Curator Kyung An welcomes you to the exhibition. 

Transcript
Kyung An: Welcome to "Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s", an exhibition dedicated to the genre-defying Korean artists and collectives who boldly sought experimentation to confront and reimagine their ever-shifting reality.

Only the Young takes place on three levels of the Guggenheim’s tower galleries. It features over 80 works and is the first exhibition in North America to explore South Korea’s highly influential movement known as Experimental art, or in Korean, silheom misul.
My name is Kyung An. I am the Associate Curator of Asian Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and I organized this exhibition. In this audio series, I introduce the overarching themes for each gallery, providing background to artworks on view.

The protagonists of this exhibition are young artists who came of age in the decades immediately following the Korean War, which took place between 1950 and 1953. Many studied and lived in Seoul, where they formed loose, self-organized groups and networks, creating art that pushed the boundaries inherited from the previous generation of abstract artists. (This older generation had worked in a gestural style of abstraction in the discipline of oil-based “Western” painting, known as Informel, as opposed to the traditional ink-based “Korean” painting.) This led to incredible artistic innovation at the intersection of painting, sculpture, performance, installation, photography, and video–and in the ways artists collaborated and organized exhibitions locally and globally.

In many of the works on display, you will discover how the material, social, and political changes shaping everyday life in Korea impacted the artists’ output. Indeed, Experimental artists witnessed a truly historic era. Their lives were conditioned by the rapidly modernizing urban environment as well as by civil unrest and censorship under Park Chung Hee’s administration, which cemented its authoritarian regime in the 1970s. These changes were framed by ongoing tensions with North Korea, an unpopular military involvement in Vietnam, and a globalizing world facilitated by developments in telecommunications and by the international circulation of print media. And so, on Level 2, you will find artists responding to the changing city around them; on Level 4, you will discover works that address the tension between tradition and modernity, and experimentation with new media like photography and video. And on Level 5, you will encounter artists in dialogue with an international avant-garde, with works that were shown at the Paris and São Paulo biennials, and more.

At the Guggenheim, "Only the Young" is a special opportunity to present artworks, artists, and stories that have not been told before. For me, putting together this exhibition was both an eye-opening and inspiring experience. It reminded me once again that even in times of uncertainty and change, artists have the courage, imagination, and unrelenting desire to continuously question and create.

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