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Images of Reality / Ideals of Democracy:

Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s

by

Sohl Lee

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Supervised by

Professor Rachel Haidu

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies

Department of Art and Art History
Arts, Sciences and Engineering
School of Arts and Sciences

University of Rochester
Rochester, New York

2014
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Dedication

I dedicate this dissertation to my umma appa, Geum Oh Choi and Jong Seob Lee.
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Biographical Sketch

Sohl Lee was born in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. She attended Smith College in

Massachusetts, and received a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in Art History and

International Relations in 2006. A year later, she began her doctoral studies in the

Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, where she pursued

her research in contemporary art under the direction of Professors Rachel Haidu (the

advisor) and Douglas Crimp (the committee member). In 2011 she received a Master of

Arts degree from the University of Rochester.

Since 2009 she has been curating exhibitions and screenings of contemporary

Korean and Asian artists, and has learned much from in-depth interactions with them.

The experience of curating Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection

of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010—held at the University Art Gallery at

University of California, Irvine in October-November 2012—was particularly invaluable.

The eponymous exhibition catalogue was published in the same year by Hyunsil

Publishing in Seoul and distributed by the University of Washington Press in Seattle.

During her field research in Seoul (2012-2013), she learned to communicate with artists,

critics, and curators by publishing art criticism in the Korean language, and she will

continue to enjoy writing in both English and Korean.

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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 nation-

wide 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
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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.

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Contributors and Funding Sources

This work was supported by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor

Rachel Haidu (advisor) and Professor Douglas Crimp of the Department of Art History,

and Professors Eleana Kim and John Osburg of the Department of Anthropology.

Graduate study was supported by the graduate fellowship and stipend from the Program

in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester (2007-2012), the Social

Sciences Research Council’s International Dissertation Research Fellowship for a year-

long field research conducted in South Korea (2012-2013), and the Korea Foundation

Graduate Fellowship (2013-2014). Summer research travels and conference trips have

been in part funded by the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women Studies

(SBAI), the Association for Asian Studies’ Northeast Asia Council (AAS/NEAS), and

the College Art Association (CAA).

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Acknowledgement

That this dissertation was complete by July 2014, if I dare say, was a miracle. But

it was not a miracle conjured by a magic wand; it required many people’s attention,

patience and compassion over the past seven years. Most prominently, my advisor Rachel

Haidu was the tour de force behind this dissertation, and my initiation to the field of

contemporary art history. From her, I learned how to think, write, and grow passion in

art. To her, I owe an immense gratitude for her unflagging support throughout the years,

and I can only hope to replicate the same towards my own students. My committee

member Douglas Crimp made my eyes teary more than once in his classes—out of

overwhelming joy and a sort of “enlightenment.” When a discussion about Warhol’s

1962 Dance Diagram turned into Douglas’s insistence on a certain art historian’s lack of

experience in dance and hence his misreading of the work, Douglas shared an experience

from his time as an avid disco dancer: when you dance, you do not know if it is the music

beat or your body that is doing the dance. Somewhere between the numbered footprints

in the slide, Douglas’s critique of the assigned reading, and his shaking of head and hands

while explaining how agency might be experienced, my eyes became teary. Keeping that

feeling with me, I listen to art works and to my bodily responses—what irks and excites

me in them. It is also through our multiple conversations in Rochester and Seoul that

Eleana Kim trained me to navigate the challenges of “working on Korea” in this country:

learning where the streams flow and learning how to swim, freely, in them. I relied on her

to share my excitements and frustrations of fieldwork and was grateful for her always

timely, thoughtful advice. Immense thanks also go to the faculty members of Visual and
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Cultural Studies, Janet Berlo, Jason Middleton, Joel Burges, Sharon Willis, Paul Duro,

Bob Foster, Joan Saab, and Tom DiPiero.

The friendship and support from numerous individuals were indispensible for this

project. I thank Bo Zheng, my partner in crime, for all our Skype and real-life

conversations about work, relationships, travel, and the pleasure of “scheming.” Our

passion for socially engaging art practices binds us together. I had the fortune to have

Shota Ogawa as a friend, a co-lecturer, and an inspiration, especially during the final race

towards the finish line. My project received the much-needed encouragements and

insightful comments during the weekly meetings of the dissertation group consisting

Shota, Iskandar Zulkarnain, and myself in 2013-2014. I am grateful for their friendship

and support. The moments shared with Zainab Saleh, Abby Glogower, Rachel Lee,

Yuichiro Kugo, Amanda Graham, Gloria Kim, Jessica Horton, Lucy Mulroney, Berin

Golonu, Tiffany Barber, Becky Burditt, Godfre Leung, Ruben Yepes Munoz, Tara Najd

Ahmadi, Alicia Chester, Youngchae Lee, Kerim can Kavakli and many others in cafes,

the public market, the writing center, and the library, as well as the warm breeze of sanity

brought by my non-academic friends Tammy Kim, Gwendolyn Rayner, and Susan Mars,

helped me survive the harsh winters in Rochester. Over the years, my research trips to

South Korea not only secured the primary materials necessary for the dissertation but also

fostered invaluable friendships, and at times productive collaborations, with artists,

critics, curators, filmmakers, and others in the cultural field. For our common dreams and

late night conversations over coffee or soju, I thank Hyunjin Kim, Jaeyong Park, Jinjoo

Kim, Yoonsuk Jung, Eunu Lee, Mihee Ahn, Namgyeong Hong, Suki Kim, Heejin Kim,
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Sangdon Kim, Younggak Cho, Taeyoon Choi, and many more friends with whom I

remain deeply connected. Countless individuals whose paths crossed with mine so

generously shared their passion for art and writing over the years.

I thank my family—Geum Oh Choi, Jong Seob Lee, Farrah Lee, and Soomin

Lee—for always standing next to me, even though we live thousands of miles apart. And

lastly, this dissertation and the pleasure I gained from writing it would not have existed if

it were not for the artists featured here. I reserve my biggest thanks for them and their

tenacity, idiosyncrasy, and energy.

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Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One Two Tales of Reality, or an Origin of Contemporary Korean 35

Art (1979-1987)

Chapter Two Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Postcolonial Pop and the Mimetic Art: 84
The Long Decade of Cultural Globalization (1987-1997)

Chapter Three Democracy in Urban Space: Publicness as a New Vision of 123

Reality (1998-2007)

Chapter Four Democracy with(in) Division: 171

From Imagined Unification to Ethical Subjectivity

Epilogue 211

Figures 215

Bibliography 257
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List of Figures
(Pages 213-254)

[Fig. 0.1] Choi Byung-su, Funeral Portrait of Lee Han-y!l, 1987!

[Fig. 1.1] Reality and Utterance, inaugural exhibition, installation view,
Munyejinh!ngwon Art Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 1980!
[Fig. 1.2] Lee Ufan, From Point, pigment suspended in glue on canvas, 1976!
[Fig. 1.3] Kim Gun-hee, "l!ld!ld!l, silk screen, dimensions variable, 1980!
[Fig. 1.4] Advertisement of Aicha!
[Fig. 1.5] Kim Jeong-heon, Marching Alongside Tom Boys, 1980!
[Fig. 1.6] Kim Jeong-heon, Creating a Life of Plenty, 1980!
[Fig. 1.7] Advertisement of Lucky Monorium!
[Fig. 1.8] Installation view, a Taehan min’guk misul ch"llamhoe, date unknown,
published in Hy!nsil kwa par!n, 1985!
[Fig. 1.9] Reality and Utterance Woodblock Print Exhibition, installation view,
Hanmadang Gallery, 1983, published in Hy!nsil kwa par!n, 1985!
[Fig. 1.10] Artist collective Tur"ng, inaugural event, April 1984!
[Fig. 1.11] Artist collective Tur"ng, Everything under the Sky (Mansangch"nha), 1982!
[Fig. 1.12] Documentary photographs, production and reception scenes of banners
(k!lgae k#rim) Gwangju, ca. 1987, published in 5.18 minchunghangchaeng!i
yesulch"k hy"ngsanghwa kwangchuchiy"k taehakmisulp'ae (Artistic
Visualization of 5.18 Minjung Uprising: Campus Art Groups in Gwangju),
2010!
[Fig. 1.13] Choi Byung-su, Bring Back Han-y!l, 1987, installation view, 15 Years of
Minjung Art Exhibition, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, South
Korea, 1994!
[Fig. 1.14] Gwangju Citizen Art School, 1983!
[Fig. 1.15] Hong Sung-dam, from May, woodblock print series, c.1983!
[Fig. 1.16] Gwangju Citizen Art School, exemples of works, published in Minjung Misul,
1985!
[Fig. 2.1] Choi Jeong-hwa, Sunday Seoul, 1990!
[Fig. 2.2] Choi Jeong-hwa, IQ Jump: My Beautiful Century, 1993!
[Fig. 2.3] Cover, Vision and Language: Industrial Society and Art, 1982!
[Fig. 2.4] A spread in Lee Young-chul’s essay, Kang Min-kwon, Tale of Women, detail,
oil on calendar, 1990 (left), Choi Jeong-hwa, IQ Jump My Beautiful 20th
Century, plastic baskets and trophies, 1990 (right)!
[Fig. 2.5] Choi Jeong-hwa, from Image Collection, March 30, 1987!
[Fig. 2.6] Choi Jeong-hwa, “A Master Instructor” from Image Collection!
[Fig. 2.7] Choi Jeong-hwa, from Image Collection!
[Fig. 2.8] Choi Jeong-hwa, Manual for Contemporary Art: Color, Color, Color, 1994!
[Fig. 2.9] Choi Jeong-hwa, Café Plus Minus, interior design, 1994!
[Fig. 2.10] Choi Jeong-hwa, Bar Ozone, interior design, 1991!
[Fig. 2.11] Choi Jeong-hwa, Rotten Art, Degradable Art, 1993!
[Fig. 2.12] Choi Jeong-hwa, Instant Gallery, curatorial project, 1995!
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[Fig. 2.13] Choi Jeong-hwa and Kas!m sikak kaepal y"nkuso, poster for Bio Installation
Ozone, Bar Ozone, December 1991!
[Fig. 2.14] Choi Jeong-hwa, The Joke, inflatable balloon sculpture, 1997!
[Fig. 2.15] Choi Jeong-hwa, Plastic Paradise, plastic baskets, 1997!
[Fig. 3.1] Sungnam Project, exhibition Sungnam and Environment-Art, installation view,
Sungnam City Hall Lobby, October 19-25, 1998!
[Fig. 3.2] Sungnam Project, exhibition Sungnam and Environment-Art, installation view,
Sungnam City Hall Lobby, October 19-25, 1998!
[Fig. 3.3] Sungnam Project, Slope Measurement, concrete casting, 1998!
[Fig. 3.4] Sungnam Project, screen shot of Taepy!ng dong Arirang, video, 10 min, 1998!
[Fig. 3.5] Sungnam Project, Catalogue, page 2 (left) and page 3 (right), 4-page brochure
on A3 paper, 1998!
[Fig. 3.6] Sungnam Project, Catalogue, page 4 (left) and page 1 (right), a 4-page
brochure on A3 paper, 1998!
[Fig. 3.7] “Goliath” from Sanggyedong Olympic, directed by Kim Dong-won, 1988!
[Fig. 3.8] FlyingCity, Something to Do on the Land of Destruction, 18 min, 2002!
[Fig. 3.9] FlyingCity, Shouting in the Mt. Bukak, 14 min 45 sec, 2002!
[Fig. 3.10] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, January 23, 2002!
[Fig. 3.11] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, January 24, 2002!
[Fig. 3.12] FlyingCity, examples from Psychogeography Workshop, with participants,
kindergarten and elementary students!
[Fig. 3.13] FlyingCity, Psychogeoraphy Workshop!
[Fig. 3.14] FlyingCity, Today’s Objet, September 27, 2003!
[Fig. 3.15] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003!
[Fig. 3.16] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003, 9
selected slides!
[Fig. 3.17] FlyingCity, This is not an electronic fan, PowerPoint presentation, 2003!
[Fig. 3.18] FlyingCity, Drifting Producers, digital print, 115x75 cm, 2003!
[Fig. 3.19] FlyingCity, All Things Park, installation view, Art Sonje, Seoul, 2004!
[Fig. 3.20] FlyingCity, All Things Park, installation view, Art Sonje, Seoul, 2004!
[Fig. 4.1] Sin Hak-chul, Rice Planting, oil painting, 130x160cm, 1987, repainted in 1993!
[Fig. 4.2] Oh Yoon, National Desire for Unification, Oil Painting, 34.9x138 cm, 1985!
[Fig. 4.3] Sin Hak-chul, Korean Modern and Contemporary History, 130 x 390 cm, 1983!
[Fig. 4.4] Lee Sangho and Jon Junho, A New Day of Reunification at the Foot of
Mountain Pekdu, banner painting, 1987!
[Fig. 4.5] Seung Woo Back, Blow Up, installation view of 40 photographs, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.6] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.7] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
[Fig. 4.8] Front page, Rodong Daily, Pyongyang, North Korea, September 30, 2011!
[Fig. 4.9] Seung Woo Back, from Blow Up, 2005-7!
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Introduction

Images of Reality / Ideals of Democracy

I begin with a photograph: An indistinguishable mass of people is congregated in

a large public plaza, spilling over to the adjacent roads. [Fig. 0.1] Among the too many

heads to fathom counting, and the too many bodies to neatly frame within the

photograph’s four corners, we see flags and banners flapping. A truck carries a portrait

painting large enough to dwarf the vehicle itself. The individual depicted in this portrait

is the only face that we can see, because the thousands of other faces are almost invisible

from this bird’s eye view. The face depicted has a name, Lee Han-y"l, and the painter is

the carpenter-cum-activist artist Choi Byung-su. Almost a million citizens gathered in the

City Plaza of Seoul on July 9, 1987 to participate in the public mourning procession for

Lee, who was killed earlier that month during one of many protests against the country’s

military dictatorship. Choi had prepared this portrait the night before. On the summer day,

which marked a climax for the pro-democracy social movement that had germinated in

the 1960s and fully arrived in the 1980s, the mourning public proudly marched across the

city alongside the funeral portrait on the moving truck—in hopes of a new democratic

regime to come as well as for the heroic martyr. The central place that Choi Byung-su’s

painting occupied in the protest, and this particular funeral procession’s crucial role in

forcing the dictator to renounce his position and promise a direct presidential election,

testifies to the indispensability of art in the political history of South Korea’s

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democratization. Indeed, this single image, for many Korean cultural practitioners,

encapsulates the political history of art and the history of political art in South Korea.

This dissertation pays homage to this climactic moment in history, when art was

an important participant in Korea’s democratic transition. But this study also excavates

other moments in which art took on political meaning, and more anticlimactic sites in

which artists have reimagined the very meaning of politics in South Korea since the

1980s. More often artists were less heroic than Choi Byung-su and played a more

peripheral role in the country’s push towards a regime change or policy changes. In this

project, therefore, I focus on artists whose radical politics of opposition are less

spectacular than the iconic image of Lee Han-y"l, but no less significant to understanding

the politics of art and the history of political art in South Korea. The chapters discuss

specific moments in South Korean art history and sociopolitical history that bring these

dialectical histories into focus: 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). Together, these four chapters

tell a story of “democratic aesthetics” formed and re-formed in South Korea.

In this project, I locate and delineate the political and artistic impasses in Korea as

much as the revolutionary fervor felt by the artists and art collectives that have formed its
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vibrant contemporary art landscape. My adjacent goal is to consider the politics of art and

the politics of writing about art together, by self-reflexively investigating the recent

processes by which Korean art has become contemporary. Instead of looking to the

globalization of contemporary art as we have seen in the expansionist model sought

during the 1990s by art museums, galleries, and auction houses in North America and

Western Europe, I ask the question of how Korean art became “contemporary” for the

artists as well as art critics and curators working in South Korea, by accounting for these

Korean practitioners’ engagement with the country’s complex sociopolitical, cultural

particularities preceding and succeeding the 1990s. In other words, the shifting aesthetics

and politics of art—from the 1980s pro-democracy social movement (organized around a

populist notion of the minjung, or people) to the post-authoritarian/globalization era of

the 1990s and 2000s—become the very sites in which to investigate the notion and

process of “contemporaneity” in South Korean art.

Establishing a genealogy of South Korean contemporary art within the concurrent

workings of globalization and democratization constitutes an epistemological inquiry into

the implicated terms: “contemporary (hy!ndae)”; “Korean (hankuk)”; “art (misul).” But

more importantly, this inquiry is an archeological one that pays careful attention to the

words, objects, aesthetics, feelings, desires, ideals, and failures of artists and cultural

practitioners1 and the socio-political, art historical, and material cultural contexts that

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Here I am informed by Foucault’s conception of history with innumerable points of
discontinuities and interruptions—“the epistemological acts and thresholds described by
Bachelard” (emphasis original)—that we ought to discover and excavate from beneath the
homogeneous surface of history. “[Forcing] it [the continuous accumulation of knowledge] to
enter a new time,” I seek to establish what Foucault calls “a work of theoretical transformation
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make up the very field of contemporary Korean art—and that these practitioners respond

to and, in turn, carve out.2 Thus, the task of redefining the field begins by carefully

translating such terms as “reality (hy!nsil),” “people (minjung),” and “democracy (minju

ju#i)” that not only persistently appear in artists’ manifestos and shape radical art

practices but also, not incidentally, reflect the country’s tumultuous pathway to

democratization with a critical eye.

Reality and Realism

The aesthetic discourse surrounding “reality” is without doubt loaded with

multilayered discursive histories in the disciplines of literature, psychoanalysis, and

cultural studies, as well as art history, with different traditions of understanding in

different parts of the world.3 In the realm of modern art, the term “reality” may call forth

the aesthetic tropes of realism which encompass a range of historically specific case

studies and movements throughout the 19th and 20th centuries: consider the realism of

Courbet, socialist realism promoted by Lukács, Nouveau Réalisme as the French rival of

American pop art, etc. Despite this diversity, realism, broadly speaking, can signify two
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‘which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this
past as ideological.’” Here, Foucault quotes Althusser’s understanding of history and ideology.
Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Allen Lane; New York: Pantheon, 1969), 168. Michel
Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 4-5.
2
Here, I am thinking of Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus (individual agents) and field
(contextual environment) and the dialectical relationship between the two.
3
The pre-modern traditions of naturalism, or the lack thereof, is beyond the scope of this study on
modern/contemporary art. But what is interesting as a brief comparative note on the pictorial
traditions of landscape painting in Europe and East Asia is that in the Sinocultural sphere the
landscape is never something to be copied from what exists in the nature but always a construct,
an imaginary space with its own internal logical structure. Thus, training for landscape is, rather
than sketching from nature, copying from other masters’ paintings, hence the mimetic
relationship with the older (often dead) masters’ pictorial space rather than with reality.
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ideologically driven approaches. One is constituted in the tropes of realism that seek to

render most faithfully what the human eye sees, sometimes to the degree exceeding

natural capacity, as in the case of photorealism, with its emphasis on the mechanisms of

perspective and vision and celebration of traditional artistic ability. Another is less rooted

in achieving accurate and mimetic representation of what exists in the world or the

unvarnished visual truth, but lies instead within an intellectual and politically-driven

project that requires assessing (social) reality and responding critically to it in aesthetic

and mechanical terms. Prominent examples might include Marxist-driven socialist

realism which, as manifested in Brecht’s work, condemns the illusionistic depiction of

reality and opposes it through the social critique, with the ultimate goal of forging social

change.4 These two poles of realism are never completely resolved as opposites but are in

suspended tension, as the case of Nouveau Réalisme testifies. That movement, which

emerged as a reaction to abstract expressionism (i.e. with some interest in figuration),

sought to develop a new artistic language that would reconstitute the relationship between

art (high versus low) and reality (as mediated by images and spectacle). Nouveau

Réalisme’s “realism” therefore points to the possibility of social critique through the

tropes of referentiality.

