Title: Images of Reality / Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s
Abstract: This dissertation concerns the shifting notion of
what I call “democratic
aesthetics” in South Korea from the
1980s – a decade when the country’s pro-democracy
social movement
called “minjung undong” (lit. “people’s movement”) provided a
political stage of postcolonial, anti-statist, and
anti-authoritarian dissent until its nationwide
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?
This inquiry
has led me to concentrate on four specific moments of “democratic
aesthetics”: the conceptualization of dissident reality by artist
groups Reality and
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
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.
Establishing a genealogy of Korean contemporary art within the
concurrent
workings of political democratization and cultural
globalization, this dissertation
ultimately constitutes an
epistemological inquiry into three implicated terms: “Korean
(hankuk)”; “contemporary (hy!ndae)”; “art (misul).” As a visual and
cultural studies
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
thus far envisioned the
20th-century history of political avant-garde art.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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