Curator Kyung An examines how artistic experimentation evolved amid Korea's changing sociopolitical scene of the 1970s.

Transcript
Kyung An: I’m Kyung An, Associate Curator of Asian Art, and organizer of this exhibition, Only the Young. We’re on Tower Level 4, in a gallery titled, “The Logic of Resistance.” In the 1970s, artists went beyond the 1960's rejection of traditional Korean arts seen on Level 2. They began to investigate structures of power and the ways language and time influenced their life and work. Many of these explorations led them to new mediums, including photography and video, in addition to performance. It also encouraged some to create exhibition platforms in other parts of the country.

The Space and Time Fine Arts Group (also known as ST) included artists such as Lee Kun-Yong, Sung Neung Kyung, and Kim Youngmin. As a group, they organized exhibitions and discussions on current art trends and theory. Although they worked across diverse mediums—like Nam Sanggyun’s collection of discarded matchsticks and cigarette butts—a handful of ST artists became known for their performance-based works, or “events,” as they called them, which they saw as pure action that was more methodical and logic-based than the improvisational or audience-oriented “happenings” as seen on Level 2.

While ST was active, in 1972, third-time president Park Chung Hee dissolved the National Assembly and abolished presidential term limits, establishing an authoritarian regime. These extreme measures cemented Park’s grip on power and intensified the already growing censorship on free speech and expression, with the government even banning long hair for men and miniskirts for women. Some ST artists turned to simple everyday actions—walking, eating, reading, measuring—and redefined them by their own logic that was free from existing social conventions or structures. Many found photography, with its ability to document precise gestures, a powerful medium.

From 1974 to 1979, the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival also became an outlet for artists to experiment beyond painting and sculpture, embracing new technologies like video. Located in the southern city of Daegu, away from the prying eyes of the Park regime and the centralizing force of the art establishments in Seoul, artists such as Lee Kang-So, Lee Hyangmi, Kim Yongjin, Choi Byungso, and Park Hyunki created works that were sometimes site specific—examples can be discovered on the timeline and in the archival vitrine in this gallery. Seventy artists took part in the first festival, which, by the time of its last installment, in 1979, would grow into a large-scale event including works by more than two hundred artists from Korea as well as Japan.

Korea’s engagement with Western culture and integration into the capitalist global economy throughout the twentieth century inevitably raised the question of “What is Korean-ness?” In the adjoining Thannhauser gallery, under the title “Inverting Tradition,“ you will discover Lee Seung-taek’s earthenware sculptures, also known as "onggi"; Ha Chong-Hyun’s collaged work incorporating "saekdong", which are the colorful stripes seen on traditional Korean clothing; and Han Youngsup’s painting juxtaposing concrete with "dancheong", a decorative multicoloring technique used on religious or royal architecture. Altogether, they draw attention to the tension between tradition and modernity, art and non-art, and learned and inherited knowledge—all at a time when many were targets for eradication as part of the state’s modernization project.

The stories of these artists show us that, despite the oppressive and changing conditions of their reality, their experimental sensibilities paved the way for new forms of art. While rarely explicitly political, their very attempt to resist the status quo and create new structures was radicality in and of itself.

Ver todos los episodios