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Of course socialist realism or realism propagated in the name of Marxist historical materialism
was never uniform, as Eugene Lunn points out. The two proponents of socialist realism, Brecht
and Lukács, differed substantially in their philosophies by the decade of the 1930s. While Brecht
sought a collective subject through mechanical and technical means of experimentation based on
economic production while Lukács fell back onto humanism and idealism of Hegel, and of the
early Marx. Eugene Lunn, “Marxism and Art in the Era of Stalin and Hitler: A Comparison of
Brecht and Lukács,” New German Critique No.3 (Autumn, 1974), 12-44.
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There have also been recent attempts to recuperate realism from modern art

history that is centered around abstraction—or the history of modern art as a teleological

step towards more abstraction or with an approving eye on abstraction. As seen in Devin

Fore’s work on 1920s-30s European art and literature (2012) and Alex Potts’s on 1940s-

60s European and American paintings (2013), there is a renewed interest in casting a self-

reflexive look on the history of modern art built on the false polarization of realism

versus abstraction that has systematically associated the latter with the avant-garde and

experimentation and the former with regression and convention.5 Of course, abstraction

being the modus operandi of capitalism, many artistic expressions with abstract

tendencies have shed a “realist light” on the conditions of cultural production, as art

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The heuristic tendency to separate realism and modernism is questioned in this dissertation,
especially the categorization of the two according to the binary of reactionary/traditional versus
avant-garde/innovative. As a study of the returned human figures in 1920s Europe (France,
Germany, and Russia) after the eradication of human presence in modern abstraction, Devin
Fore’s Realism after Modernism narrates, as the author notes, “the struggle to remotivate and
resocialize strategies of representation after modernism’s relentless demotivation of the realist
sign.” Realism after Modernism: The Rehumanization of art and Literature (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2012), 13. This illuminating study investigates the mimetic relationship, and not a rupture,
between human and machine-driven technological development, as our understanding of man
(with the focus on human body) after industrial revolution and modernization had fundamentally
changed. Mimesis rather than poesis is at the center of Fore’s book. The idea of mimesis is
important for my work too, with its postcolonial connotation that Homi Bhabha’s work puts
forward and that I will elaborate later in Chapter 2; but how I push forward the notion realism
differs from Fore’s direction because of my emphasis on the artists’ perception of “reality” rather
than human “body” or human figuration. In this dissertation, it is reality—as in an idea-
materiality signified and experienced—that is at the center of “realism.” Alex Potts examines
1940s-1960s European and American paintings but his focused interests in the medium of
painting casts its own limit while his slippage between the three terms—of reality, the world, and
the everyday—as encompassing the “phenomena of the world around us” poses conceptual
problem when thinking of post-colonial politics and vernacular culture I intend to examine in this
dissertation. Potts, Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in
Postwar European and American Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)
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historians T.J. Clark and Benjamin Buchloh, among others, have argued.6 Realism, as

Potts asserts, “is best understood as representing a constellation of concerns and

impulses, rather than as a clear-cut category defining a single historical movement or

aesthetic tendency,” while its “anti-formalistic” (and not anti-formalist) character poses a

forceful challenge to the way we have constructed modern and contemporary art history.7

At the crux of the realism debates is the contestation of interpretation, historiography, and

ontology of modern/contemporary art.

But in the late 20th century, and especially during the 1980s and 1990s, as art

history attempted to “globalize,” the term “reality” acquired new interpretative problems.

When these Non-Western works are grouped together in a sweeping manner, the tone of

celebration is often based not only on their mimetic and derivative relationship with the

artistic language of Western predecessors but also on their ability to reveal something

inherently truthful about the artists’ identity and the sociopolitical concerns of their place

of origin. That is, the social reality of the periphery as is represented in the borrowed

artistic language of the center.8 Such art historical analysis therefore seamlessly merges

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Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale, 1999).
Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from
1955 to 1975 (Cambridge: MIT, 2000). Another step in this line of analysis can be seen in the
neo-Marxist interpretation of cultural products as unveiling the base structure of late capitalism,
as seen in the works by David Harvey and Frederic Jameson. See Rosalyn Deutsche’s feminist
critique of Harvey and Jameson in “Men in Space,” “Boys Town” and “Chinatown, Part Four?
What Jake Forgets about Downtown” in Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1996), 195-256.
7
Potts, 2-4.
8
To countervail such a perennial problem, art historian Joan Kee chooses to give a close formal
analysis of “what is within the picture frame,” and how the elements within the artwork interact
with one another, or bring meaning when in contact with the viewer, in the first book-length study
of contemporary Korean art in English, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency
of Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
 8
!

the formal discourse with the semiotics based on the art’s ability to be referential or

symptomatic of its society of origin. If such a formal discourse (that is, the language of

the same) corresponds with the larger conceptualization of modernity as manifesting a

temporal lag across borders, the locally contingent interpretation of reality (that is, the

language of the different) originates from the desire to equate artworks and the social

conditions of the ethnic group or the nation (only for artworks made by artists with

“difference”)9. As an interpretative method, this has become more widespread in part

because the globalization of contemporary art (at least from the perspective of Western

Europe and North America) coincided with the era of identity politics and postmodernism

in contemporary art.10

Taking into account the complex history of realism, and discourses surrounding

reality and art outside the Western metropoles, I then ask: what if artists themselves are

keen on using the term “reality” in their practice so frequently that an overgeneralized

notion of reality that emerged in the 1980s and 90s is invalidated wholesale? How do we

reckon the Korean practitioners’ critical and artistic attempts to interpret and engage with

what they perceived as reality? How do we understand the creatively forged mimetic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
9
No doubt a similar claim can be made about women artists, and the categories such as “Asian
women artists” pose an interpretative challenge. See Joan Kee’s “What is Feminist about
Contemporary Asian Women’s Art?” in exhibition catalogue Global Feminisms (Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Museum; New York: Merrell Publishers, 2007) for a preliminary investigation on this
topic.
10
One prominent example would be the 1993 Whitney Biennale, self-described as “multicultural
biennale” and vehemently criticized by a critic as simply “politics.” See Roberta Smith, “At the
Whitney, a biennial with a social conscience,” NY Times (March 5, 1993). Christopher Knight
writes, “With identity politics overriding the art world, it was a relief to see shows by artists like
Vija Celmins and Adrian Saxe.” in “1993 Year in Review: Art. It's Called Art, Not Politics,” LA
Times (December 26, 1993). Another well-known example is Les Magiciens de la terre at the
Centre Pompidou (1989).
 9
!

relationship between art and reality in South Korea, rather than focusing our attention on

the formal mimicry between Western/global art (avant-garde) and Korean art (the

derivative)? By making discussions of reality a focal point of this project, I reconsider the

artistic will to forge a contingent relationship between art and contemporaneous reality as

a decidedly avant-garde project in its modern sense. To this end, I hope to position this

dissertation as an explicit attempt to rewrite the course of visual analyses of art produced

outside the “West” by way of a politically driven, historically contingent study of South

Korean artistic scene. The members of the collective Reality and Utterance (Hyônsil kwa

par!n) wrote in a 1979 manifesto that they sought to “speak about reality through art.” In

so doing, they not only considered themselves directly engaging with the reality circa

1979 in South Korea but also attempted to move beyond the hegemonic trope of

tansaekhwa (the Korean school of monochrome abstract painting) that they assessed as a

copy, imitation, or reinterpretation of the Western avant-garde whose ideological

foundation is located in the liberal idea of individualism.11 The “reality” for Reality and

Utterance encompassed the history of Korean modern and contemporary art, in which the

forces of modernism were thought to come from elsewhere (the Western model of art-

making as an origin of inspiration) rather than the here-and-now (the social conditions of

Korean life) that artists could actively respond to and re-shape through their artistic

language.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
11
Joan Kee’s sophisticated study of the tansaekhwa (monochrome painting) movement
complicates the minjung practitioners’ sweeping generalization of the Korean practice of abstract
painting, by first and foremost focusing on the rhetoric and promotion of such painting in
conjunction with the material and social stakes that the painters have claimed as having
influenced their production. See Kee, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency
of Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)
 10
!

The struggle to reconcile the aesthetic avant-garde with the political avant-garde,

and, more importantly, to reactivate and redraw the line between the two, began rather

unambiguously when the artists, intellectuals and cultural activists aligned with the

minjung social movement. The motto for minjung literature and visual art movements

was to find a way to give form to the aesthetics of reality that is contiguous with the

Marxist-Leninist tradition of socialist realism.12 In Korea, the adaptation of socialist

realism goes back as far as the 1920s, amid the political struggle against Japanese

colonial rule (1919-1945). For the leftist artists of Korean Proletariat Federation of

Artists (KAPF) and other progressive writers living through both Western and Japanese

imperialism in the Korean peninsula, realism was far from simply epistemological. It was

always ideological and social. Realism was understood as the sole artistic means with

which to express the materialist worldview and the artist’s critical subjectivity. Thus for

these leftist artists an insurmountable wall had to be built between epistemological

realism and socialist realism, while all of the terms referring to realism such as sasil ju#i,

hy!nsil ju#i and ri!lij#m carried a slightly varied meaning depending on the speaker.13

Over the following three decades (1930s-1950s), however, a series of events and

developments—such as the Japanese colonial government’s crackdown on leftist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
12
In Korea, or in East Asia more broadly, the tropes of realism that organizes pictorial space
according to linear perspective were products of modern encounter with the West, beginning the
17th and 18th century ink painting that adapted, at least partially, a vanishing point and shadows,
and extending up to the late 19th and early 20th century adaptation of figurative techniques in oil
painting (i.e. sôyanghwa, or “Western painting” in oil, that established itself as an entity opposing
tongyanghwa, or “Eastern painting” in ink). When speaking realism in 1980s Korea, it is inflected
with utopianism that is anti-imperialism, a bit similar to KAPF’s realism. The difference between
KAPF realism and minjung realism however lies in the former’s insistence on universalism and
the latter’s emphasis on nationalism.
13
Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006), 182.
 11
!

intellectuals starting from 1932, the national partition in 1945, the subsequent founding of

the South Korean nation based on a staunch anti-communist ideology and under

American occupation, and the fleeing of colonial-era progressive intellectuals to the

North in the 1950s—all contributed to a long hiatus in the practice of such realism in

South Korea.14 It was only in the 1960s that the return of realism was vividly felt in the

realm of literature, with the poet Kim Chi-ha being one of its ardent proponents.15

Undoubtedly, Kim’s 1969 Manifesto of Reality Group (Hy"nsil tongin), consisting of

four art students from Seoul National University, was one of the earliest post-Korean War

(that is, post-1953) markers in which an explicit connection between art and reality was

set out as an artistic agenda.

Though Reality Group (1969) prematurely stopped its activities after its plan for

an inaugural exhibition was censored and obliterated, the impact of the collective’s

manifesto survived over time, eventually inspiring, in part, the founding of Reality and

Utterance (1979-1989). As outlined in Chapter 1, the notion of reality, or hy!nsil,

according to Reality and Utterance, undergoes ample development in discursive depth

and conceptual potential during the 1980s through their publishing of manifestos and

holding of exhibitions around politically-driven themes (such as urban development, the

Korean War, etc.).16 Another art collective, the Gwangju Freedom Artists Association,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
14
Theodore H. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's Frontier
(Columbia University, 2012)
15
Kim’s ideas were influenced by the Third World Theology movement in South Korea. See Kim
Chi-ha’s Gold Crowned Jesus and Other Writings (1978).
16
For Reality and Utterance, hy!nsil is both the truth (the reality of hardship under military
dictatorship) and the veil that hides the truth (the media spectacle and government’s
 12
!

which ingrained its geographical origin of Gwangju in its name and began the practice of

hy!njang misul (lit. “art of the site” or protest site), developed a notion of reality around

the term hy!njang, which is less abstract and more contingent upon time and place than

the term hy!nsil.17 The dissident artists like the members of Reality and Utterance and the

Gwangju Freedom Artists Association, who placed the ever-changing manifestation of

reality and radical politics on the same page when envisioning their visual productions

amid the era of the pro-democracy social movement, revived and reinvented the

discourse around reality and realism in South Korean art history. It is thus from the 1980s

that “reality” serves as one of the key concepts driving Korean art to stay vital, engage

with the aesthetics of politics, and envision utopian ideals, over the ensuing three

decades.

These two terms of reality, I argue, remain relevant after their introduction in the

1980s, driving artists to develop new visual languages of their time and situation.18 The

genealogy of reality and realism that I seek to draw in this dissertation is conspicuously

absent in the existing writing of contemporary Korean art, mainly because art historians

and critics writing in English first and foremost ask what the adjective “Korean” might

mean for the formal and technical aspects of the given art works. When seen from a

particular location that belongs to the imagined community that is the nation, the link

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
propagandistic representation). Here, the “veil” is the medium through which the truthful reality
exists, and is thus an important material for artistic appropriation.
17
The term hy!njang, when used in the context of art connotes the site of protest, but in the
context of crime investigation, it could mean a crime scene. Over all, its focus is more on the
event and act placed at the site than the physical composition or history of the site in question.
18
To be more historically accurate, reality and realism were re-introduced and re-deployed in the
1980s from their earlier development in the colonial period. But I argue that the colonial use had
a more literary focus than the visual one.
 13
!

between art and the nation might become less relevant. What is more relevant is the

multi-faceted and ever-changing features and pretenses of one’s reality that one reacts to

and one attempts to take part in—and that are not automatically associated with national

traits. I therefore trace the afterlives of hy!nsil (reality), which incubates a desire for

structural analysis of society that is also material, and hy!njang (site), which signifies

paying a keen attention to the physical, phenomenological, socio-cultural changes taking

place in a given site, in order to unravel the artistic desire to reconcile with the local, the

national, and the global within the place of their production in the 1990s and the 2000s.

Even though the subsequent generations of artists do not verbalize these terms, the

dialectical relationship between hy!nsil and hy!njang continues to be redeployed in

artistic activities that give utmost attention to the visual, audiovisual, and spatial politics

of Korea.

From Minjung to Post-Minjung, or vice versa

The history charted in this dissertation project begins in 1979, the year in which

two of the period’s most significant art collectives—Reality and Utterance and Gwangju

Freedom Artists Association—founded what would become known, a few years later, as

“minjung misul.” In this project, I use the mixed tactics of transliteration and translation

to call minjung misul “minjung art,” for the purpose of preserving the historical

connotations of minjung (i.e. the political subjectivity signified by the conjoined Sino-

Korean characters min for commoners and jung for masses) that is complex and unique to

Korea. In its use in the context of the minjung social movement, the term minjung
 14
!

expresses more an anti-colonial politics driven by strong sentiments of ethno-centric

nationalism than universalist claims of and affinities with subalterns and proletariats.19

The history and cultural use of the category “minjung art” too resists simplification,

forcing me to seek multiple relationships that do not wholly endorse or criticize. Even

during the 1980s the term minjung art was not uniformly used but was one of many terms

denoting dissident art: minjok misul (national art), minjok minjung misul (national

people’s art), saeroun misul undong (new art movement), among others. Only in 1985,

when an exhibition of dissident artists in their twenties entitled Power of the Twenties

Generation (20 dae #i him) was targeted with systematic government oppression (leading

to arrests of several artists at the exhibition opening), did a national newspaper, in

employing “minjung misul,” give a push to the widespread dissemination of the term.

Artists at that time resisted such a sweeping categorization, perhaps fully knowing its

danger: the term minjung art survived the artists themselves, most of whom remained

unknown except as victims of an atrocious incident of governmental censorship.20

More importantly, the term minjung, ideologically charged and rooted in the

development of social movement, has overpowered and suppressed the complex histories
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
19
Terms that share affinities with minjung are “renmin” in the Chinese socialism, “subaltern” in
the South Asian-driven Subaltern Studies, “people” in the American Revolution, or “homme”/
“citoyen” in the French Revolution Although minjung and renmin may share similarities with the
pre-modern understanding of common people (like paeks!ng in Korean and laobaixing in
Mandarin) bounded within a ruling dynasty, both terms are also cosmopolitan in their imagination
of equality across borders. In this sense, historian Namhee Lee associates minjung with the
construct of subaltern as those whose power and language to speak for themselves is previously
taken away yet whose location is always one of propinquity to the dominant power. The historical
subjectivity of minjung is thus called upon during 1970s and 1980s South Korea to rise up against
the system of oppression. I develop the universal idealism of people in the American and French
Revolutions in the context of democracy—through Bhabha’s understanding of democracy’s
universal ideals.
20
Fifteen Years of Minjung Art (Seoul: National Museum of Contemporary Art Korea, 1994)
 15
!

of artistic production during the period, resulting in inadequate assessment of the

diversity and multiplicity of “minjung art.”21 Korean art history and criticism’s

uncomplicated understanding of minjung art can be summed up as being divided into two

scenarios: one chooses not to engage at all with minjung art, either arguing for its lack of

artistic value (for example, claiming that it is formally unchallenging, authorless political

propaganda), or celebrating the bravery of dissident artists’ outspokenness against a

repressive regime. Equally steeped in preconceived notions about minjung art, these two

views have reproduced themselves, relegating more nuanced views to the margins of

South Korean art history.22

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
21
The major scholarships on minjung art in the Korean language were embarked on by minjung
art critics themselves in the 1990s. Among them Choi Yeol and Sung Wan-kyung’s writings are
most lucid and insightful. Sung Wan-kyung, Minjung misul mod!nism sigaky!ngu (Minjung Art,
Modernism, Visual Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999) and Choi Yeol, Hankuk hy!ndae misul
undong #i y!ksa (The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement) (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994).
Also a short essay on minjung on English was written by a Korean cultural studies scholar Frank
Hoffman. See Hoffman, “Images of Dissent: Transformations in Korean Minjung art,” Harvard
Asia Pacific Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 44-49. The analyses of minjung paintings by
Korean Studies literature scholars and anthropologists (Nancy Abelmann and Theodore Hughes)
most often fall into trap of reading the paintings as if they are texts, that is, focus exclusively on
the allegorical reading at the expense of a material and formal analysis. Other available resources
on minjung art are curatorial essays commissioned for solo shows or group shows that are often
less historically rooted. Among the two doctoral dissertations on minjung written in English,
Soyang Park’s engages with theoretical readings of paintings (especially with trauma theory)
while Hyejong Yoo’s historical readings consider the artworks as symptoms of the society under
oppression. See Soyang Park, Postcolonial Visual Culture Theory: memory and haunting in the
minjung democratic art movement in the postcolonial space of South Korea during 1980s (Ph.D.
dissertation, Goldsmith, 2005). Hyejong Yoo, Democracy as the legitimate "form" and "content":
Minjung misul in dissident nationalism of South Korea (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University,
2011). My project responds to the interpretative shortcomings that I see in these existing
literatures, by interrogating the location of political articulation invested by the minjung
practitioners and by exploring the mechanisms of both production and dissemination of visual
works.
22
Here, I refer to discussions by minjung practitioners Sung Wan-kyung and Choi Min-hwa, and
also more recent critics and scholars like Park Chan-kyong and Beck Ji-sook.
 16
!

It is therefore more fitting to say that I am interested in looking at a constellation

of artists and new ways of making art that emerged during the minjung social movement

than that I am in the category of minjung art per se. By starting this dissertation in the

early 1980s (1979-1984), with what can be more accurately called politically-driven art

of the “pre-minjung art” period, I seek not only to complicate the history of minjung art

but also to challenge the category itself.23 It is my view that the “minjung” in minjung art

should not be taken for granted as merely signifying the artists’ political consciousness in

the most generic way, or as describing art that simply coexisted with the minjung social

movement. To this end, the focus of Chapter 1 is on excavating what politics meant for

the artists experiencing, and participating in, the very socio-political activities

underpinning their artistic activities, while the subsequent chapters (on the 1990s and the

2000s) articulate the power of visual language to shape, influence, and carve out the

political subjectivity that was for the 1980s cultural activists identified as minjung. What,

then, are the qualities of minjung that survive over time in the post-minjung age?

My close visual analyses of art works are first and foremost informed by the

interdisciplinary understanding of minjung and its politics in the cross-disciplinary field

of Korean Studies. The Korean Studies discourse around minjung in the disciplines of

history, anthropology, sociology, and literature confirms that minjung cannot be pinned

down to a particular body of people. Rather, it was an ideal, with special signifying

power aimed at enunciating future change. Various scholars writing about the minjung

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23
To be more precise, the site of intervention for me is the history of such categorization
(“minjung art”) and the subsequent use—and misuse—of the term in the field of art history and
others.
 17
!

cultural movement (in music and literature respectively), like Sunyoung Park and Chang-

nam Kim, accept the definition of “minjung” as a projection, an ideal to be achieved in

the future tense, rather than a concrete depiction of Korean people (bound by class

consciousness or other sociostructural categories) that already exist.24 Minjung, writes

historian Kenneth Wells, “refers less to such a group [of proletariats] than to a quality

which, it is claimed, can be found in the past, is active in the present, and will determine

Korea’s future… [not by] virtue of their doing something [but by] virtue of their being

something—the bearers of certain values and qualities.” (Emphasis original)25 The

multiple temporalities laden in the subjectivity of minjung and its “culturally defined

populist idealism” calls for a rise of consciousness across different classes against the

anti-minjung forces, domestic (military dictatorship and elites) or international

(neocolonial imperialism).26 It is therefore the “historical mandate” of the minjung

subjectivity that Marxist feminist cultural scholar Chung-moo Choi (herself a minjung

activist in the 1980s) puts at the center of minjung movement’s achievement as a

significant anti-colonial movement in modern Korean history, launching a moment of

South Korean post-coloniality for the first time.27 Informed by the 1981 ground-breaking

study of the Korean War and the immediate post-war period by Bruce Cumings, Choi’s
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
24
A short article by Frank Hoffman on art and a dissertation of Sunyoung Park on literature all
have this as assumption. Frank Hoffman, "Images of Dissent: Transformations in Korean
Minjung art," Harvard Asia Pacific Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 44-49. Sunyoung Park,
Realism in Korean Modern Literature (UCLA, PhD dissertation, 2003).
25
Kenneth Wells, “The Cultural Construction of Korean History,” South Korea’s Minjung
Movement: The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. ed. Kenneth Wells (University of Hawaii,
1995), p.11
26
Wells, 12.
27
Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea” in The
Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, edited by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1997), 461-484.
 18
!

revisionist understanding of Korean history contends that Korea’s independence from

Japanese colonialism was never achieved by the anti-colonial movements (at that time

active in Korea as well as abroad) but was given by the Allies’ victory over Japan in 1945,

placing Korea once again under the occupation of a foreign power, this time a Cold War,

anti-communist one. Choi therefore identifies the remnants of Japanese colonial brutality

and the reality of Cold War American occupation as direct causes for the delay in the

nation’s true liberation, which finally began with the minjung movement’s anti-colonial

politics. This liberating force holds ample political potential, which I analyze as having

been realized in more recent art practices even though the artists featured in Chapters 2-4

do not make an explicit reference to minjung.

