5-14.
3. Kang-so Lee, conversation with the author, November 3, 2023.
4. Lee Yil, “Saenghwalhaneun jeolmeun misul [living young art],” Dong-a ilbo, December 23, 1967; cited in Cho Soojin, “From Avant-Garde Experiments to Experimental Art: A History of Alternative Korean Modernism,” in Kyung An and Kang Soojung, eds., Only The Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s (NY: Guggenheim Museum, 2023), 20.
5. Sook-Kyung Lee, “Negotiating Present Histories: Korean Art since 1980,” in Elisabeth Agro and Hyunsoo Woo, The Shape of Time, Korean Art After 1989 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2023), 62-3.
6. Minouk Lim, interview with Alexandra Munroe, 14 May 2022, via teleconference. Cited in Alexandra Munroe, “She Desperately Casts a Spell for the Creation of a New Order,” Elisabeth Agro and Hyunsoo Woo, The Shape of Time, Korean Art After 1989 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2023), 101.
7. Minouk Lim, in Kyung An, unpublished curatorial report, “Minouk Lim: Installation for The Promise of If, 2015-21,” Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Curatorial Report, October 2021, cited in Alexandra Munroe, “She Desperately Casts a Spell for the Creation of a New Order,” Elisabeth Agro and Hyunsoo Woo, The Shape of Time, Korean Art After 1989 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2023), 101.
8. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (London: 1859), 1.