Curator Kyung An discusses the international reach of Korea's Experimental artists. 

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 5, in a gallery titled, “The Global Village.” This section showcases Experimental artworks that were at the forefront of the global avant-garde art world, including Lee Kun-Yong’s tree sculpture "Corporal Term", which was shown at the eighth Paris Biennial in 1973, and Park Hyunki’s "Untitled (TV Stone Tower)", at the São Paulo Biennial in 1979. As large international exhibitions, biennials helped develop contemporary art practices and discourses outside traditional fine arts museum contexts. Korean Experimental artists’ participation in exhibitions in France, Brazil, Australia, and beyond demonstrated their desire to invite dialogue with their international contemporaries as well as their ambition to put Seoul on the map. However, the South Korean pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the oldest biennial in the world, was not built until 1995.

The Paris Biennial, founded in 1959 by the French Ministry of Culture, distinguished itself from other international biennials by imposing an age limit of thirty-five on participating artists. This provided Experimental artists with the opportunity to show their work abroad, eliminating competition with more established artists. Despite the warm reception of works by Lee Kun-Yong and Shim Moon-seup, the Western gaze of European critics sometimes misinterpreted the Korean artists’ work, betraying orientalist assumptions that overlooked local context of production and grouped Korean artists together with their Japanese counterparts.

Striving to be in dialogue with international contemporaries working in other art movements, such as Mono-ha, Arte Povera, Conceptual art, Supports/Surfaces, and Land art, members of the Korean Avant Garde Association (or AG as they were known) organized the Seoul Biennial in 1974, with participation by more than sixty artists from across the country. The Seoul Biennial ultimately aspired to serve as a microcosm of exchange that Experimental artists desired at a global scale. It only ran one iteration, however, and the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in its fifth and last edition in 1979 would partly achieve this goal by inviting Japanese artists. One year after the inaugural Seoul Biennial, the AG would hold its fourth and final exhibition in 1975, with only four artists participating—an early signal for the waning momentum for Experimental art. Indeed, artists like Shin Hak-chul and Yeo Un, whose works you will discover toward the back of the gallery, will move on to become prominent figures in Minjung art that emerged as part of the larger democracy movement.

Yet, it is important to remember that some individual Experimental artists, like Kim Kulim, Sung Neung Kyung, and Park Hyunki, continued—and still continue to this day—their radical artistic practices, a testament to their unwavering spirit of experimentation and vision.

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