My initial interests in minjung art and the minjung period only began when I

started to encounter, around 2008-2009, the category of “post-minjung art.” Read as

“posûtû minjung misul” in Korean and designating an array of artistic practices with

political dissent in the recent years, it is a term first proposed by critics in the late 1990s,

and became, by 2008, increasingly prominent and equally controversial, garnering the

most hostile disapprovals from the very artists who were theorized as practicing “post-

minjung art.” As the famous account at a workshop sponsored by the 2008 Gwangju

Biennale tells it, the critic-artist Park Chan-kyong’s presentation entitled “Conversation

with ‘Minjung Art’” provoked a heated Q&A session during which Lim Minouk, one of

the “post-minjung artists” per Park, stood up in the audience and asked why Park would
 19
!

resurrect the father (i.e. minjung art) she had never known.28 For Lim, her artistic practice

has the least to do with minjung art and its narrow definition of politics. This incident

effectively reveals the dilemma of critics/historians in writing the history of Korean art

from the decidedly political perspective, and that of artists in making political art after the

minjung revolution. Lim is uncomfortable with the nationalistic paradigm and patriotism

that minjung still signifies today, which compels her to deny any discursive or political

association between minjung art and her works which, for her, seek to cross national and

ethnic boundaries through a nuanced play of space, sound, and intersubjectivity. Indeed,

Lim represents many artists working in Korea today and analyzed in Chapters 2-3 who

would be quick to disassociate their work from the formal aesthetics of both minjung and

modernist abstract painting, as well as the nation-bound discourses surrounding both art

movements of the 1970s and 1980s.29

The “post-minjung discourse” in Korean art criticism originates not from artists

but from some critics who became wary of the lack of a politically-conscious art scene

(i.e. the field as a whole) in democratic South Korea (from 1987 to the present),

especially when another wave of social upheavals were burgeoning across the country,

starting around 2008.30 This new decade of “post-minjung art discourse” was preceded by

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
28
Park Chan-kyong, “‘Criticality’ in Korean Art and the ‘Interests’ of Artists: Minjung Art and
the Present” in Journal Bol. Vol.10 (2008), 33-45. Minouk Lim, Interview with the author.
29
The exception is Park Chan-kyong, who is an artist as well as a critici and who believes in
reinventing our understanding of minjung art, a critical and historical objective that this
dissertation also shares with.
30
The evidence of considerable importance that the post-minjung discourse displays can be found
in the back-to-back discussion and argument in March, April, and June, 2010 issues of Art in
Culture, one of the most rigorous art criticism journals in South Korea. The proponents of “post-
minjung” art discourse include Park Chan-kyong, Beck Ji-sook, Kim Jong-gil, and Lee Young-
wook among others.
 20
!

the decline of political demonstrations for democracy in the 1990s which led to the

demise of political art on the street that had previously flourished in the late 1980s. Along

with the social movement, the dynamic discourse about art, reality, and democracy began

to dwindle too, as Park Chan-kyong and many others have lamented since the late 1990s.

What, then, should happen in circa 2008, when there is a resurgence of social movements,

not about the presidential election but still concerning the power of democracy that

allows citizens’ participation in political decision-making?31 The post-minjung art

discourse is therefore less about art-making than about making the art field as a whole

more politically motivated.

But by linking today’s art with dissident art of the 1980s on the sole basis of the

shared desire to speak social critique through art, the so-called “post-minjung discourse”

demonstrates a major shortcoming. Such discourse implicitly celebrates the artists’

dissident spirit and heroic bravery at the expense of intelligent discussions about the

artworks themselves. The negligence of the form represses any discussions of 1980s

political art’s fixation on two-dimensional pictorial space (oil on canvas, collage, banner

painting) as well as the so-called post-minjung artists’ equally obsessive aversion to

painting as medium. The existing discourse therefore emphasizes repetition (of “political

criticality” or “political spirit” in artists’ intentions) and suppresses difference (in artistic

or formal languages). More importantly, the current discourse has yet to develop a careful

analysis of the conditions of exhibition and reception that have affected the aesthetic,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
31
Hye-jong Yoo, “The Candlelight Girls’ Playground: Nationalism as Art of Dialogy, The 2008
Candlelight Vigil Protests in South Korea.” Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual
Culture 15 (Fall 2010).
http://minjung.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_15/articles/yoo/yoo.html.
 21
!

cultural, and political significance that the artworks generated during the 1980s, or could

generate today.32

Despite these conceptual and historical problems in the discourse of “post-

minjung art,” I see its discursive value in linking the current period of Korean art (the

2000s and on) to critiques of post-colonialism and post-modernism (of the 1980s). I

therefore argue for a concept of “post-minjung” not as a signifier of a historical, aesthetic,

or ideological break but rather as a discursive space in which we can locate the artists’

ambivalently shifting relationship with the history and ideals of the minjung social

movement.33 The radical politics of minjung survives with post-minjung, as the minjung

ideal is something to aspire to even––or especially––today.34

My archeological position in approaching the post-minjung era is also fully aware

of the contemporary dilemmas in writing the history of minjung, and I seek to interrogate

the minjung ideology’s various parochialisms and problematic discursive strategies while

recuperating the liberating forces of minjung. Minjung ideology is itself an ideology with

ramifications that became apparent to even the most avid proponents of minjung

struggles––scholars like Chungmoo Choi and Namhee Lee, who question minjung’s

“problem of representation.” Choi in particular critiques the minjung mode of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
32
Interestingly, as a criticism and a theory, the post-minjung art discourse falls short precisely
because it mimics minjung art discourse (drenched in didacticism and critical thinking based on
emancipatory/ameliorative political project) too faithfully.
33
Homi Bhabha’s theorization of the post-colonial is helpful here. Bhabha theorizes the prefix
“post” in postcolonialism as embodying a model of spatio-temporality ingrained with “a sense of
disorientation, a disturbance of direction,” and “an exploratory, restless movement caught so well
in the French rendition of the words au-delà—here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and
thither, back and forth.” Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. (London: Routledge, 2004),
2.
34
The political climate of this day has to do with the ever-increasing control of individual citizens
by global capital and the technocratic state amid highly compartmentalized social movements.
 22
!

representation as evolving around the ideology of purity, morality, self-righteousness,

and patriotism,35 which I detect in the portraits of heroic male martyrs and suffering

minjung figures in large banners that attempted to idealize and consolidate a singular, all-

encompassing national subjectivity, defined in accordance with an ethnonationalistic,

androcentric, and working-class identity. In the arts, the exclusive emphasis on narrative

and figuration, which relied on the logic of binary opposition such as Korean versus

foreign, urban versus rural, is the most prominent shortcomings of art from the minjung

period.

But when I excavate the histories of minjung and post-minjung, my intention is

not to form a linear history leading from minjung to post-minjung.36 Its core agenda

instead lies in resisting the progressive historicism that pervades the historical writing of

South Korean politics and arts. There is a prevalent misconception that the struggles for

democracy ended victoriously with a nation-wide social movement in 1987, only to open

up the era of post-authoritarian, (neo-)liberal society of global capitalism.37 The central

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
35
Chungmoo Choi, Ibid., 300. Choi’s critique of minjung activists and their rhetoric lays out the
inherent dilemma experienced by the minjung intellectuals who sought to locate the innate
minjung-ness in the workers and farmers, but also wanted to shape these Korean proletariats into
the revolutionary subject. For Choi, this contradiction demonstrates the process of othering that
the minjung intellectuals enacted onto the working class Koreans.
36
If we consider “post-minjung” aesthetics as arising directly after minjung art or emulating it,
we fall into the danger of forging a singular, linear temporality between minjung and post-
minjung. By claiming that social critique in today’s art was born after “the death of minjung,” one
not only mistakenly forms a teleological narrative but also asserts that minjung is “dead.” Curator
Kim Jong-gil argues the resurrection of minjung in today’s art after the (clearly pronounced)
death of minjung art. Kim Jong-gil. “Dasi, j!nwuiwa silch!n, haengdong #i abanggar#d#r#l
wuihay!” (Towards experiment, practice, and action of the avant-garde!)” in Art in Culture (April
2010).
37
In South Korea, globalization, was promulgated by the state under the official policy of
segyehwa, a term roughly translated as “world-ization.” Globalization is considered to naturally
follow democratization as an extension of it. See Samuel S. Kim “Korea and Globalization
 23
!

problem of this narrative is that it simultaneously declares the end of a social movement

(as a permanent rupture) and insinuates the impossibility for another revolution (because

the struggle has ended). Also contested in my project is the narrow definition of

democracy that pervades the writing of Korean art history, because the ideals of

democracy, when visualized in artistic projects, may have less to do with the rules of

governing and more to do with the formal language of spatial composition, colorful

harmony/disharmony, and framing device, as well as the material support of papers, walls,

flags, and film negatives, that together give the artworks a multivalent political meaning.

Only when the relationship between art and democratic ideals opens up do we understand

the constellation of today’s Korean art works as innovatively political, even if innovation

at times means reinventing the workings of realities (as hy!nsil, hy!njang, and various

combinations of the two) developed some thirty years ago, when the first de-colonizing

social movement of modern Korean history erupted with an indelible force.

Democracy and Its De-realized Ideals

Democracy serves a key role in this project for multiple reasons. In a most general

sense, this dissertation engages with the notion of democracy by investigating artworks

produced during the democracy movement and the post-movement/post-transition society.

And yet, this kind of engagement with democracy, or the history of institutional

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Segyehwa): A Framework for Analysis” in Korea’s Globalization, edited by Samuel Kim
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2–3. Korean political theorists have argued this
before. See Kim, Jong-yeop, ed. 87ch'aejaeron minjuhwa ihu hanguk sahoe #i insikgwa sae
j!nmang (A Theory of the 1987 System: The Understanding and New Vision of South Korean
Society Since Democratization). (Seoul: Changbi Publishers, 2009)
 24
!

democratization, only concerns a narrow definition of democracy surrounding the

political system of governing, and whether the art was produced during the time of a

nation-wide effort towards parliamentary democracy or after its implementation.

Certainly, South Korea provides an interesting case study for scholars in both “normative

democratic theory” (philosophical inquiries into fundamental ideas of democracy) and

“explanatory democratic theory” (empirical social sciences tending to contemporary

political issues such as maintaining economic and political stability after a transition

period).38 How I approach the question of democracy and democratic ideals in visual arts

is more specific to the political impasse that intellectuals across borders began to sense

especially during the post-war period of decolonization and political uprisings, such as

the Algerian independence movement, Paris May ‘68, Japan’s Anpo protest (against the

Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan), and

new social movements like the civil rights movement in the U.S.

It is my contention that the South Korean minjung movement should be situated

within the larger wave of political dissent of the second half of the 20th century that

actively interrogated the very mechanism of organizing power, the very meaning of

democracy. I draw on attempts made by political philosophers like Louis Althusser,

Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and others in the

European post-68 era to articulate politics through such terms as ideology, dissensus,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
38
Ian Shapiro, The State of Democratic Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c2003);
Archon Fung, “Democratic Theory and Political Science: A Pragmatic Method of Constructive
Engagement” in American Political Science Review 101.3 (August 2007), 443-458.
 25
!

antagonism, alterity, and multitudes.39 It is my belief that the Korean art scene of post-

minjung politics serves as a site of a continued struggle for democracy—that is, the very

meaning and workings of democracy—despite a simplistic claim made by Samuel

Huntington that South Korea has effectively achieved democracy, and thus has

spearheaded the third wave of democracy.40 Huntington’s praise rhymes with the

democratically elected administration’s rhetoric, which pays more attention to declaring

its democratic status rather than addressing how the coordinates of democracy have

changed in the new environment. Not as an object to achieve but as a social space that

constantly evolves, radical democracy, as conceptualized by Laclau and Mouffe, is

considered by theorists in the humanities and the social sciences in Korea as one possible

model for reevaluating the “success story” of the Korean case.41

I also find the more recent and post-colonial understandings of democracy put

forward by Homi Bhabha to be strongly pertinent to the South Korean minjung and post-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
39
Antonio Gramsci’s development of cultural hegemony as a system of power in flux between
the dominant and the oppressed is important, as Althusser and his students Laclau and Mouffe
take hegemony as a basis of their theoretical development. Laclau and Mouffe also further
develop Claude Lefort’s idea of the empty vessel of power as the foundation of modern-day
democracy (i.e. the impossible ground and incommensurability), by formulating their “radical
democracy theory” in which consensus among people becomes not a goal to achieve but an ideal
to infinitely reach towards. Democracy for them is lived through the perpetual condition of
antagonism. This reformulation of democracy with the idea of dissensus rather than consensus is
resonant in Jacques Rancière too. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2001). Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London:
Continuum, 2004).
40
Bruce Cumings, Korea's Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: Norton, 1997).
41
Here I refer to the Sungkonghoe University-based research center of democracy established in
2008. The radical democracy theory as a viable political theory however does not have a strong
mainstream impact in Korean scholarship of democracy now (circa 2012-2014), as I have
observed that talks by Zizek and Ranciere attract a substantially larger and wider crowd, as well
as a more visible media spotlight, than one by Chantal Mouffe in Seoul.
 26
!

minjung approach to democracy. If works like Mouffe and Laclau’s radical democracy

theory advocate democracy in its most ideal form as a fundamentally unrealizable,

incommensurable project, Bhabha agrees with and yet departs from their premises and

historicization. For Bhabha, democracy today is a de-realized project whose gap between

the epistemological/cultural ideal and ethical/political practice opens up a new urgency to

look at those who suffered the most under many democrats’ neocolonial impulses:

What has to be acknowledged… are the implications of the self-contradictoriness

of liberal democracy, which has a war raging in its heart. This war internal to
democracy is a struggle between a sincerely held “universalism” as a principle of
cultural comparison and scholarly study, and ethnocentricism, even racism, as a
condition of ethical practice and political prescription. At the heart of democracy
we witness this fraying, de-realizing dialectic between the epistemological and the
ethical, between cultural description and political judgment.42

The idea of de-realized democracy, explains Bhabha, follows Brecht’s concept of

distantiation and de-familiarization: “a critical ‘distance’ or alienation [is] disclosed in

the very naming of the formation of the democratic experience and its expressions of

equality.”43 Throughout the thirty years of Korean political art-making, I argue, the goal

of realizing—or “making real”––has always encompassed the process of de-realizing, or

seeing reality with a critical distance. For the Korean artists featured in this project,

democracy and all of its ideals such as equality, justice, and liberty have always meant

two contradictory operations: the malleable universal ideals that can be applicable to

anyone, including themselves, and at the same time, the ideology of liberal democracy

propagated by the US-backed South Korean government, which promoted neoliberal,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
42
Bhabha, “Democracy De-realized,” in Diogenes 50(1), 29.
43
Ibid.
 27
!

anti-democratic corporatism in the name of a better life for all. Instead of railing at

democracy’s failure, it is democracy’s “fragility” and “frailty” to which Bhabha and the

artists about whom I write have turned for the idea of democracy’s “creative potential.”44

While keeping in mind that the frailty and the creative potential coexist in a

critical outlook onto democracy, this dissertation brings to the surface questions of visual

language and visual form. What does such a de-realized understanding of democracy

look like? What do the forms of resistance against a naively universal epistemology of

democracy look like, or feel like? As important if not more important than the battle of

ideology are the material forms and spatial construction of the everyday that take into

consideration the “de-realizing dialectic.” This question of form also complicates the

understanding of political subjectivity—the demo or the minjung—as it latches onto

certain forms and places, all the while transforming into a new understanding of agency.

The consideration of colors, spatial compositions, rhythms, and materials with durability

and ephemerality bring conceptual and visual depth to the analysis of practiced

democracy. The artists in Chapters 2-3 thus turn to the urban space as a concrete site in

which other adjacent terms like “the vernacular,” “spontaneous culture,” “mimetic art,”

and “publicness” express the dialectical forms of democracy. And finally, in Chapter 4, I

add the idea of democracy being inherently divisional, as well as de-realized, in the

divided Korean peninsula, thereby introducing another formal, structural, and ideological

term – “division” – into the discourse of democracy.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
44
Ibid.
 28
!

* * *

Chapter Outline

In Chapter 1, entitled “Two Tales of Reality, or an Origin of Contemporary

Korean Art (1979-1987),” I investigate the aesthetics of dissident art that flourished

during the 1980s. Although the movement’s historical, social, and political aspects have

long been the subject of in-depth studies, the focus on the activists and their ideologies

has privileged a textual, anthropological, and sociological analysis of this tumultuous

period—despite the fact that a plethora of visual artists produced innovative aesthetic

language that actively reinvented the very meaning of politics and dissident spirit. One

important goal for this chapter is therefore to study various artistic activities (e.g. holding

exhibitions despite censorship, writing manifestos, launching a citizen art school, and

collaborating with activist groups to produce propaganda materials) not as expressing

political anguish but as forging a productive site where the meaning of politics itself is

negotiated.

By “two tales of reality,” I refer to the two terms of reality—hy!nsil and

hy!njang—that are connected yet hold distinctive semantic power for the two types of art

practices born in Seoul and Gwnagju. I begin this chapter by focusing on the Seoul-based

art collective Reality and Utterance (Hy"nsil kwa par"n), which was founded in 1979 and

spearheaded a theory of art that engaged with society by relating speaking (par!n) to

reality (hy!nsil). The collective’s desire to make political speech through art encouraged

them to assess “reality,” which for them meant both the state-sponsored media spectacle
 29
!

(medium) and the “truth” of reality (content) hidden behind it. Photo collages of Kim

Gun-hee and Kim Jeong-heon most aptly illustrate the relationship between reality and

artistic speech that was established through numerous, heated debates (held in both public

and semi-public spheres) among the artists and critics of Reality and Utterance. This is

what I discuss in the first part of my chapter, which remains within Reality and

Utterance’s discourse on “reality.” In the second part of the chapter, I analyze how a

different notion of reality was envisioned at demonstration sites (hy!njang) by tracing the

genealogy and aesthetic composition of banner painting (k!lgae k#rim)—executed and

exhibited by Gwangju-based collective Gwangju Freedom Artists Association

(Gwangjahy"p)––which proposed a collective model of production and viewership as

political art-making. This chapter, historically rooted in the minjung period, therefore

introduces the terms “reality” and “utterance/speech,” as well as “performativity” and

“collective authorship,” setting the stage for my argument that, with the 1980s democracy

movement, the notion of reality provided a dialectical basis for contemporaneity for the

artistic practices which subsequently unfolded in the post-minjung era of the 1990s and

2000s.

Entitled “Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Postcolonial Pop and the Mimetic Art in the Long

Decade of Cultural Globalization (1987-1997),” Chapter 2 investigates how the

incorporation of vernacular culture and ephemeral temporality in the “pop art” of Choi

Jeong-hwa (b.1961) forms a new, counterpublic language amid the explosion of

commercialism, urban renewal, and neoliberal market policy in the post-minjung

movement period. Even though the 1980s dissident artists and protest art were considered
 30
!

by many to have “disappeared” with the end of military dictatorship (1987), the

implementation of democratic state governance did not automatically result in the

achievement of democracy in South Korea. (This is attested by political theorists and

cultural critics alike.) On the level of the everyday, anti-democratic forces were most

prominently felt in the bulldozer-like urban development schemes driven by global

aspirations that erased multiple, vernacular voices across Seoul.

I examine the various mediums and disciplines with which Choi builds his

creative world: the archive of his street photographs; art installations with pop

sensibilities using inflatable balloons and cheap plastic baskets; exhibitions for

experimental performances; interior designs for cafes with chairs from working-class

food stall (p’ochangmach’a); and the publication designs of books and posters. If Korean

and international art critics’ hitherto unbalanced focus on Choi’s colorful plastic art

installation has mistakenly associated Choi with globe-trotting pop artists like Jeff Koons

and Damien Hirst, who also use banal objects, this chapter will take a more balanced look

at Choi’s entire oeuvre, proposing that Choi’s art-making model is more ambiguous. In

his ambiguity, and in his production model of incessantly copying the unstable, transitory,

spontaneous aesthetics of Korean vernacular culture, Choi becomes more than a “Korean

pop artist.” He instead reinvents the post-modern aesthetics of pop art through a post-

colonial, post-minjung politics that confronts the 1990s South Korean march towards

cultural globalization. His art forges a mimetic relationship with vernacular reality—a

combination of hy!nsil and hy!njang––that both complicates my earlier definition of

those terms and brings them into a new era in South Korean politics. It is in this chapter
 31
!

that I elaborate the aesthetics of post-minjung, which designates the bifurcated view of

minjung aesthetics—a critique suspended in praise, a position fully aware of minjung’s

de-realization as much as its creative potential.

Chapter 3, “Democracy in Urban Space: Publicness as a New Vision of Reality,”

opens with the year 1998 by examining site-specific, research-driven, mixed-media

projects by two collectives: Sungnam Project and FlyingCity. In the Korean art scene, the

years 1998-1999 are important for two reasons. First, the 1997-98 Asian Financial Crisis

(the “IMF Crisis”) affected the Korean art market and corporate funding for art, which

led artists to found “alternative art spaces” themselves (called taean konggan, literally

meaning alternative space). This gave a push to a new institutional model that thrived on

intimate collectivities built outside of state-run museums and commercial galleries.

Second, these alternative art spaces functioned as think tanks for a new artistic mode of

engaging reality through site-specific, research-based conceptual art in the name of new

public art. Although the term “reality” as in hy!nsil and hy!njang had almost entirely

disappeared from the scene by the late 1990s, I argue that the political and aesthetic

ambitions in the 1980s articulated via reality were reoriented and translated into a new

term, that of publicness (kongkong), an idea that reinvents the workings of hy!nsil and

hy!njang in this period.

The pursuit of publicness was most actively manifested in the artist collectives

Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s efforts to critique the half century-long tradition of

public art commissions (sculptures of military generals on streets or kitsch fountains in

commercial plazas) by making a new type of art that embraced a more populist notion of
 32
!

the “public.” A plethora of questions about art and democracy are posed in these two

collectives’ efforts to engage, respectively, with the urban landscape of Sungnam (a

working-class satellite city near Seoul) and the human ecology of Cheonggyecheon (a

hub of small-scale metal workshops facing urban renewal in the historic downtown of

Seoul). But what are their working definitions of public space; who or what is the public;

and how can one express publicness in politico-aesthetic terms? These questions are

asked by the artists in part due to the increasingly prevailing practice of “urban renewal”

and “revitalization” pursued by the government in the guise of gentrification. Thus, I

trace the epistemological significance in the shift—from minjung art (minjung misul) to

public art (kongkong misul), or from minjung’s obsession with “reality” to public art’s

foregrounding of “publicness”—while keeping in mind how the artists contest the

dominant notion of public, public space, and publicness. I also put the art projects

featured in this chapter of late 1990s and early 2000s South Korea into conversation with

the contemporary paradigm shift in the public art practices in the U.S. with the emergent

discourse of “art and spatial politics” (Deutsche, 1996) and “dialogical art” (Kester,

2004).

Charting the history of contemporary art in conjunction with the history of

democracy movement in South Korea, Chapters 1, 2, and 3 also demonstrate the diverse

ways in which Korean artists have sought to make art closer to what they perceived as

reality over the past thirty years. This idea of proximity to reality that injects energy into

the South Korean art scene over three decades is finally addressed as an

incommensurable antagonism in Chapter 4, titled “Democracy with(in) Division: From

 33
!

Imagined Unification to Ethical Subjectivity (1980-present).” The “invisible presence” of

North Korea within South Korean art history is already well accounted for: in South

Korea, the cultural history of modern Korea is written through the disavowal of North

Korea and its cultural practitioners, or the forced absence of any cultural products

sympathetic to socialism. But despite the South Korean military dictatorships’ strict ban

on any alliance with communism and North Korea, and the stultifying effects of the

National Security Law (1948-), artistic efforts to reconnect with Northern brethren began

with the rise of the minjung movement and their socialist ideals, which flourished in a

more nuanced way in the post-authoritarian period (1987 to the present).

In this chapter, I am inspired by one of the foremost literary critics, Paik Nak-

chung, who theorized “division system (pundan ch’aeje)” and “division reality (pundan

hy!nsil)” as the ultimate logics organizing social formation and reality in South Korea.

The notion of division reality, when seen through the various manifestations of “reality”

that I outline in the previous chapters, stands out as envisioning a different type of

antagonistic relationship between opposing entities. Whereas the first three chapters

develop a hegemonic paradigm between the dominant and the oppressed, the dividing

line between the North and the South cannot be understood in such terms. Following the

epistemological shift in South Korean artists’ North Korea-related endeavors—from the

pictorial representation of “the Korean nation as one” (by 1980s dissident artists) to the

introduction of double or multiple-frame and ethical dis-identification between the South

and the North (starting from the 1990s, especially during the Sunshine Policy era of

1998-2007)—this chapter will posit the reality of division as an effective model of

 34
!

democracy, a pure manifestation of democratic antagonism (per Mouffe and Laclau, via

Rosalyn Deutsche). Along with two oil paintings about unification from the 1980s by Oh

Yoon and Sin Hak-chul, closely analyzed in this chapter are Seung Woo Back’s

photographs Blow Up (2001-2005).

 35
!

Chapter One

Two Tales of Reality, or an Origin of Contemporary Korean Art (1979-1987)

On October 17, 1980, the electricity abruptly cut off at the Munyejinh!ngwon Art

Gallery in Seoul. Just like that, the Inaugural Exhibition of the legendary 1980s art group

Hy"nsil kwa par"n (Reality and Utterance) began—and ended within a few hours. [Fig.

1.1] According to the state-run art gallery representative, the exhibition had to shut down

due to the “inadequacy” of the artworks on display. One visitor, an art student at that time

who had fortuitously stumbled upon the exhibition, remembers his inability to see the

paintings; the candles hastily lit by the artists were too dim to render visible the works on

the wall.45 If the lights had been on, he would have witnessed a range of styles: oil on

canvas depicting a group of dilapidated inner city slum houses, photo-collages of

newspapers and advertisements, woodblock prints of figures wearing traditional Korean

costume hanbok, etc. To different degrees, all of the works illustrated aspects of what

they conceptualized as hy!nsil (reality) in a country that had undergone a rapid

reconstruction in the three decades following the provisional end of the Korean War

(1950-53), which had devastated most of the country’s industrial and cultural

infrastructure. For the participating artists, these two-dimensional works with references

to mass media and popular culture had two goals: The first was to counter the years-long

dominance of monochromatic abstract painting in the South Korean art scene [Fig. 1.2],

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
45
Reality and Utterance (Seoul: Sigak kwa "n", 1985) and Minjungmisur#l Hyanghay!: Hy!nsil
kwa par!n 10-ny!n ûi Palchach’wi (Towards Minjung Art: Reality and Utterance’s 10 Years of
Footprint), (Seoul: Kwahak kwa sasang, 1990).
 36
!

which conspicuously thrived under the dictators Park Chung-hee (1960-1979) and Chun

Du-hwan (1979-1987), and which sought to evacuate narrative from the picture frame.

The second goal was to interrogate the widespread fear of enunciating—or narrating—

anything explicitly critical of the anti-communist ethno-national state. This incident of

relatively benign censorship on the part of the gallery was therefore not entirely

unexpected, given this climate of oppression in which artworks like these represented the

fight for visibility against obscurity and erasure that would continue throughout the 1980s

and beyond.46 However, the issues of visibility versus invisibility and of government

censorship versus dissident opposition were never stable binaries. They had multiple

facets depending on the mechanisms of enunciation, such as the subjectivity of speakers,

the location of expression, and the composition of anticipated audiences, that this chapter

seeks to articulate through a more nuanced inquiry.

While Reality and Utterance’s collective investigation of the relationship between

art and reality emerged from the members’ recognition of the artist’s changing role in the

increasingly mediatized landscape of the industrializing society, this view did not

represent the entire picture of dissident art-making in the 1980s. A slightly different

political agenda was at play in other art collectives, such as the Gwangju Jayu Misulin

Hyôpuihoe (Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists, 1979-1984), Sigak Maech’e

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
46
As a participating artist told it years later, the person who insisted on censoring these works
was an abstract painter who held his exhibition one flight downstairs and who asked the gallery to
remove the works of Reality and Utterance. It was censorship within the art scene—not by the
government—that Reality and Utterance artists faced. Yun B"m-mo, “Hy"nsil kwa par"n 10-
ny"n ûi Palchach’wi” (Reality and Utterance’s 10 years of footprint), Minjungmisur#l Hyanghay!:
Hy!nsil kwa par!n 10-ny!n ûi Palchach’wi (Towards Minjung Art: Reality and Utterance’s 10
Years of Footprint), (Seoul: Kwahak kwa sasang, 1990), 552.
 37
!

Y"ngu (Visual Media Research Group, 1983-1989), Tur"ng (1982-1987), Kanûmpae

(1985-1994), and S"ul Misul Gongdongche (Seoul Art Collective, 1985-1995). The

growing urgency of configuring a new art reflected the heightened sense of political

resistance propelled by the pro-democracy minjung undong (“people’s movement”),

which commenced in the 1960s and took a more radical turn in the 1980s. By the early

1980s, these art groups quickly formed association with minjung munhwa yesul undong

(the minjung culture and arts movement), which also germinated in the 1960s and came

of age in the late 1970s. Considered part of the broader minjung culture and arts

movement,47 the above-mentioned groups, as early as 1980, began to participate in the

social movement as active propaganda units, which meant that they effectively

introduced the visual component to the minjung demonstration sites by producing large-

scale banners, flags, brochures, and wall texts with slogans and images to be distributed

on university campuses and across the city. Enveloping the urban space and the citizen-

participants, these colorful, visual-textual imageries created an alternative public space

that imagined a time of democracy beyond the current dictatorship.

The reality for these activist artists concerned hy!njang, meaning a “site” or more

accurately a site where an event (e.g., a political protest) takes place. Instead of pursuing

a sociocultural assessment of reality (hy!nsil), these artists were interested in standing on

the ground of hy!njang and making protest visual arts that shaped the dynamics as well

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
47
As I delineate in the introduction, even though minjung misul (minjung art) is currently the
default term for 1970s and 1980s political art, the term was coined by a journalist in 1985 and
was initially rejected by the artists themselves. In the 1970s and early 1980s, saeroun misul
undong (new art movement) and “minjok art” (national art) were the terms mostly commonly
used.
 38
!

as the aesthetics of hy!njang. At minjung demonstrations, individual participants moved

their bodies according to, and under the influence of, the on-site visual installations. The

movement’s legendary picture—the bird’s-eye-view black and white documentary

photograph of Seoul’s City Square taken during a funeral procession of six student

martyrs in June 1987—provides a prime example. [Fig. 0.1] Six larger-than-life face

portraits loomed large amid innumerable citizens who filled up the square. These moving

paintings—quickly prepared for the funeral procession by artists like Choi Byung-su (a

carpenter-turned-member of Seoul Art Collective), and mounted atop moving trucks—

literally moved and mobilized the bodies of the activated citizens who enacted a

collective ritual.

Days after the photograph was taken, the dictator Chun was compelled at last to

step down, promising a democratically held presidential election in December of that

year. However, it is important to remember that this photograph epitomizes the dynamics

of art and politics in South Korea not simply because the event that it captures was

deemed successful. More important than the immediate result of the movement is what

the photograph reveals: that the funeral paintings’ particular aesthetic quality (i.e. size,

composition, etc.) and the mechanism of its display (on a truck as part of a funeral

procession) effectively facilitated physical congregation of over a million bodies in a real

space, thus forging a new cultural language born out of the political movement. This new

language, as I will analyze in detail, has acquired the power to make the social reality of

the 1980s categorically visible, a power that survived long after the political movement

had dissipated by the end of the decade. How then can we unravel this new language
 39
!

from thirty years later, especially given the complex set of dissimilarities and contrasts

that arise from juxtaposing, say, the exhibition of Reality and Utterance versus the protest

art of Choi Byung-su? In other words, how do we account for the divergent views of

politics—or the different understandings of politics and reality—so vibrantly formed in

the new visual languages, by artists who shared a certain “mandate” to seek alternatives

beyond state ideologies and beyond the received notions of international modernism? As

historian Kristin Ross’s work on May of 1968 in Paris discusses, a time of political

struggle puts pressure on its dissident participants to create a new visual and cultural

language, even in their inability to assess such a change or to possess a full cognizance of

their invention. Often the rapidity of revolution’s unraveling exceeds the articulation of

aesthetic language, forcing the actors on the site to lose absolute control over their actions

or at least an acute awareness of the consequences of their actions in both aesthetic and

political terms. Such was the case for artists in 1980s South Korea attempting to make

sense of their precipitously shifting hy!nsil and hy!njang.

The inability to see clearly the mechanisms and impacts of artistic production at

the time of its making inevitably shifts the burden of historicization into a post-revolution

period. I must highlight here that the place of minjung art in Korean art history has long

been that of negation and invisibility. Detractors of minjung art dismiss it on the basis of

its populist and utilitarian nature by disregarding its profound epistemological,

phenomenological, and affective values. Until recently Korean art historians in academia

rarely gave minjung art the aesthetic and political significance it deserves. Surprisingly,

the very words of former minjung art practitioners also lend perceptive negativity to their
 40
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art today, corroborating in their perpetuated marginalization. According to my research of

primary resources from the 1980s through the 2000s (which included artist publications,

exhibition catalogues, artist writings/manifestos, and minjung critics’ essays written in

support of the artists), the minjung practitioners’ self-assessment of the art movement,

both at that time and retroactively, is steeped in lamentation over the art movement’s

inadequacy, with the reasons for failure being divided, broadly speaking, into those

internal to the art scene (i.e. the artworks proper and the dynamics within the art

movement) and those external to the art scene (i.e. sociopolitical factors that frame and

affect the art scene).

For Choi Yeol and Kim Bong-jun, who locate the fault within, the art movement

failed to fully integrate into the social movement. For them, some artists problematically

and anachronistically made the agenda of remaining within the realm of art (i.e. gallery

space in the case of Reality and Utterance) their priority, while others, despite their brave

willingness to produce protest art, most often failed to devise “correct” figurations of

revolutionary archetypes.48 Sung Wan-kyung (another minjung critic and a founding

member of Reality and Utterance) likewise argues that the failure originates from the

inability to reconcile gallery art (ch!nsijang misul) and protest art (hy!njang misul)

within the art movement at large.49 The lack of a unified front forged between the two

“factions” of minjung art is the cause of failure for Sung. The second line of criticism

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
48
Choi Yeol, Minjokmisul#i ironkwa silch'!n (Theory and Practice of Minjok Art). (Seoul:
Tolpeke, 1991), 237.
49
Sung, Wan-kyung. “From the Local Context: Conceptual Art in South Korea.” In Global
Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, edited by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver, and
Rachel Weiss (Queens, NY: The Queens Museum of Art, 1999), 119-126.
 41
!

traces a reason “external” to art—that is, the rapidly shifted sociopolitical environment of

Korea, in which the end of the democracy movement in 1987 meant the implementation

of parliamentary democracy, and, as a consequence unforeseen to most people, the

country’s wholesale insertion into the neoliberal economic order.50 Amidst the 1990s

march towards the age of post-ideology and globalization, the intensely ideological

position of minjung art became conspicuously obsolete, appearing out of date and too

“hot” in the age of “cool” global culture, as Sung and others acknowledged in hindsight.

In this explanation of minjung art’s demise, the fall of the Soviet bloc and historical

communism was repeatedly emphasized as another major reason for the domestic social

change, and a legitimate reason for the loss of lofty goals of revolution for the artists and

activists alike. With the end of movement came the end of activism and activist art. Or so

they say.

The evaluation of minjung art (art historical or sociopolitical) has so far been

imprisoned in the tale of success and failure (of either the art or the social movement) at

the expense of articulating the aesthetics of the diverse range of activities—from photo-

collages and woodblocks to banner paintings and slogan flags—that constitute a complex

discourse of art and politics born amid the democracy movement. Therefore, locating

points of divergence between art and the social movement, as much as finding the

moments of convergence between the two, carries a discursive significance for my

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
50
Sung Wan-kyung, Minmung misul modonism sigakyongu (Minjung Art, Modernism, Visual
Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999), 39; and Sung, “The Rise and Fall of Minjung Art,” Being
Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy,
1980-2010. ed. Sohl Lee (Seoul: Hy"nsil Munhwa; Seattle: University of Washington, 2012),
188-203.
 42
!

argument. On another level, my attempt to give a renewed visibility to minjung art also

makes a decisive move away from the very language of success and failure, truth and

false, right and wrong—that is, the rhetoric of truth claims and moralism—in which the

minjung practitioners themselves were perhaps too profoundly entrenched. It is my belief

that what is obsolete now is not the 1980s art itself but today’s discourse on minjung art,

a discourse that fails to see both the artworks and the criticism of the 1980s in a new light

and beyond the words of minjung practitioners themselves as well as their opponents.

Moreover, the analysis of the work, I argue, demands understanding not just of what it

says but of how it functioned in physical and discursive spaces. In other words, I will

analyze not only what is depicted within the composition but also how the materiality of

the very support—as various as banner, flag, floor tag, or funeral portrait—gave the

picture a physical, time-contingent, and site-specific function in the political events in

which it participated. In the case of paintings and collages produced to be viewed in an

art gallery, my analysis points to the significance of “artistic speech” (par!n) made

within the changing institutional structure of contemporary art at the time.

This chapter therefore seeks to liberate two histories of minjung art—one that

developed in the galleries and art publications (the art of hy!nsil) and the other that

thrived on the streets and the public squares (the art of hy!njang). Despite wide-spread

cynicism about the inability of 1980s politically engaged artists to reconcile the gap

between gallery art and protest art, I argue that the preservation or the incomplete

suspension of these two categories is significant to understanding the very historical

trajectories of minjung art’s development as politicized art that engages with reality—as
 43
!

hy!nsil or hy!njang. The tension between the two different understandings of reality was

initially also a difference between the earlier art groups like Reality and Utterance, whose

members were well into their mid-30s in 1980, and the later groups with more self-aware

activist tendencies like the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists and its predecessor

Visual Media Research Group in Gwangju (whose members were in their 20s and many

still enrolled in university). My research, however, has led me to believe that the most

significant difference lies in the respective location of politicization and activism.

Whereas the first group sought to revolutionize the institution of art from within by

injecting the visual economy of popular culture into the picture frame, the latter sought a

revolution outside art institutions by visually politicizing the public realm and urban

landscape.51 As I will explore more in detail, this difference in location has consequently

shaped the ways in which collective spirit and collective authorship are practiced in

South Korean art.

Contrary to the misperception that the dialectical relationship between these two

positions erupted in mid-1980s, the history of minjung art that I discuss begins with the

premise that the tension between these two poles has a much longer history. Here, I will

examine two vastly different artistic strategies in the art of hy!nsil and the art of

hy!njang—the strategies regarding the location of enunciation and the audience for their

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
51
This dilemma is similar to the 1920s colonial struggle that the Korean Federation of Proletariat
Artists (KAPF) in search of a resistant mechanism working within the Japanese colonialism or
claiming revolution like the 1919 March Independence Movement in Seoul. Another set of
dilemmas that haunted KAPF artists concerned whether to utilize or dismiss popular culture (i.e.
popular mediums like film novel, cartoons, movies, etc.). These binaries seem still relevant in the
1980s, especially considering Reality and Utterance’s first two exhibitions that pay close
attention to commercially available images such as advertisements and products of popular visual
culture like television dramas.
 44
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respective art. Both the art of hy!nsil and the art of hy!njang share the year 1979 as their

point of origin, as artists formed Reality and Utterance and the Association of Gwangju

Freedom Artists in Seoul and Gwangju, respectively, without awareness of each other’s

existence. This chapter will therefore trace the artists’ different rationales and motivations

for the unprecedented collective gesture, their discussions about the ideal of art (what

kind of art is called forth in the reality of the here-and-now), and their understanding of

reality, as well as their representation and eventual making of reality as a political and

popular interface. Only with such an archeology can we grasp a more nuanced

understanding of the 1980s zeitgeist, one that accounts for divergences as well as

commonalities, and, moreover, the impact of minjung art on subsequent generations. To

this end, this chapter lays the groundwork for this dissertation’s thesis: that artists’

investigation of the relationship between art and reality is at the core of South Korean

contemporary art, serving as the thematic, discursive, and aesthetic thread that weaves

moments of creative eruption and epistemological transition together with aspirations for

democracy.

Reality and Utterance: hy!nsil and la prise de parole in the New Era of Images

For the first gathering of what later became Reality and Utterance, ten artists

including Kim Jeong-heon, Joo Jae-hwan, and Oh Yoon and two art critics Ra Won-sik

and Sung Wan-kyung showed up at a small Chinese restaurant called Yuwon in

 45
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Ch’"ngchin-dong, Seoul on December 6, 1979.52 The meeting was initiated by Ra Won-

sik, who thought it would make little sense if visual artists did nothing to commemorate

the twentieth anniversary of the April 19 Revolution the following year.53 The April 19

Revolution of 1960, or 4.19 as it is called in South Korea, was the first grass-roots

movement since the founding of South Korean government in 1948 that mobilized

nation-wide dissent against the statist hegemony. The movement ended when the wave of

young activists (consisting mostly of middle school, high school, and university students)

successfully forced president Syngman Rhee to step down and eventually flee to the U.S.,

whose ardent support he had enjoyed during his 13-year tenure. Shortly thereafter,

however, army general Park Chung-hee seized the presidential power by a military coup

on May 16, 1961. Despite the brief lifespan of 4.19., the so-called 4.19-generation’s

activist fervor had subsequently spread to a wider cultural arena, producing aftereffects in

literature, music, and theater throughout the 1960s and 70s. Examples of people’s

literature, music, and theater are ample.54 Depending on the theorist at this time, the term

to designate “people” oscillated between minjung and minjok, sometimes with little self-

reflection. While minjung is closer to the Korean term for “proletarians” and minjok for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
52
The twelve participants were: Won Dong-suk, Kim Jeong-heon, Joo Jae-hwan, Oh Yoon, Ra
Won-sik, Sung Wan-kyung, Son Chang-s"p, Kim Ky"ng-in, Oh Su-hwan, Kim J"ng-su, Kim
Yong-tae, Yun B"m-mo, and Choi Min. Yun B"m-mo, “Hy"nsil kwa par"n 10-ny"n ûi
Palchach’wi” (Reality and Utterance’s 10 years of footprint), 535.
53
Sung Wan-kyung recalls Ra’s words: “When considering the impact and weight of 4.19 in our
history, it would be a shame if the arts scene does not express any response or reflection about it.”
“Roundtable: Consciousness of Hy"nsil and Activism of Art: The Development and Prospect of
1980s from the Perspective of Reality and Utterance,” Reality and Utterance (Seoul: Sigak kwa
"n", 1985), 185-7.
54
Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South
Korea. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007.). Also see: South Korea’s Minjung Movement:
The Culture and Politics of Dissidence. ed. Kenneth Well (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press,
1995).
 46
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“(Korean) ethnic group,” both refer to the oppressed, subaltern nature of ethnic

Koreans.55 In the field of visual arts, the only memorable incident that stands out in the

1960s is the 1969 establishment of a collective Hy"nsil Tongin (Reality Group), whose

inaugural exhibition was preemptively censored the day before its planned opening in

Seoul, with a more brutal consequence than Reality and Utterance would experience in

1980.56 Reality Group consisted of Kim Chi-ha (a poet), Kim Yoon-sik (an art critic), and

Oh Yoon, Lim Se-taek, Oh Ky"ng-hwan (three painters in their early 20s and still

enrolled at the Seoul National University). Among the three, Oh Yoon became famous

for having burnt all of his submitted paintings as a protest against the shutdown. The

exhibition was unrealized but not, in the end, completely silenced. The collective’s

manifesto, composed by the already-recognized leading minjung literary figure Kim Chi-

ha, called for a new artistic language that would reflect and intervene in contemporary

reality. Kim Chi-ha’s monumental 25,000-word manifesto makes an excruciating effort

to build minjok ch!k hy!nsil ju#i (realism or the aesthetics of reality for/about/by Korean

people) and ultimately provided a vocabulary of resistance for other critics and artists,

such as Kim Yoon-su and Ra Won-sik, who developed their theory of dissident art (under

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
55
Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006), 165-192. On the leading
literary critic Paik Nak-chung’s minjok literature theory in light of his division system theory, see
Ryu Junpil, “On national literature and the division system,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 11,
No.4. (2010),552-565.
56
These artists rebelled against abstract expressionism, which was the dominant painting style
taught at art schools at the time, by emulating the socialist realism and mural movements in
Mexico. The announcement posters for the collective’s inaugural exhibition caught the eyes of
their professors, who deemed the figurative paintings decidedly socialist and thus pro-North
Korea. Under the anti-communist military dictatorship, any gesture even obliquely pointing to the
“other” Korea and its cultural identity was worth reporting to the South Korean CIA, which is
precisely what the professors did.
 47
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the name of minjok art or minjung art) in the 1970s. Both Kim and Ra became the

founding members of Reality and Utterance; so did Oh Yoon, one of the three artists of

Reality Group.

Not long into the first meeting of Reality and Utterance, the conversation drifted

away from the initial motivation for their gathering—that is, addressing the role of art in

honoring the past revolution of 4.19—and instead advanced to what the artists considered

more pertinent and immediately political: activating present-day politics of the Korean art

world at an institutional level. The 1970s discourse of art in South Korea was

overwhelmed by academia’s rapturous support for tansaekhwa, or monochrome abstract

painting, which the artists and critics gathered on Sinmun Road considered

problematically “pi hy!nsil ch!k (non-realistic),” “striking no relationship with life,”

“uninteresting,” “lacking in force,” and “contributing little to communication (sot‘ong)

among people.”57 Tansaekhwa painters’ pursuit of sunsu misul (a Korean translation of

“fine art” but literally meaning “pure art”58) despite other artistic mediums’ increasingly

forthright “social engagement” (ch‘amy!) put the art world out of touch with the here-

and-now.59 Against the widespread ideology of purity, disengagement and disinterest, the

desired way of making art had to evolve to engage hy!nsil, first by determining “what

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
57
Sung in “Roundtable,” 186.
58
When in use, the Korean term sunsumisul means “art’s for art’s sake” even though it is a direct
translation of “fine art.”
59
Sunsu or the idea of purity itself takes on a local-specific meaning in Korea, with the advent of
Park Chung-hee dictatorship. As a result, Sunsu can directly mean anti-communist policy of the
military regime. Theodore H. Hughes, Literature and Film in Cold War South Korea: Freedom's
Frontier (Columbia University, 2012)
 48
!

hy!nsil is” and then articulating it in visual means.60A profound desire for such art rooted

in hy!nsil is explicit in these artists’ decision to include the term hy!nsil in the

collective’s name.

Of course, as I have outlined in the introduction, the concept of reality is loaded

with multilayered discursive histories in the disciplines of sociology, literature, cultural

studies, as well as art history, with different traditions of understanding in different parts

of the world. In Korean intellectual history alone, the discourse goes back to the colonial

period (1909-1945) and the leftist artists (writers, critics, film theorists, and visual artists)

of the Korean Proletariat Federation of Artists (KAPF, 1925-1935) and other progressive

writers, for whom realism was ideological and social than simply epistemological.61 For

the colonial-period artists, realism was understood as one of the most effective artistic

means with which to express both a materialist worldview and the writer’s critical

subjectivity, thereby favoring the latter between epistemological realism (depiction of the

world around us) and social realism (ideologically driven construct of the world and the

“typical” individuals whose psyche world serves as a critique of the ideology). The

emphasis put on realism in Korea with such terms as hy!nsil ju#i (aesthetics of hy!nsil)

and ri!lij#m thus has its origin in the colonial period.62 Over the following three decades

(1930s-1950s), however, a series of events and formations—such as the tumultuous

history of the Japanese colonial government’s increased crackdown on leftist intellectuals

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
60
“Roundtable,” 181-226.
61
For the influence of Lenin and Georg Lukács on the Korean proletariat artists, see Rat Fire:
Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire (Cornell University, 2013).
62
Sunyoung Park, “The Colonial Origin of Korean Realism and Its Contemporary
Manifestation.” Positions: east asia cultures critique 14, no.1 (2006), 182.
 49
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beginning in 1932, the national partition in 1945, the subsequent founding of the South

Korean nation based on anti-communist ideology, and the fleeing of colonial-period

progressive intellectuals to the North in the 1950s—all contributed to a long hiatus in the

practice of such realism in South Korea.63 It was only in the 1970s that the return of

realism was vividly felt in the realm of literature, with the poet Kim Chi-ha being one of

its ardent proponents. Undoubtedly, Kim’s Reality Group manifesto (1969) was one of

major inspirations for the founding of Reality and Utterance, as well as the 1980s artists’

theorization of hy!nsil or hy!nsil ju#i.

The brief manifesto of Reality and Utterance, published on the first page of their

exhibition’s catalogue, encompasses the range of inquiries that the artists posed through

their practice. A sentence expressing their discontent with the “existing forms of art”

opens the manifesto, while the core of the manifesto is concisely summarized and posed

as questions that prioritize criteria concerning the artists. Although the manifesto reads as

formulaic, containing less of a trailblazing roadmap than a vision with an unyielding

determination, its interrogative force and concision rendered it amenable to citation. Parts

of the manifesto were repeatedly referred to in various art historical texts as reflecting the

artistic dilemma of the time.

1. What is reality (hy!nsil)? For artists, is reality located within the realm
of art, or does it expand to the urgency of embracing external influence?
[From this arises] the reexamining of the meaning of reality, and the
point of encounter between the artist’s consciousness and reality.
2. How do we see and feel reality (hy!nsil)? From perceiving reality,
developing critical reflection, and acquiring insight into reality [we gain]
the reality of neighbors, the reality of the era, the connection with site-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
63
Theodore H. Hughes, Ibid.
 50
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oriented reality, the recuperation of alienated humans and a hope for a

positive outlook to reality.
3. What does it mean to speak (par!n)? How does one speak? Who is the
speaker, and where is this speech [utterance] directed? For whom and
by whom is this utterance made? What is the relationship between the
speakers and those who are on the receiving end of the utterance?
4. What are the methods in which to speak? How, where, and to what
degree of efficiency can one speak? [We pose] the question of the
methodology of speech/utterance and creativity, the critical inquiry into
and overcoming of the existing methods of expression and reception,
the adequate relationship and interaction between reality and utterance.

Whereas the manifesto expressed initial frustration and motivation in an abstract

way, what truly concretized their conceptual ground can be found in the essays and

recorded roundtable conversations that developed later in 1980-1985. Of hy!nsil, the

critic Won Dong-suk emphasized the pronoun uri (our) that modifies hy!nsil (reality) at a

paper given at the group’s 1980 meeting. (Between 1980 and 1985, the group met

frequently for two to three members’ presentations followed by heated discussions.64)

The pronoun “we” designates Korean people (minjok or minjung) who are oppressed,

and whose life is deeply affected and dispossessed by foreign powers as well as by the

imported ideology of bourgeois capitalism. Such an ethnocentric nationalist view in

Won’s understanding of reality was symptomatic of the 1970s and 1980s programmatic

elimination of modernist universalism that KAPF had, to a great degree, retained during

the first two decades of the twentieth century.65 In the 1980s the progressive artists’

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
64
The presentation manuscripts, and in some cases the transcript of discussions, were published
in art magazines or as part of exhibition catalogues.
65
Theodore Hughes, Ibid. Also see: Chungmoo Choi, “The Discourse of Decolonization and
Popular Memory: South Korea,” Positions 1.1 (Spring, 1993): 77-102. Choi argues that the
Korean minjung movement is less a Marxist proletariat movement than a nationalist
decolonization movement.
 51
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antagonism towards anything foreign and their firm belief in the dichotomy of the Korean

versus the foreign was a reaction to the fascist state’s violent propaganda of pure art

(sunsu misul), which the artists in Reality and Utterance considered a mere copy of

Western (read: imperialist) style.66 Entrenched in ethnonationalism that spills into anti-

colonial nativism, artist Im Ok-sang went so far as to dismiss all signs of industrial

modernity as properly belonging to the Other (that is, the Western): “As I walk across the

city, rely on refrigerator, and watch TV, I feel that I am a victim of industrialization,

which is a different type of civilization [than the one of our own]. It has already become

commonplace to see in our surroundings the modern urban space filled with plastic and

cement, pornographic images and advertisement, and industrial products modeled after

the West. Not only in sunsu misul but also in such a visual environment, we witness a

profound influence of the West.”67

The group’s collective agenda was clear: if the reality of the art world concerned

“pure art” (the status quo in need of usurpation), the “commendable” artistic practice

should not engage!a direct parody or ameliorative expansion of abstract painting, but

make explicit the possibility of communicating “our reality” through art. The core value

of art arises from its ability to mediate a message, trigger communication about “our
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
66
The historical research of the formation of tansaekhwa reveals that a much more complex
matrix of agendas and forces were at play than a mere desire to faithfully mimic the European or
American abstract painting. An investigation into Koreanness was embedded in the production
and promotion of tansaekhwa. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of
Methods (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
67
Sigakkwa !n! I (Vision and Language I: Industrial Society and Art) (Seoul: Y"lhwadang,
1982), 284. Cultural theorist Chen Kuang-hsin’s differentiation of nationalism and nativism is
useful here, because Im’s rhetorical emphasis on native Korean culture of the pre-colonial and
pre-modern era is more similar to nativism. Chen, Kuan-hsing, “Decolonization: A Geocolonial
Historical Materialism,” Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization (Durham: Duke University,
2010), 65-114.
 52
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reality.” The second term of the collective’s name “par!n,” which is connected to hy!nsil

by the conjunction “kwa” (and), points to a desire to formulate art as communication and

mediation. Of the collective’s debate between the name Reality and Utterance and its first

runner-up (hy!nsil kwa p’y!hy!n, or Reality and Expression), Sung Wan-kyung notes

that their ultimate selection of “utterance,” a term less familiar to artists than

“expression,” represents a desire to move away from the “inside” of art (the art world

proper) and expand its boundaries of activity to the “outside” (the social, the cultural, and

the political), and to “emphasize the belief that diverse individuals outside of the art

institutions can become subjects of multiple utterances.”68 Such a utopian move was

meant to invite non-art professionals, that is, the people (minjung) and masses (taejung),

into possibly occupying the subject position that recognizes the inadequacies and

injustice in hy!nsil and speaks about it. Moreover, it injected into artistic practice a sense

of direct political speech rather than a processed, ambiguous cycle of exhibition. On how

to translate par!n into other languages, Choi Min thought of the English term “utterance,”

that is, “an immediate and direct response in the face of a certain situation or motivation,”

whereas Sung suggested the French term “la prise de parole,” to imply that one raises

one’s hand among the audience of people. Sung says that he wanted to “emphasize how

one becomes aware of the necessity of one’s par!n and exercises initiative.”69

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
68
Sung Wan-kyong said: “If the term “expression” already anticipates a certain voyeuristic
distance, “utterance” is a response more immediate, active, and concrete, one that is more hy!nsil
ch!k (realistic or reality-like) and effective.” “Roundtable,” 186.
69
Even though the collective name is not hy!nsil #i par!n, which would mean “utterance of
[about] reality.” The discussion about the foreign translation of hy!nsil kwa par!n began early
on. As Sung Wan-kyung noted in 1985, he and Choi Min each proposed the French and the
 53
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How can such a communication be realized in artistic practice, especially when

sot’ong, or communication, was envisioned in the era of mass communication and

spectacle? If, as the members of Reality and Utterance hoped, the cultural form of art was

to step into the territory of par!n and sot’ong, competing with other mediums of

communication such as advertisement, TV shows and other manifestations of popular

culture, what would it look like? What forms would such an art take? As illustrated in the

two-dimensional works by Reality and Utterance artists, the primary aim of their art was

two-fold: to communicate with the audience but also to generate a hybrid mediatized

language.

The Early Works of Reality and Utterance: Consumer Culture, Media Spectacle,

and Kitsch

The first work featured in the catalogue of Reality of Utterance’s prematurely

closed inaugural show was "l!ld!ld!l, a silkscreen print by Kim Gun-hee. [Fig. 1.3]

Two planes collapse onto the flat surface—both indexical copies of print cultural

materials. The bottom layer is reproduced from the page 5 of the Chosun Daily, dated

May 21, 1980. This spread either lacked illustration; or, even if it had one, it would have

been hidden by the top layer, which is a torn half of a commercial advertisement

(originally in full color scheme but reduced here to black and white), for tubed ice

popsicles called Aicha (a pun on “Oh, cold!”). In its original state the advertisement

would have had two separate but intersecting narrative components: the upper half of the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
English translations. Educated at Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French scholarship between
1972-76, Sung remains more fluent in French than English.
 54
!

page devoted to three identically dressed women with large hoop earrings and head

scarves of Caribbean flare, each holding a popsicle; the advertisement’s bottom half

featuring their captain: a Korean man in the awkwardly artificial role of a pirate. In the

original advertisement, the two planes are divided by a text band that reads “[So cold that

it] numbs inside your mouth.” [Fig. 1.4] In Kim’s reuse of the commercial image, she

only left “"l"ld"ld"l,” the mimetic word describing the numbing state, and the three

women of the top half.70 The removal of the word “mouth” (the physical site of

desensitization) and the captain (the beneficiary of the pleasurable dessert or the

sexualized women) liberates the state of numbing to describe any number of possibilities.

The news dated May 21, 1980 (when the state-sponsored massacre in Gwangju that had

begun on May 18 was still fully on), not the popsicle, might be one such object which

motivates the production of montage. Through the montage, the artist makes explicit her

position on the May 1980 Gwangju Democracy Movement. The reference to Gwangju is

explicit in its date, regardless of whether the particular news clipping reveals the truth

behind the massacre or distorts it. If the Korean major news media at that time had ever

reported on the incident, as in the case of another prominent paper Tong’a Daily of the

same day, it featured the urgency to suppress the “insurgent” in Gwangju.

With the advertisement cutout sporting as a quasi-illustration of the newspaper

text, Kim’s "l!ld!ld!l links the two sides of mediatized realities—the news outlet that

suppresses truth (the play of invisibility) and the advertisement whose raison d'être is to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
70
Aicha commercial (1980) is now available on YouTube, effectively demonstrating the
aesthetics against which Kim Gun-hee was working:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2KGw9nQwRg. (Last accessed on November 30, 2013)
 55
!

promote commercialized and sexualized products (the tactics of hypervisibility). The

mechanism of visual manipulation is not unrelated to the regime’s attempt at all-

encompassing control of the South Korean people beyond the reach of the hard politics of

martial law but in the realm of culture. This could be seen in the “Three S Policy”—the

government’s outright promotion of “sports, sex, and screen,” the designation of three

popular entertainment arenas constituting the site of fantasy for the masses, delivering the

lush food of divertissement rather than critical thinking. The artist’s critical par!n targets

these invisible and hypervisible realities that make up the two sides of the same coin.

New meaning arises from decontexualization and recontexualization, which alter existing

meanings by reframing the existing social fabric supporting the undemocratic regime. A

thread of commonality linking artists in Reality and Utterance is the discursive weight

placed less on the outspoken critique of the regime’s landmark political decisions (such

as political massacre and violation of constitution) than on its cultural mechanism (such

as the mass media and the language of communication of popular culture, which the

artists designated as cooperating with the statist authoritarian regime-friendly capitalism

and its pervasiveness in the everyday). 71 The targeted location of enunciation for Reality

and Utterance was always the realm of cultural representation, one degree removed from

the site of political representation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
71
The point that the dictatorial rule depended on such an unstable mechanism of visuality and
politics was well made when the artist re-cast a new version of "l!ld!ld!l for the second version
of the Inaugural Exhibition. To avoid the censorship second time, the artists self-censored some
of the works, one of them being "l!ld!ld!l. The new version omitted many of the texts in the
back plane, so as to mimic the form of harmless advertisement. Although it is questionable
whether this self-censorship mechanism was effective, it demonstrates the artists’ belief that a
dissident political speech can be made through juxtaposing the two means of regime control.
 56
!

The reference to mass media and consumerism also appears frequently in the

work of Kim Jeong-heon (b. 1945), whose two collages are featured in the catalogue’s

next spread. Titled Marching Alongside Tom Boys (1980) and Creating a Life of Plenty

(1980), both works insert the non-descript figure of a Korean farmer into found

representational surfaces such as glossy advertisements from a lifestyle magazine.

Because the figures are rendered with rough brushstrokes in acrylic, both farmers are

discernably male but their physical features do not explicitly indicate gender or age, In

Marching Alongside Tom Boys, the farmer stands, or walks, in between two Korean

female models sporting Annie Hall-style pants suits and high heels, conspicuously

replicating the new-woman image that has a long history in Hollywood cinema and that

Korean cinema had also replicated on its screen. [Fig. 1.5] Most obvious are the women’s

perfectly styled outfits, coiffed hair, and straight legs caught in the moment of a fashion-

shoot runway walk, all of which direct the viewers’ eyes to the contrast they make vis-à-

vis the farmer’s awkward standing pose and fashion appropriate to his physically

demanding labor: sun hat, shapeless shirt, baggy rolled up pants and a sickle in his hands.

But it is the models who are in the wrong place, as the artist not only inserted the farmer

into the picture frame but also painted over the background to depict a quintessentially

Korean rice field with low hill mountains afar, as if the new, modernized Korean lifestyle

has accelerated the decimation of the good, old tradition of prelapsarian agricultural

community.

What might come to mind first is the ease with which the artist contrasts the

premodern with the modern and pits country against city. But the fact that the artist paints
 57
!

on top of an advertisement highlights another juxtaposition—that is, that of production

versus consumption, whose material consequence leads to a widening gap between the

haves and the have-nots. Kim Jeong-heon reinserts an agricultural worker into the

consumer-oriented advertisement pages as a haunting ghost that shouts his speech and

asserts his existence as the nation’s productive force.

At the core of Kim’s creative re-composition is the contrast between two

opposing poles, which is elaborated and never fully suspended. The establishment of a

binary naturally involves a certain degree of abstraction and stereotyping, as in the case

of the farmer figure, which attains its allegorical power as the symbol of production only

at the expense of the factory workers, who by the 1970s were recognized as the country’s

largest labor force. Similar to the farmer, the middle-class lifestyle featured in Creating a

Life of Plenty relies on the tropes of exaggeration and symbolization. [Fig. 1.6] Taking up

most of the composition is a living room filled with signifiers of the country’s newly

rising middle class (leather couch, coffee table, indoors orchids, collectible celadon

vases) probably in a newly built apartment complex in an urban center like Seoul. These

decorative elements are relegated to the upper edge, so as to emphasize the linoleum floor

of bright yellow and orange hues, which occupy the picture’s center. Kim’s painting is in

fact an appropriation of a magazine advertisement for linoleum, the synthetic flooring

promoted as adding a notch of perfection to the careful composition of a middle-class

home. The farmer figure, on the other hand, is pressed to the composition’s bottom edge,

literally crushed by the presence of linoleum. With its scooped back turned away from

the viewer, the anonymous farmer attends to his rice field, inciting the viewer to
 58
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speculate whether he is planting the seedling or removing the weeds. The viewer is,

however, certain about one thing: the farmer’s posture changes the symbolic meaning of

the artificial floor of modernity into the fertile land of Korean origin. Such a facile switch

or a conversion of signification is possible because the overt demonstration of material

wealth (in the advertisement) and the equally exaggerated depiction of humble labor (in

political victimhood) both operate on the level of allegory and symbolic representation.

All this points to the fact that the artist is keen on mimicking the semantics of commercial

advertisement that plays on immediately recognizable metaphors. Indeed, Kim has not

painted the image of an ad but reused the very glossy magazine page with the linoleum

brand name—Lucky Monorium—preserved intact in the upper left corner. Not only the

visual language but also the materiality of the commercial medium was reclaimed. The

surface, representing either as linoleum or a rice field, is unquestionably a print surface,

the very material of commercialized popular culture with which the artist would like to

interact. Through this dialectical move, the print surface becomes a brand new surface, a

new material for artistic production in the newly industrialized country. [Fig. 1.7]

It is therefore incorrect to assert that the type of “realism” propagated by Reality

and Utterance shows an intimate alliance with photorealism—the type of painterly

realism popular in 1970s South Korea, or a code for the accusation that these artists’

painterly figures are unsympathetically blunt copies of existing photographic images.72

As seen in the early activities of Reality and Utterance, these artists’ application of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
72
Critic Lee Young-june’s critique is apt for some examples of murals and paintings, but here I
demonstrate counterexamples that likewise prevalently appeared. Author’s conversation with Lee
on November 27, 2012.
 59
!

photographs in the picture frame resembles more closely the nouveau realism and Pop of

1960s and 1970s Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles, which comments on the

commercialized everyday visual landscape surrounding every inch of industrialized

society. But unlike many Pop artists’ quest for and embrace of glamour, these Korean

artists were adamant about critiquing the media-induced glamour because for them media

not only represented the mechanisms of capitalism but also the military regime’s

ideological state apparatus that rendered the rest of the glamour-lacking reality invisible.

These Korean artists might seem to strike a closer affinity with Adorno’s critique of mass

communication than Pop art’s well-known position of ambivalence between cooptation

and criticism.73

In order for art to achieve authentic communication, the artists believed, art itself

should not only communicate to its audience (in terms of the message) but also engage

with the medium of popular culture that its audience is familiar with (in terms of the form

and language), and at times even with its materiality. Hy!nsil, or reality, is inherently

double-bound for these Korean artists: that which is the veil (the “hypervisible”

mechanism of “distraction,” “alienation,” and “escapism”) and also that which is hidden

behind the veil (the “invisible” truth that needs to be better communicated among the

viewers and the masses). One cannot exist without the other, and it is this relationship to

which these artists draw attention. Their tactics therefore involved appropriating

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
73
Sigakkwa !n! I (Vision and Language I: Industrial Society and Art), 289. Oh’s words are: “As
a separate entity from art that is caged in gallery, visual images are produced in new ways due to
the development of photography, advertisement, TV, and mechanical reproduction, which is what
contributes to the making of popular culture (taejung munhwa). The fact is that in many aspects
this [phenomenon] is not all desirable. Rather than assisting difficulties in survival for those in the
receiving end, [these images] tend to provide escapist pastime and entertainment.”
 60
!

materials from mass communication (k‘!myunik‘eisy!n) in order to strive for a “genuine”

communication (sot‘ong). The object of criticism and the object of promotion (and even

prescription) coexist within the frame, forming a binary of opposition.

Until the early 1980s, artists of Reality and Utterance and other groups used the

term taejung more often than minjung to refer to “people.” Taejung, more than minjung,

refers to masses that might privilege entertainment over politics, and anonymity over

authorship. In Korean, popular culture is thus called taejung munhwa, and not minjung

munhwa. This colloquial use of taejung among the artists proves that engagement with

the ideals of democracy, as envisioned by Reality and Utterance, was the process of

democratizing artistic language, to free it from the ivory tower of what they considered

“formalist high art.” In order to communicate with the masses who were taejung but

laden with the potential to become politicized, the artists had to find a channel through

which to communicate (sot’ong) with the audience. Such trust in and hope for the masses

indicates these artists’ alignment with the spirit of the minjung social movement even

when they did not explicitly advocate the minjung ideology or use the term minjung in

their theorization of reality. Artists attempting to practice the art of hy!nsil seemed to

have learnt their lesson from other leftist intellectuals in the minjung period, who, as

Namhee Lee theorized, put trust in the masses even when they believed that the

intellectuals had to awaken them.74 In so far as “our reality”—or uri hy!nsil as Won

Dong-suk had earlier expressed it—was in fact the reality diagnosed by us (the artists as

the political vanguards) for the masses, the us-versus-them binary that the artists formed
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
74
Namhee Lee, "Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-gk, Ritual, and Protest"
in positions: east asia cultures critique. Vol. 11, No. 3 (Winter 2003), 555-584.
 61
!

against those in dominant social positions has dangerously been transferred onto another

binary of the artists-versus-the masses. Communication as proposed by Reality and

Utterance was more of a one-directional speech to those in the art scene than a dialogue

with those outside the arts.

This also meant that their art had to be shown in the form of art exhibition, even

with certain compromises. Two weeks after the first exhibition was shut down, Reality

and Utterance managed to re-organize the inaugural exhibition, albeit in a different

gallery. In order to avoid the censorship a second time, they explained, some artists

exercised “adjustments.” Kim Geon-hee erased most of the newspaper text from

"l!ld!ld!l to make less reference to May 18. The single-page manifesto was taken out of

the exhibition catalogue, and the artists bios were added in order to “give the more

conventional look” of an exhibition catalogue. This can lead us to some speculations:

artistic speech—the notion of par!n for Reality and Utterance—can only be heard within

the existing realm of art, i.e. the gallery, which is why the exhibition had to take place at

any cost, even at the expense of what is apparent as self-censorship.

Opened with the “successful” (that is, publically accessible) inaugural exhibition

in November 1980, Reality and Utterance held other thematically organized shows such

as City and Vision (1981), Image of Happiness (1982), Print Exhibition of Reality and

Utterance (1983), June 25 [the date indicating June 25 of 1950 when the Korean War

broke] (1984). Even though the group met frequently to discuss their continued dilemma

vis-à-vis the art scene and the changing social atmosphere, these exhibitions always

featured individually authored works in a neat layout that shows no distinction from the
 62
!

exhibition format of the establishment. [Fig. 1.8 and Fig. 1.9] As these thematic

exhibitions signified, it is through their loosely interlinked thematic concern that multiple

individuals’ par!n came together.

Reality and Utterance’s verbal and textual articulation of their intent, heavy

theorization of art and reality, and relative autonomy of its individual artists guaranteed

some of its members longevity in the art world, giving them the opportunity, as early as

the late 1980s, to reinvent themselves as curators, academics, public art project managers,

board members of funding agencies, and even market-friendly artists. Yet, this

predominance has its cost. The group’s outstanding status as representative of 1980s

political art, at least seen from the perspective of mainstream art history and criticism, has

long been overshadowed by another significant strain of minjung art: the protest art like

that of the carpenter-artist Choi Byung-su which thrived in the squares. As mentioned

earlier, one of the most pernicious misconceptions about minjung art history is that

hy!njang misul (“art of the site,” referring to protest art that was made for and that

thrived at activist demonstrations) came after an anti-modernist movement like Reality

and Utterance, when in actuality the conceptual rumination and visual language of

hy!njang misul as illustrated in groups like the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists

began in 1979 if not earlier. This not only complicates the temporal evolution of minjung

art history, but also gives a multi-layered texture to the notion of dissident art and art’s

relationship with the social movement, which were newly envisioned during the late
 63
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1970s and throughout the 1980s.75 Therefore, the second part of this chapter will

complicate the meaning of reality, which a plethora of art collectives actively shaped

outside art galleries and on protest grounds. My analysis will predominantly focus on the

practices of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists, the Visual Media Research

Group, and Tur"ng, but also mention works by Kan!pae and Seoul Art Collective.

Art that Sculpts a Different Reality for All: The Association of Gwangju Freedom

Artists

The first meeting of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists (Gwangju Jayu

Misulin Hy"phoe or, in abbreviation, “Gwangjahy"p” as referred to by the artists and as I

will henceforth call them) was held in July 1979, three months before that of Reality and

Utterance in Seoul. Present at the meeting were Hong Sung-dam (b. 1955), Choi Yik-

kyun (b.1956, penname Choi Yeol), and others who were fresh out of art school or soon

to graduate from Chosun University, which makes them five to ten years younger on

average than the members of Reality and Utterance. The collective Gwangjahy"p drafted

a manifesto that shares similar key words, such as par!n (utterance or speech), with that

of Reality and Utterance, which only further emphasizes that both groups were under the

profound influence of the zeitgeist circa 1979 characterized by artists’ desire for

participatory social change, or at least for using art as a ground for political expression.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
75
“Of course it is not that collective activities (tongin hwaldong) previously did not exist. But if
the group’s nature was in for art competition winners to flaunt their connections among based on
school, sects, career route, the [new] collectives can be ideologically distinguished because their
fellowship was built around the will to overcome the fiction of competition system on the
conceptual level.” Won Dong-suk, “New Tendency of 1980s Art: Beyond 1970s Art” in Minjung
Art 15 Years: 1980-1994 (Seoul: National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 1994), 17.
 64
!

Yet, it is also possible to detect a subtle difference in the agenda, especially the use of the

term sanghwang (situation).

The artist is to see the situation of this land and this era. If this situation is filled
with contradiction and corruption, it is the command of our conscience that tells
us to direct a focused attention there…Artist as a human must not pursue what is
vain; instead s/he should always approach the problems arising from the situation.
The work should contain the testimony and speech (par!n) of such an approach.
If the reason for existence of art is in transmission [or conveyance and
communication], art shall acquire the power of testimony and speech.
Accordingly it shall be a challenge issued to the corruption of human society.
Form should be offset by freedom. (Emphasis mine)76

In this manifesto, form is cast in contrast to freedom. These politicized artists in Gwangju

target both the current art scene dominated by the formalists and the undemocratic

regime that bars freedom of speech. This dual emphasis contrasts with Reality and

Utterance’s move from the political concern to the artistic scene during the collective’s

inaugural meeting. Another considerable difference is found in the Gwangju artists’ use

of the term sanghwang (situation) instead of hy!nsil (reality). When “situation”—a term

imbued with a more acute sense of time-specificity and space-contingency—is put side

by side with a relatively general term like “reality,” it becomes apparent that “situation”

represents a particular understanding of the contemporary moment—one charged with

urgency. A “situation,” whose spatiotemporal coordinates transform rapidly like a

moving target, inevitably disallows a safe distance of critical position and affects the

artists’ conception of their role vis-à-vis the shifting social reality of the 1980s. The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
76
Oh Sang-gil, 20 seki hankuk misul untongsa (The 20th-Century Korean History of Art
Movement) (Seoul: ICAS).
 65
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particular direction that the everyday reality of Gwangju took circa 1980 was indeed

beyond what anyone had expected.

By May 1980, a citywide uprising in Gwangju affected the fate of Gwangju

artists, as well as everyone else in the city. Now praised as the Gwangju Democracy

Movement but at that time classified as a “red commies-instigated” insurgence, the

uprising of students and citizens of Gwangju was immediately met with the U.S.-backed

South Korean army’s violent crackdown and eventual slaughter of an estimated two

thousand civilians. The cruel, full-scale attack on the Provincial Hall in downtown, where

the last remains of a citizen army had retreated on the evening of May 18, marked the

complete defeat of the anti-state uprising, giving it the name of May 18, or 5.18. What

made the event a “state of exception” was the days-long isolation and insulation of

Gwangju from the rest of the country. During this period, state troops blocked all the

roads in and out of Gwangju, and the media, effectively controlled by the military

dictator, only provided lip service to the authoritarian rule.

Hong Sung-dam, a leader of Gwangjahy"p, would later recall the artists’

participation in the rapidly changing scene of May 1980 in his testimonial essay. By early

May, Gwangjahy"p had already held multiple meetings. The artists were fully aware of

the quickly changing atmosphere across the city, even though they went about their daily

lives, including tutoring youth at an afterschool art institution. The acute consciousness

that something dreadful could happen at any moment filled the air. Then, in one

afternoon, Hong heard the uproar from the streets. Without much time to think, he

quickly gathered his students’ “sketch books and all available papers” and hastily wrote
 66
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down, with a junior member of Gwangjahy"p, the “slogans shouted by citizen

protesters.” As the two brought the makeshift placards to the streets nearby and

distributed them to the activists in protest cars, more activists who had heard about this

began to flock. Running out of paper, the artists “managed, in a hurry and impromptu, to

write the slogans directly onto the cars.”77 On the following day, with more artists of

Gwangjahy"p gathered together, they divided tasks to efficiently produce the protest

propaganda, which was in increasing demand, as the conflict with the military troops

escalated and much more citizen protesters joined in the uprising. One task group would

spray slogans in “any tiny blank spaces” like pedestrian cement blocks and telephone

poles throughout the city, while another group produced placards on twenty rolls of

newly purchased muslin and distributed them to citizen armies in nearby

neighborhoods.78 Required to rapidly react to the situation rather than carefully reflecting

on it, the artists produced a range of “works” on a scale that no single individual artist

could achieve within the given time frame. Such collaborative practices—of tagging the

public space in a swift fashion without having the time to retain a critical distance—gave

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
77
The Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists, “ch‘ongtan sok #i p#rangk‘at#”(“Placards amid
Shooting”) in Kwangjumunhwa [Gwangju Culture] Vol.2 (Gwangju Minjung Munhwa
Y"nkuhoe, 1985. 6), cited in Choi Yeol, The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement
(Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994), 174.
78
The declaration of martial law by General Chun Du-hwan, who only few months earlier
requisitioned the Blue House via a successful coup d’etat, meant the blocking of any channels of
travel and transportation to Gwangju by tanks for a good duration, and the absence of domestic
media coverage of the brutal slaughter, barring the rest of South Korean citizens’ access to the
real time news from Gwangju. Photographs taken by reporters of the Times and other foreign
news agencies, as well as a native-Gwangju photographer’s furtive shots of soldiers beating or
shooting citizens on the streets in broad daylight, survive as rare visual evidence in the fashion of
George Holliday’s video of Rodney King.
 67
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these artists a concrete experience of working collectively to intervene in the reality that

was hy!njang.

Even though the artists’ participation in May 18 lasted only a few days, the

momentary lift from the everyday did not return them to the same ground. Most

obviously, the Gwangjahy"p’s inaugural exhibition, which had at first been planned for

some time in May 1980, never took place. Instead of organizing another art show, like

Reality and Utterance had done after the initial censorship, Gwangjahy"p performed a kut

(a shamanistic ritual of mourning) in an open field outside the city of Gwangju called the

Nampy"ng riverside field, wherein they read out aloud the group’s manifesto.79 The

discursive distinction of “situation of this land and this era”—the very word chosen to

describe reality in Gwangjahy"p’s first manifesto, and a term endorsed precisely for its

immediacy, specificity, and versatility—seems to have foreshadowed the fate of artists

who interacted with the extremely specific and relatively short-lived uprising of May 18,

1980. Their inaugural “exhibition,” too, was a direct response to the unprecedented

circumstance of post-May 18 Gwangju, in which the state’s war on its own civilians left

thousands dead and injured and tens of thousands traumatized by the loss of friends and

families. Both decisions—participating in the protest and holding the mourning ritual in

the aftermath—were decisive artistic choices that disrupted the pervasive understanding

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
79
Compared to ancestral worship of chesa, the shamanistic ritual kut is a more dynamic, versatile
stage of encounter between the dead and the living. It is a dialogical and unstable exchange of
gestural performance, rather than a customary worship, that is manifested by the artists in
Gwangju. Laurel Kendall, The Life and Hard Times of a Korean Shaman (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 1988), 7-8. Also see: Rogert L. Janelli and Dawnhee Yim Janelli, Ancestor
Worship and Korean Society (Stanford: Stanford University, 1982).
 68
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of descriptive time-space and repurposed it to open up a new perception of here-and-now,

hy!njang, with a possibility of art’s participation in reinventing that present.

That art can be made outside art studios, exhibited outside art galleries, and

simultaneously experienced by an active, participating audience seems to have inspired

the artists to further invest in the art’s performative potential. On March 27, 1981

Gwangjahy"p decided to hold an outdoor show (yahoe ch!nsi) as the group’s second

“exhibition”: a choreographed spectacle with paintings on display, ritualistic

performance, and over a hundred attendees. This spectacle is different from the media

spectacle that Reality and Utterance feared and sought to fight. The type that

Gwangjahy"p forged—with the slogans, placards, and tags on the streets during May 18,

and in the open field in post-May 18—was one that created new intersubjective

togetherness for its participants. Either as a festive theater or a life-threatening (and also

life heightening) demonstration, the spectacle of collective performance recuperated the

kind of sociality that Debord diagnosed as lacking in the society of spectacle.80

In both making and sharing the spectacle, a new collectivity was formed, and a

different reality sculpted. Beyond the derogatory designation of simplicity and

utilitarianism, such a protest art therefore brings to light a conceptual importance to the

discussion of art, democracy, and communication (sot’ong) in 1980s South Korean art

scene—for it reconfigures the notions of viewership and authorship. Those on the streets

constitute an immediately established audience that demands of artists visual markers that

amplify their dissent on the streets. The minjung (people)-versus-taejung (masses)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
80
Images are there not to alienate the viewers but to participate in the group whose success (that
is dynamics) depends on both its human participants and inhuman materials.
 69
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discourse surrounding the question of audience for Reality and Utterance is here cast in a

completely new light, as neither minjung nor taejung is a preconceived target audience of

the artworks; the audience is instead formed as the artworks are made. The relationship

between art and protest, too, like that between art and audience, is difficult to discern as

to which one is a cause of the other—or which one serves the other’s purpose. While

protest calls for art, art also calls for protest, as Namhee Lee and Chungmoo Choi’s lucid

analysis of madangg#k reveals. As an example that illustrates this new cultural

expression of counterpublicness that erupted in the 1970s and continued in the 1980s,

madangg#k was a form of “people’s theater” performed at the demonstration sites, often

leading up to, and preparing the audience for, the protests. As a reinvented form of

traditional folk drama, madangg#k demolished the division between actor and spectator,

between drama and ritual.81 Whereas madangg#k has been widely performed on

university campuses and at protest sites since the 1970s, the exponential growth in visual

markers that served similar goals of bringing the dissenting bodies together and

culminating in their embodied experience came late, with the advent of “art of hy!njang.”

These Gwangju artists were not alone in promoting this propensity to cooperate in

a multidisciplinary cultural setting of hy!njang that combined visual and performative

elements. Another collective called Tur"ng had, since the early 1980s, developed in

Seoul a similar method of artistic practice on the level of art education, ritual

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
81
Namhee Lee, “Between Indeterminacy and Radical Critique: Madang-gk, Ritual, and Protest,”
Ibid.
 70
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performance, and dependency on cultural activism.82 The members of Tur"ng, such as

Kim Bong-jun, formed an on-campus madangg#k collective in 1978-1979 and were well

informed with the 1970s reintroduction of folk culture as the potential rehearsal of anti-

statist resistance.83 Influenced by the 1970s activist culture, Tur"ng’s activities leading up

to its long-overdue inaugural exhibition in April 1984 projected the raw energy of

minjung culture with its shamanistic kut performance, regarding which Sung Wan-kyung

of Reality and Utterance famously commented that the event was unlike anything he had

ever seen in the art world.84 [Fig. 1.10] Gwangju artists’ replacing of the art exhibition

with kut was also influenced by 1970s activist beliefs in readapting pre-modern Korean

folk culture, especially the potential of madangk#k, the open-air performance in which all

members of the audience can participate. Tur"ng’s most prominent contribution to the

1980s art movement was the invention of k!lgae k#rim, to which I will now turn my

attention in the hope of further expounding the mechanism of hy!njang in protest art.

K!lgae k"rim: Collective Authorship and Viewership at Hy!njang

The newly formed genre of k!lgae k#rim (banner painting) was first devised by

Tur"ng, and then widely spread among activist art groups like Gwangjahy"p (1979-1985)
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
82
The understanding of situation is similar. The leader of Turong, Kim Bong June, just like Hong
Sung Dam, is said to have spread pamphlets/news about May 18 when he heard the news. Lee
Dae beom, The Legacy of Minjung Art (Korea National University of Arts, Masters thesis, 2010).
Lee’s thesis is the first substantial graduate-level study of minjung art, and one of very few
studies that pursue analyses beyond the face value of minjung practitioners’ words and written by
a generation that came of age in the 1990s when the degraded reputation of minjung art quickly
began to prevail.
83
Namhee Lee, Ibid.
84
Sung Wan-kyung “The Inaugurationof Turong—towards a life-art” in Minmung misul
modonism sigakyongu (Minjung Art, Modernism, Visual Culture) (Seoul: Yolhwadang, 1999),
72-6.
 71
!

and the Visual Media Research Group (1985-1989 as the later incarnation of

Gwangjahy"p). The term k!lgae k#rim is the Korean translation of the Sino-Korean word

kwaehwa, which literally means “hanging painting” and is exhibited outdoors for a

temporary congregation of a Buddhist ceremony.85 The first banner painting, showcased

in 1982, entitled Everything under the Sky (Mansangch!nha), therefore appropriated

Buddhist painting (taenghwa) in its composition and color scheme. [Fig. 1.11] The

painting is a composite of multiple narrative vignettes that illustrate one ill after another

of modern urban life. In this painting that merges the old and the new, the mix of bright

colors are appropriated from the convention of Buddhist painting, while the subdued

colors of grey tones are added as the new plastic element with which to depict city life.

Obliquely adapting the composition of the Buddhist “hell painting,” the painting’s upper

section depicts modestly dressed groups of people, some of whom are dressed in farmer

attire and dancing in a circle to hint at collective rural life. These protagonists are the

onlookers of the congested urban scene (captured in the middle section) and the

corruption and overconsumption depicted in the bottom section. Other human figures are

smaller in scale than these observers on the top layer, indicating that the painting, which

ignores aerial perspective, give weight to these onlookers who are supposed to reflect the

viewers’ identificatory point.

Beyond the composition and (lack of) perspective, the methods of collaborative

production used in making the banner are also inspired by Buddhist painting. In Buddhist

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
85
According to Choi Yeol, a minjung art critic and the founding member of the Gwangjahy"p,
the earliest modern adaptation of kwaenghwa for political purpose is during the Japanese colonial
period. Choi Yeol, ibid., 224-6.
 72
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methods, the main painter (chupil) makes the sketch and the outline, and others in the

group, the colors and shapes.86 In banner painting, the entire group first engages in a

rigorous discussion about the composition and allegories, after which the main painter

drafts a sketch for other members, who are permitted to comment on the location, size,

and shape, for example, of certain figures.87 The most important aspect about collective

production, which might seem self-explanatory but was never explicitly spelled out by

Korean art historians, is that in the 1980s many artists willingly abandoned their

individual authorship, at least partially if not entirely. Understandably, not all collective

activities in the so-called 1980s new art movement were on the same page about the

model of collaboration: while some collectives like Reality and Utterance and Imsulny"n

retained individuality, others like Tur"ng and the Visual Media Research Group, when

they worked on banner painting, relied on multi-authored processes of discussion, line

drawing, and coloring. There is no written record of who focused on which figure or

which corner; the boundary of authorship is therefore not known to anyone but is simply

remembered by these multiple co-authors who were present at the site of production. But

these authors themselves do not reveal much detail about individual contributions. As the

frequently rehearsed dictum “we all did it together” indicates, the boundaries of

individuals blurred amid their pursuit of collective authorship. One can easily imagine a

scene in which multiple artists are immersed in the room-size banner, all simultaneously

working on each corner and edge, feeling each other’s proximate presence but without
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
86
Choi Yeol, ibid.
87
This was the case for Visual Media Research Group and T‘omal (art collective on Chonnam
University campus) as the participating artist Hong Sung-min recalls. Author’s interview with the
artist on September 3, 2013.
 73
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the certainty of what their own contribution to the larger picture might look like when the

work is complete. The painting surrounds the individual bodies; the artist is within the

painting that envelops his body, as well as the bodies of his collaborators. [Fig. 1.12]

The renewed multiplicity—if not dissipation—of authorship is also evident in the

realm of techniques and use of symbols in the k!lgae k#rim practice. The techniques of

figuration as well as composition are recycled across different banners; slogans, symbols,

allegories, story vignettes and color schemes that are similar reappear in works executed

by divergent collectives. Sometimes the same set of artists recycle previously effective

motif in their new creation. It is as though the act of borrowing, copying, and repeating

gives the image of dissent the power of omnipresence, and in the process, individual

artists insert themselves into a larger collective of artists making the propagandistic,

protesting visuality. Reality and Utterance’s “la prise de parole” is an individual speech

addressed to an audience, responding to the emergence of individual liberalism (i.e.

individual freedom of speech) as a viable emancipatory claim with which to combat the

all-controlling singular body of the Korean ethno-nation imposed by the authoritarian

martial rule. But in precisely such a time, the practitioners of hy!njang misul (the art of

hy!njang) arduously formed an alternative vision of holding dear the ideals of collective

sociability.

Not only production but viewership, too, was achieved in a collective manner.

The visual materials made for protest sites, such as banners, flags, and large type posters

(daechabo), are meant to be displayed in a large-scale public space filled with different

groups of viewers and a range of diverse visual materials that are in constant motion.
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(Banner paintings rarely permit a one-to-one relationship between the viewer and itself,

lest it defeat the raison d’être of the banners.) In an open field, the protest artworks not

only delivered visual speech (par!n) with explicit messages linked to the specific purpose

of the protest, but also physically marked the space. The protest materials therefore set

the stage for something larger than a simple delivery of a speech; a banner, for example,

demarcated a site fully laden with a potential eruption of more dynamic sociability and

collectivity. They provoked an experience more visceral, bodily, and intersubjective than

intellectual. The metaphor of immersion—into the site (hy!njang) and situation

(sanghwang)—as seen in the site of production is therefore also applicable to the

audience’s viewing circumstances. There is no clear beginning—or end—of the picture,

for those who experience the same hy!njang. Where there seems little that is “internal” to

the art field proper, everything becomes more than art.

Indeed, the artists in the Seoul-based collective Kan!mpae, known for its

successful banner productions, considered the installation of banners at the demonstration

site as important as painting, arguing that activating the banner in the viewing site was as

important as producing one.88 How it was viewed when it was up for a brief period of

time and how it heightened the fervor of protest participants were certainly points not to

be missed. To this end, I would argue that a large banner painting’s value lies in its

spatiotemporal character—its ability to temporally create a common space of potentiality,

wherever it is hung. My analysis of the banner painting therefore lays emphasis on the

sociological and phenomenological aspect of collective production and reception at the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
88
Minjung Misul (Minjung Art) (Minjung Misul Pyonjiphoe, 1985), 47-50.
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expense of art historical visual analysis of what resides within the picture frame. Even

though the aesthetics of banner painting has preoccupied minjung critics like Choi Yeol

of Gwangjahy"p, who values the “dynamic movement” in the composition and the

figuration of a “faithful archetype of minjung,” I believe that the “convivial energy of life”

(sinmy!ng) that Choi locates within the picture frame actually lies more vividly outside

the picture—in the people who make the picture, the people who experience the picture,

and the picture’s ability to produce a protest site (hy!njang) that is a contemporary reality

in the act of being shaped.89

Many minjung cultural theorists favored “convivial energy of life” (sinmy!ng) as

the inherently Korean value rooted in the pre-modern past native to the Korean peninsula.

As such, “sinmy!ng” was a concept with which to oppose the invasion of modern

Western values characterized by terms like “scientific progress,” “industrialization,” and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
89
The criteria for “good” banner painting seem to have existed for minjung practitioners such as
Choi Yeol, a founding member and a critic of the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists. The
figuration and schematization of minjung as the oppressed but hopeful people, as much as the
collaboration-based production methods, seem to carry the most significantly cherished value in
minjung art for Choi. As apparent from The History of Korean Modern Art Movement, in which
Choi establishes twentieth-century Korean art’s genealogy with the KAPF, Reality Group, and
the new art movement of the 1980s, the “movement” for Choi is always a sociopolitical as much
as aesthetic endeavor. The tradition, whether Buddhist or folk, is an entity to be always
reinvented for contemporary re-use, which explains why Choi seems to give more value to
T‘omal’s banner Battle of Minjung (1984) than Turong’s Everything under the Sky (1983).
Originally over 14 meters-long, Battle of Minjung is another early banner painting whose
distinction from the previous ones is outstanding in its composition, because this banner breaks
ties with Buddhist painting by composing the picture’s left half with the conglomeration of past
and present forces of minjung that push away the disorderly composite of Western influences (e.g.
Coca Cola, pornographic magazines, the Statue of Liberty located on the right hand.) The
muscular “King of Heaven and Earth” leading the troops of present-day minjung and past
minjung struggles (e.g. the general Chun Bong-june of the 18th peasant revolution) leans over to
the right and crosses the central axis of the painting, thus giving a sense of dynamic movement to
the picture. It is the depiction of a future revolution, a strong will rooted in the present moment,
and a history of Korean grass-root revolts. Choi Yeol, 32-49; 67-75.
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“individualism.” As the ultimate value to pursue—sometimes like a dogma—the

intangible and indefinable notion of sinmy!ng reappears in minjung practitioners’ writing

and talks. In the 1980s, if one could argue that the painting (or woodblock) has sinmy!ng,

then it must be a good, valuable example of dissident art. When examined now, from a

distance of thirty years, “sinmy!ng” seems to have functioned as a keyword inundated

with multiple significations. With sinmy!ng, minjung artists sought to express their

loyalty to the pre-modern, folk tradition (seen in mask dance, shamanistic ritual, the

humor in the everyday) and also to the utopian hope of surviving the era and changing the

dire reality.90 The conceptual significance imposed onto these sentiments by the 1980s

activists—and even today by many Koreans as the inherently Korean sensibility—

necessitates a deeper investigation, which I believe should happen alongside such notions

as affect, ethics, sociability, counterpublicness, collaboration, participation, and de-

authorization. In this chapter I emphasize that it is not within the picture frame (i.e.

composition, color scheme, lines of two dimensional works like banner painting, etc.) but

in the three-dimensional, time-dependent process of production and exhibition that the

moment and site of performative sinmyông in 1980s dissident art lies.

What most evidently supports my argument is the 1994 retrospective of minjung

art at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea The 15 Years of Minjung Art

(1980-1994), which brought not only oil paintings and collages by Reality and Utterance,

but also the few protest banner paintings that survived weathering and confiscation. In the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
90
Sinmy!ng is often discussed in relation to han, which means an amalgam of anger, frustration,
and sadness originating from oppression. Sinmy!ng and han, the two sides of what composes
Korean sentiment, always come as a pair, because han is always already imbued with a little dose
of sinmy!ng and vice versa.
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gallery the banner paintings seemed deprived of their power, even though what was

represented in the picture frame remained the same. To many critics and artists, this

exhibition, sponsored by the newly democratized government, was considered, with a

degree of truth, the “funeral” of minjung art that announced the final end of dissident art

that flourished under authoritarianism.91 [Fig. 1.13] The entry of the previously counter-

governmental production into the acme of state art institution that is the National

Museum falls prey to such a criticism, even though the South Korean state in 1994 is not

the same as that in 1987. On a symbolic level, the exhibition signifies the

institutionalization of minjung art or the by-now democratic state’s acceptance, approval,

or even praise of the art of democracy fighters that the governmental leaders began to

identify with. The dissidents have become the institution, as if anticipating Andrea

Fraser’s institutional critique— “we are the institution.”92 But a more art historical,

semantic, and material tack of analysis reveals that this entry was fatal to the works

because the particular use values of the art objects—either as a politico-aesthetic speech

housed in Reality and Utterance’s thematically organized exhibitions on issues of the

Korean War and urbanization or as a spatial marker of protest sites in the case of banners

by Kanumpae or Gwangjahy"p—were effectively lost in this large-scale exhibition. An

analogy can be found in cases in which ethnographic objects with context-based use

values gain formalistic values but lose ritualistic values upon entering in the white-cube

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
91
Sung Wan-kyung, “The Meaning of A Memorable Event: 15 Years of Minjung Art” in Gana
Art Journal (March/April, 1994). Interview with the author, June 8, 2012 and September 17,
2013.
92
Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum, Vol.
44, Iss. 1 (New York: Sep 2005), 278-285.!
 78
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gallery.93 In the case of minjung art, a more substantially detrimental effect was the

museum’s institutional production of a general “minjungness” by interpellating the

multifaceted and often factional collectives who worked in and across multiple provinces

under a singularized national battle against authoritarianism. All the art works and the

artists have become the national heroes venerated on the national altar by 1994.

Off the Grid of Art History

The work of Gwangjahy"p have evaded a deserved historicization, because their

activities fell off the grid of art history, and their next steps seem only to have widened

their distance from art establishments. In 1980-2 the artists indulged in a rigorous process

of un-educating (of the modernist abstraction and individual authorship taught at art

school) and self-educating (of techniques such as Buddhist hanging-scroll painting and

woodcut prints that could be appropriated for new uses), sometimes under the reinforced

crackdown of any dissident activities under the then newly instituted martial law.94

Starting in August 1983, the collective Gwangjahy"p actively practiced popular

education in Simin Misul Hakgyo (Citizen Art School), which propagated the methods of

collective production and sharing. In 1985 Gwangjahy"p was renamed the Sigak

Maechae Yonguso (Visual Media Research Group), which functioned as the visual arts

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
93
On this topic, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Ritual: Inside Public Art Museums (New York:
Routledge, 1995) and Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations eds. Ivan
Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Thomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006).
94
In 1982 Hong learned the techniques of painting Buddhist painting (taenghwa) at a Buddhist
monastery. “From May to Unification” Misul Undong (Art Movement) (Seoul: Kongdongchae,
1988), 54-66.
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division of the cultural activist group Il kwa nori (Work and Play) and operated alongside

other divisions like publication, mask dance and theater.

In order to understand the alternative model of art and public Gwangjahy"p

engendered, it is instructive to turn to the particular example of the Citizen Art School.

[Fig. 1.14] Sponsored by the Gwangju Catholic Center and held at its center in downtown,

the Citizen Art School proved popular with students, professionals, and homemakers in

Gwangju, who were not artists or art students. Every summer and winter in 1983-1986, a

total of 236 Gwangju residents signed up for the classes consisting of both theory and

practice. For example, the first Citizen Art School was held for two weeks during which

the two-hour morning sessions included lectures on folk art and the afternoons were

reserved for studio sessions. Members of Gwangjahy"p, such as Hong, had previously

made a living by teaching in private art institutions. [Fig. 1.15] But at the Citizen Art

School, the aim of the curriculum was not to reinsert these newcomers into the existing

art infrastructure; rather, it was to democratize the means of visual production:

Now is not the time when only poets can compose poetry and only painters can
draw pictures. Rather, the appropriate art of this era can be realized with an
attitude of respectfully understanding and sharing each other’s experience about
everyday survival… From now on what is at stake is not the function and
professionalism of art but its responsibility to express a total life of the given
period.95

Of course the act of expressing “total life” is not equivalent to producing a picture of life

as totality, because the foundation of Citizen Art School requires participation of multiple

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
95
Citizen Art School Manifesto (1983) as appeared in Choi Yeol, The History of Korean
Contemporary Art Movement (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994), 57-8.
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authors with multiple artistic objectives. Some woodblock prints depict the joy of daily

life, others the economic hardship of survival, and still others the traumatic residue of

May 18 for Gwangju citizens. [Fig. 1.16] Some prints share formal and narrative

similarity with the well-known woodcut series May by Hong Sung-dam and others. Hong

published his print collection as early as 1982 in the form of a calendar, a format that the

Citizen Art School repeated in 1984, for example, by publishing the exemplary works of

students in a calendar that accompanied a group gallery exhibition. The Citizen Art

School therefore put into practice the formation of an alternative network for distributing

images and stories produced by people. Here, the people as producers and consumers are

already both minjung (people) and taejung (masses) in the conjoined senses of the

political and popular potential.

Regarding the popularizing effect of arts and culture promoted by the School,

critic Won Dong-suk notes that the inception of the School signifies a shift in the 1980s

art movement. Won argues: if some artists previously posed as intellectuals and made art

in the name of expanding the realm of art for the people, a new breed of artists finally

began to merge the subject/object positions and allow the people themselves to make art

of their own.96 Won’s distinction between two notions of minjung—the oppressed people

to be portrayed in the arts (painting, fiction, poetry, etc.) versus the producers of the arts

in their own right—reflects the development of minjung literary theory, which in the

1960s sought a way to represent the figure of minjung and then in the 1970s made a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
96
Won Dong-suk, “New Tendency of 1980s Art: Beyond 1970s Art” in Minjung Art 15 Years:
1980-1994, 20.
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theoretical jump to privilege the writings by the workers and farmers themselves.97 It is

indeed the 1970s development of minjung cultural activism at large and especially its

embrace of theories of education, including Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed

(1968; translated to Korean by Catholic Press in 1979) that influenced the Gwangjahy"p

members. To these cultural activists, including the artists in Gwangju, the country’s

democratization required transforming social forms of interaction as much as it did

implementing regime change. By praising the model of the Citizen Art School and its

recognition of minjung’s productive possibility, Won also incidentally refers to the

different notion and role of artists envisioned by Gwangjahy"p. Artists are the

collaborators of minjung, the providers of platform, format, and modes (i.e. context, or

situation) with which people create their own narratives (i.e. content).98 What is

important here is that such a role can be repeated in different times and places. The

notion of reproducibility should be read as ingrained in the artistic practice. Rather than

being concerned about jeopardizing “originality,” these artists welcomed the possibility

of reproducing their practice elsewhere in a different context. The notions of

reproducibility and dissemination are important in Chapters 2 and 3, but here, in Chapter

1, the ability to generate a site—hy!njang—of such artistic activities is especially critical.

The artist’s selection of woodblock printing resonates with this particular

methodology. As a medium vastly promoted by 1970s cultural movement (and most

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
97
Literature on the theoretical transition is outlined in Lee Dae beom, The Legacy of Minjung Art
(Korea National University of Arts, Masters thesis, 2010).
98
My analysis here is influenced by Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics. Grant H. Kester,
Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004.)
 82
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prominently advanced by Oh Yoon in Reality and Utterance) for its inherent

reproducibility, woodblock printing can be characterized by affordability of materials

(compared to paint, brush, and canvas) and accessibility of techniques, rendering it

conducive to mass education. The combination of the medium specificity and the format

of “artists as context-providers” was rapidly reproduced in other cities like Mokpo, Iri,

and Jeonju in the Cholla Province of which Gwangju is a provincial capital. Repeated

anew in different locales, the Citizen Art School formed an interregional network that

operated simultaneously across the nation. The network was inter-institutional and inter-

disciplinary as much as intersubjective and interregional. The Citizen Art School always

relied on existing institutions such as the Catholic Center to operate, and such

organizational dependency was further pursued when some of these artists renamed

themselves the Visual Media Research Group, the “visual bureau” of the cultural activist

headquarter called Work and Play (Il kwa nori) in Gwangju. Likewise, Tur"ng too

submitted itself to the theater Aeoge, which functioned as the clubhouse for cultural

activism, and starting in 1986, held folk art classes (mask dance, woodblock prints, etc.)

for non-art experts in the Taehakro district of Seoul.

The talk of “participatory art” abounds in the South Korean art scene in the new

millennium, in which more and more artists cooperate with the cultural bureau of

municipal governments in setting up a space of collaboration between artists and local

residents. If the 2000s incarnation of such art has its partial origin in the problematic

policy of urban revitalization and “new public art” (the topic of Chapter 3), its 1980s

precedent is squarely located in an anti-statist, dissident art practice that, willingly and
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deliberately, stepped outside of art history as it was understood back then and, as a

consequence, changed the way art history has been written about this period.
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Chapter Two

Choi Jeong-Hwa’s Postcolonial Pop and the Mimetic Art:

The Long Decade of Cultural Globalization (1987-1997)

“We do not want to belong in any categorical classification” is how critic Yoon

Jin-seob, in 1987, described the motto of the “new generation artists” (sinsedae misulga),

a group of artists born in the late 1950s and early 1960s defined by their explosive energy

of youth, interest in commodity culture, and refusal to submit to any theory or ideology

(that is, pure art versus engagement, modernism versus minjung realism that divided the

contemporary cultural sphere in 1970s and 1980s Korea).99 In 1990, for example, when

the representative artist of this generation, Choi Jeong-hwa (b. 1961), organized an

exhibition with his friends titled Sunday Seoul (following the most widely read yellow

paper in 1980s Korea), he presented a titular work in the form of installation art that

might seem to fit the motto of fin-de-siècle. On seven shelves on a white wall, Choi laid

out silicon models of grocery items, such as a large beef brisket, a foot-long tuna, two

rows of thinly sliced pork belly, and three cabbages. These ready-mades are no

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
99
Originally written in 1987, and later quoted in 1990 writing. Yoon Jin-sub, “Aesthetics of
Denial” in Space Magazine (November, 1990). The theory about generation, which Karl
Mannheim’s sociology of generations has inspired (“Problem of Generations” of 1923), defines a
generation as a group that shares a common sense of destiny, but is essentially transideological.
In contemporary art, the 2009 group show Younger than Jesus revived generation discourse.
Lauren Cornell, ed. Younger than Jesus: The Generation Book (New York: New Museum;
Göttingen: Steidl, 2009). Either in the arts or in a general understanding of society, the generation
discourse is prominent in Korea, where the transideological characteristics of a generation is
complicated. The exception is the “new generation of the 1990s.” More on the generation
discourse in Korea is found in Sim Kwang-hy"n’s “Saedae #i ch!ngchihak kwa hanguk
hy!ndaesa#i chehaes!k ” (Politics of Generation and Reinterpretation of Korean Modern History),
Munhwa Kwahak. Vol.62 (Summer, 2010), 17-71.
 85
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Duchampian, because they lack an explicit statement or a provocation. [Fig. 2.1] The

same goes to My IQ Jump (1993), wherein fake gold trophies adorn a pyramid-shaped

pile of red plastic baskets for the work whose title refers to a monthly comic magazine

massively popular among the youth.100 [Fig. 2.2]

By 1990, however, Yoon made a more careful assessment: “their most fatal

shortcoming is in the lack of an ultimate direction, or prevailing uncertainty. As their

work advances further, they might be able to destroy authority and escape the

predetermined path; yet they cannot open a new horizon.” He then concluded:

The work of this new generation of artists is characterized by depersonalized

sensibility, de-mystification, and spiritual vacuum, revealing sensibilities related
to emptiness, anxiety, decadence, irrationality, and loss of faith that are found in
the artists’ writings; also demonstrated in this generation are discursive methods
represented by deconstruction of grammar, lack of stylistic sophistication, belief
in the absence of truth, intended vulgarity and popular appeals, and exposition of
maze-like consciousness, and post-modern sensibility.101 (My emphasis)

The art critic so easily dismisses the art of new generation artists by simply reiterating the

preconceived notion of post-modern absence of criteria, direction, and evaluative

system—hence the title of Yoon’s article, “The Aesthetics of Denial.” In hindsight,

Yoon’s criticism might lack an analytical poignancy as much directionless as he

describes these young artists’ activities to be, while effectively demonstrating the

confusion pervading both artists and critics in the face of a new era. The slow dissolution

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
100
Seen in retrospect, Choi’s unrivaled success in the globalizing art scene in the 1990s—
beginning in the mid-1990s in full-scale, and effectively separating him from any of his cohort,
except for Lee Bul, and minjung artists—did him more harm than good, resulting in the lack of
proper study of his oeuvre that in fact contributed to the larger art and cultural scene in South
Korea. Compared to Choi, I have a different evaluation of Lee Bul, whose artistic practice began
as an engagement with the notion of public and has become more and more introspective.
101
Yoon Jin-sub, “Aesthetics of Denial” in Space Magazine (November, 1990).
 86
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of the iron curtain in the tail end of the Cold War had immediate impacts on South Korea,

a country built on anti-communism and American aid. The 1988 Seoul Olympics, the

first summer game in post-war period to attract countries from both worlds, forced Korea

to open up its market to free trade. This atmosphere of “opening up” coincided with the

anti-statist, pro-democracy movement that finally toppled the military junta of Chun Du-

hwan in 1987.

This chapter traces the visual language and discursive frameworks that came out

of the initial chaos dominating the late 1980s to the late 1990s, or more precisely the

decade of 1987-1997, bracketed by the end of democracy movement and the beginning of

the Asian Financial Crisis. But this era and its art productions cannot simply be

characterized by its negativity, its rupture, or certain artists’ glamorous success in

penetrating, and joining, the newly formed circle of the “global” contemporary art scene.

Considering the discourse surrounding the “new generation artists”—and in this chapter,

artist Choi Jeong-hwa in particular—not as the symptom of a rupture but of a negotiation

between the old (the 1980s dissident drive in the minjung cultural movement) and the

new (the 1990s rise of post-authoritarian, global culture) in South Korea, I will

investigate the conflicted site of artistic productions (artistic activities by artists) and the

criticism of art (writings by art critics) that also sought a certain “opening.” This opening

is not only to the outside but also to the history of Korean art built in the 1970s and 1980s,

as discussed in Chapter 1. The case study in point of Chapter 2 is the art of Choi Jeong-

hwa, the representative artist of this generation who is now known as one of the most

prolific artists in contemporary Korean art history and as the moniker of “Korean pop art.”
 87
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In addition to introducing Choi’s works, lesser known as much as better known, I will

explore how critics in the collective Art Criticism Research Group (Misul Pipy"ng

Y"nguhoe or, in short, “Mipiy"n”) interpreted Choi’s art. Active between 1989 and 1993,

Mipiy"n members consisted of young critics born in the 1960s with a few senior

members, most notably Sung Wan-kyung (b. 1944) of Reality and Utterance (the most

well-known minjung art collective and the subject of Chapter 1) as well as art historians

like Lee Young-wook (b.1957) and Park Sin-!i (b.1955). The criticism activity of this

group is thus considered to have followed the overall political and ideological stance of

Reality and Utterance (1979-1989), even though Mipiy"n never officially joined the

Association of Minjok Art, the parent association of multiple minjung art collectives

including Reality and Utterance. My insistence on excavating Mipiy"n’s critical

responses to Choi’s art has a two-fold goal: firstly, I am interested in the shift in art

criticism of Choi’s art, a negotiated shift that marked the end of minjung ideology and the

beginning of what I call “post-minjung sensibility” in Korean art history; secondly, my

reading of Choi investigates these critics’ implicit yet under-developed designation of

emancipatory possibility in Choi’s art and how his work expands while altering the 1980s

notions of reality (hy!nsil and hy!njang). Choi’s art thus becomes not an illustration of a

certain Korean pop art after the American and British Pop Art, but an effective “post-

colonial pop,” which, I will argue, interacts with and replicates the shifting vernacular

street aesthetics of 1990s Seoul urbanscape.

Therefore, my attention to the development of criticism from the legacy of the

minjung art movement, as manifested in Mipiy"n, seeks to bring the legacy of the 1980s
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back to the discussion of the 1990s. Much of the forces dictating cultural productions

were new in post-authoritarian Korea, especially with the post-modern, global-scale

consumerism infiltrating the widest realm of the South Korean life; yet, the epoch

defining concept of the 1990s was “post-minjung” as much as it was post-authoritarian

and global consumerism. Following the critique of postcolonialism, postmodernism, and

other productive discourses of “posts” that have emerged in critical theory over the past

half-century, here “post-minjung” should be understood not as a signifier of a complete

break but rather as a discursive space in which we can locate the ambivalently shifting

relationship between the history and the ideal of the minjung social movement. I argue

that Choi’s counterhegemonic aesthetics in a variety of creative ventures (art installation,

public art, publication design, interior design, photo archive, etc.) proposes a new model

of producing “democratic art” beyond the minjung vocabulary as well as the dictatorial

oppression. To this end, I will not only outline and critique the discourse of “new

generation art” and the leftist art criticism of Mipiy"n surrounding Choi but also

investigate the notion of mimicry in Choi’s art through his replication of the

“spontaneous vernacular culture” in urban space. Temporality of ephemerality in Choi’s

art, I will argue, constitutes a new vocabulary of resistance that complicates the

monumentality of minjung resistance.

The New Generation Discourse and the Legacy of Minjung Art Criticism

The defining character of the new generation artists as an aimless explosion of

energy earned them as much praise as accusation; however, it was not only directed to
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artists. The discourse about art was subsumed to a larger discourse about the new breed

of Korean youngsters who were born in the 1960s, benefited from 1970s industrialization,

came of age in the 1980s, and were indulging fully in the flower of capitalism in the

Asian Tiger economy in the late 1980s and early 1990s.102 Beginning in 1990 and

reaching its height by 1993, the mainstream media’s reference to this generation as the

“new generation (sinsedae)”—or the Japanese-influenced neologism of “new mankind

(sinillyu)”—began to mushroom, often tinted with caution against its blatant lack of

morality and its decadent life style. Frequently considered to share similarities with the

American X-generation, the explosive energy seen in artists of this generation gave them

the fame of “enfants terribles.”103 Who, then, were these artists rebelling against, if not

their parents, when the new breed of consumers was considered to challenge the society

that built its economic comfort based on stoic, savings-based moralism of the Korean

War survivors? For artists like Choi, the perversion of fathers might have been the

existing art institution and the dominating style (figurative expressionism), as much as

the ideological battle between modernism and minjung art. For instance, while still

enrolled in college, Choi submitted a painting to the 1986 Jungang Art Competition for

the sole purpose of winning the prize, or outdoing the system of art competition. His

effort to faithfully render expressive brushstrokes—the style that he assessed the jury

would appreciate—gave him the third prize, which provoked him to try again, and more

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102
Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 2005).
103
The first use of this Francophone term might trace to the 2000 Ssamzzie Residency Show
titled Mus!un Ayit#l, the direct translation of enfants terribles, including artists from its first
residency program of 1998, such as Kimhongsuk, Park Chan-kyong, Chung Seoyoung, Rhii
Jooyo, Hong Sun-my"ng, and Ko Nak-b"m.
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rigorously, the following year and he ultimately seized first place. As Choi confesses

later in his quintessentially nonchalant manner, the award was valuable because of the

accompanying reward: an all-expenses-paid European trip—his first venture outside

Korea and Japan—at a time when the South Korean government’s loosening of foreign

travel restriction spawned a rising tide of curious young Koreans to begin backpacking

abroad.104

Even though this defiant act, coupled with the fact that Choi abandoned painting

for good shortly after 1987, may only perpetuate his fame as an unquestionably talented

young rebel, Choi’s post-1987 path resembles less the decadent life style of ultra-

consumerist, globe-trotting nouveau riches than the group of young critics in Mipiy"n

described it to be.105 It is important to note that, though their activities did not cross paths

until 1992-1993, Mipiy"n and Choi shared interests in creating a new path for the

aesthetics corresponding with the new era; but even then, the critics of Mipiy"n often

mis-recognized Choi’s aesthetics despite their comparable goals. Mostly born in the early

1960s like Choi, the critics who founded Mipiy"n aspired to continue hy!nsil-driven art

criticism by picking it up where 1980s minjung art criticism left off. Mipiy"n’s early

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104
This trip, as well as Choi’s trip to Japan in 1987, functioned as an important inspiration for
Choi for reasons that I will develop in the third section of this chapter on nostalgia and retro
culture.
105
Here I mean the “Orange Tribe (orenji jok),” who in 1992-1994 gave birth to Seoul’s
Gangnam district, its infamous fame of limitless consumerism and personal desires. The Orange
Tribe is stereotyped as a new breed of Koreans in their twenties and early thirties, comprising rich
college students, who sometimes studied abroad thanks to their nouveau riches parents, and
young professionals, who either inherit their family business or launch their own businesses with
their family money. The nuance of the self-made man, which Korean society has long cherished,
is absent; the emphasis on vulture-like consumerism and the decadent sex life of the “West”
prevails, hence the metaphor of American “orange,” which symbolizes foreign, as opposed to the
smaller clementine kyul of Korea.
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activities involved studying and translating texts of the Berlin-based philosopher

Wolfgang Friz Haug and his commodity aesthetics theory, which examines the reflection

of consumerist desire on the level of aesthetics by rearticulating Marxist commodity

fetishism.106 His deep and long-lasting ties with the Frankfurt School is thus not a

surprising factor, which brings Mipiy"n back to the territory of Adornian-inspired

minjung art criticism. The group’s investment in commercial circulation of images and

media spectacle seems only natural when considering that its central and outstandingly

senior member was Sung Wan-kyung, the former Reality and Utterance member who,

back in 1982, edited the publication Vision and Language: Industrial Society and Art

(Sigak kwa !n!: San!psahoe wa misul) by compiling texts by Korean critics (Won Dong-

suk and Kim U-chang) in addition to translated texts originally written by Euro-American

critics (Hans Peter Thurn, Ernest van den Haag, John Berger and Susan Sontag) and

reproducing the accompanying images (commercial advertisements, both Korean and

foreign).107 [Fig. 2.3] This publication, dating from the earlier days of Reality and

Utterance, proved a pivotal departure for Mipiy"n and their faith in the value of

commodity aesthetics theory. Mipiy"n critics likewise gravitated toward analyzing

advertisements, that is, two-dimensional and mechanically reproducible representations

of the commodities.

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106
The particular channel through which these South Korean critics have adopted Haug’s
scholarship as their own requires future research, but the highly visible focus given to Haug is
noteworthy.
107
The publication includes Hans Peter Thurn’s “Soziologie der Kunstvermittelnden
Institutionen” from Soziologie der Kunst (W. Kohlhammer, 1973); Ernest van den Hagg’s “Art
and the Mass Audience” in Art in America (July/August, 1971), an excerpt (chapter 6) from John
Berger’s Ways of Seeing (New York: Penguin Book, 1972), and an excerpt (chapter 1) of Susan
Sontag’s On Photograph (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
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The urgency to reconcile with the shifting aesthetic of everyday urban life and the

commodities available to masses in the industrialized society—taejung munhwa and/as

kitsch—prevail amid the group’s discussion mobilized by the determination to value and

learn from popular culture, albeit with a deep-seated discontent. Mipiy"n member Beck

Ji-sook’s elaboration of mass culture most eloquently contextualizes it in the Korean

scene. Unlike minjung practitioners, Beck does not apply the Adornian dichotomy

between art and urban visual culture wherein the former is in the threat of the latter;

rather, she commends the latter for its “honesty,” “authenticity,” and in short, for its

proximity to reality. For her, the city (tosi) is an “ethnographic” object, and the

Gwanghwamun Square in particular is deemed suitable for her ethnographic study.108

Right off the main gate of Gyeongbokgung (the Chos"n Dynasty’s main palace), the

Gwanghwamun Square is at once an elongated avenue, like the avenue of Champs-

Élysées, and Seoul’s main public space surrounded by historically important buildings

such as the Sejong Cultural Center for art and performance and the Tong’a Daily

Headquarter. Walking along the avenue to catch the last bus at night, Beck accounts, she

cannot help but compare the lights emanating from the Sejong Center (the epitome of arts)

and the electronic commercial billboard atop the Tong’a building (the pure commercial
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108
This ethnographic turn to the commercial and vernacular architectural structures in urban
Seoul rhymes with the rhetoric of Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of
Architectural Form (1972) by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour. The
English term ethnography is Beck’s own word written in parenthesis and in English alphabets.
But her Korean expression is “minjok ch!k (ethnic or ethnocentric),” instead of “minjokhak ch!k
(ethnographic).” The context of her writing informs me to designate the Korean word as a
mistaken translation of ethnography—an interesting mistranslation because her search for a
location of politics in the ethnographic analysis of urban space is precisely a move away from the
ethnocentric minjung politics. Beck Ji-sook, “Tosi taejung munhwa” (City Mass Culture) in
exhibition catalogue for City Mass Culture (Tosi taejung munhwa) at T"kwon Misulkwan, Seoul
(June 17-23, 1992), 6.
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enterprise for profit): “ironically…the latter light seems to possess the power of reality

(hy!nsil ch!kin him) than the cultural center’s light.”109 Beck’s continued praise of the

florescent light of the billboard for its value as “a thoroughly everyday culture founded

on the desire of the basic necessity [and] also a culture that does not pretend to sublimate

the everyday and that is straightforward and shameless.”110 Beck as a critic and curator

favors artists who, like herself, fully acknowledge their location of speech, which is fully

embedded within the urban life and its landscape, and yet simultaneously removed so that

they can make sense of the larger picture. This larger picture, unlike the ameliorative goal

of the 1980s, is never simply given, and it may never be obtained. But the process of

analyzing the society as a picture (or a text) in the hope of providing a prescription is

what Beck and others valued. Thus, this impulse to cognitively map media-driven mass

culture, on the one hand, puts Mipiy"n closer to the 1980s artists active in Reality and

Utterance and, on the other hand, distances it from Choi.

This is why when Lee Young June, another member of Mipiy"n, visited Choi’s

studio for the first time in 1991, he felt compelled to base his critique of Choi’s art on the

commodity aesthetics theory. To Lee, Choi’s work, which appropriates plastic imitations

of vegetables, plastic baskets, and plastic figurines, lends itself to an uncritical use of

fetishistic aesthetics of mass reproductions. He felt the urgency, with a certain excitement,

to strike up Choi with commodity aesthetics theory, something that could essentially

function as an acerbic criticism of Choi’s enterprise. But to the cynic critic’s

astonishment, the artist looked intrigued, not agitated at the critic’s aggression, and in a
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109
Beck, ibid., 8.
110
Beck, ibid.
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rather calm demeanor asked the critic to explain what he meant. The critic, who later

befriended the artist, let his guard down and explained “Marxism and sorts” (Lee’s words)

to the artist who seemed surprisingly captivated and at times nodded in agreement. This

episode of encounter reflects the existence of two different approaches to commodity

culture working in early 1990s Korea, and perhaps also the artist’s cool victory over the

suspicious critic armed, and overheated, with theory. Essentially, the difference between

Lee (the Mipiy"n critic) and Choi (the enfant terrible) was that between the outright

suspicion of the aesthetic quality of commercial products and the belief in the possible

play with the mass-produced objects. While the critics were stuck with the mandate of

critiquing commodity culture or how rapidly the global art market had infiltrated Korea

since the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Choi, through a play, found another way to experience

the 1990s material culture.

Another Mipiy"n critic Lee Young-chul even elaborates on the difference

between such terms like “subjective” interpretation and “objective” presentation of kitsch

materials. For example, artist Kang Min-kwon’s appropriation of a B-culture

pornographic calendar spread with a nude photograph of a woman—by painting over her

body the drapes of pre-modern fairy outfit and giving it the ironical title of Biographies

of Women (1990)—is representative of “highly self-injected, subjective expression,”

according to Lee. On the other hand, the display of mass produced objects seen in Choi’s

work is “cool-headed, objective kitsch.” [Fig. 2.4] The degree to which the artist

interrupted and manipulated mass culture seems important for these critics, who clearly

distinguished the “good” from the “bad” ways of being influenced by urban, mass culture.
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Interestingly, the images as representation of mass culture, rather than the objects

themselves, are more prone to apposite criticism of mass culture, and no less to the

recuperation of the highly self-reflexive subject of the critic. Such a dichotomy

parenthetically reveals a preconception of Mipiy"n critics, which limits the site of

engagement with mass culture to the realm of media representation (that is media

spectacle) than the mass produced objects themselves (that Choi in most cases

appropriates as materials of his artistic production).

On the question of agency, which is at the heart of the discussion for these art

critics, maintaining too much distance (the seeming lack of opinion) also means having

no distance at all (the fatal attraction to the mass culture), because they both signify the

insufficient presence of agency. Writing “Our Art and Kitsch” in 1992, art critic Kim

Hy"n-do expresses his sympathy for the “kitsch generation” such as Choi Jeong-hwa,

whose ceaseless incorporation of kitsch items into art means little more than the

generation’s internalization, and perhaps subconscious acceptance, of life filled with

“kitsch.” Here, the only way for this segment of artists to recuperate their agency is via

“help” from a critic, who would call attention to the sociocultural structure in which the

only value of the artist’s weak agency is drawn from their forthright honesty about the

fictionality of their identity and of the superficial world of mass commodities.111 Such a

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111
Kim cherishes the “honesty” of artists whose works reflect the “real” world (i.e. world
surrounded by popular and mass culture). Kim Hy"n-do, “Uri misul kwa kich’i (Our Art and
Kitsch)” Misul segye (Winter, 1992), 27-32. Lee Young-wook (1992/3) differentiates art criticism
that critique the life of Kitsch (or popularized forms of cheap, uninventive arts) and artworks that
performs such a critique; the latter, instead of transcending kitsch, demonstrates the inescapability
of kitsch in contemporary Korean life. Lee Young-wook, “K’ich’i Chinsil Uri Munhwa” (Kitsch,
Truth, and Our Culture), Munhak kwa sahoe (Winter, 1992), 1221-1236. The lamentation of this
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recuperative formula is faulty for two reasons: it not only assumes the critic’s external

position from which to critique the society but also considers the artist either as a medium

(that transparently reflects the society) or a symptom (that points to the larger social

force). And Choi, who never calls his work “kitsch” and who sustains his ambivalent or

rather fan-like affective relationship with the objects, colors, styles, and display tactics he

chooses to appropriate for all of his practices (art installation, film set design, interior

design, publication, etc.), is already outside the tradition of leftist moralistic hatred

toward mass culture that the Mipiy"n critics and others like Kim Hy"n-do, who have

inherited Marxist and (some) post-Marxist theories. The early readings of Choi fail to

attend to his innovative productions, precisely because the recognition of something new

in Choi quickly fell into a simplistic dismissal as a mere reflection of the early 1990s

post-modern South Korea.

Of course, few people back then, critics or otherwise, knew what to make of this

sudden arrival of consumer-driven post-industrial era, except to acknowledge its state as

an unprecedented, exceptional chaos. Even before someone like Fredric Jameson visited

Seoul in 1990 and declared that South Korea was both the first and second world and the

third world, everyone whose daily life depended on the social fabric of South Korea

knew this unlikely hybrid as a fact.112 Then and now, to place art squarely within such a

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inescapability was earlier seen in the Reality and Utterance member Min Jeong-ki’s self-claimed
“kitsch paintings,” or “barbershop paintings,” that faithfully followed the naïve, ostensibly
untrained painterly application of cliché scenes such as the rural landscape or still life with
flowers.
112
As famously noted in the dialogue between Paik Nak-chung and Frederic Jameson during the
latter’s visit to Seoul in 1990, South Korea is in flux of both the first and second world and the
third world, posing as an exceptionally chaotic society that gives a complex texture to the post-
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vague grasp of the tumultuous years of 1987-1993 is only further barring any adequate

understanding of the art objects and their implications, aesthetic or social.113 In order to

shed new light on both Choi’s work and the cultural logic of 1990s South Korea (if there

is such a thing as a delineated “cultural logic”), it is therefore necessary to contextualize

the art critics’ emphasis on the hierarchy of copy and original firmly within the history of

postcolonial politics. Only then it becomes possible to reconsider the politics of Choi’s

aesthetics beyond the Greenbergian vilification of kitsch’s non-originality.

For these leftist art critics, the place reserved for kitsch in modern Korean history

is well-defined: the signifiers of modernism that originated elsewhere (read: the West or

Japan) was transposed to Korea only to be reborn as kitsch, that is, as the replicated form

of the original signifier but without the original signified. Or, in the Korean soil, kitsch

acquires a new signification—the lack, and subsequently a cover-up for the lack. For

example, as Sung Wan-kyung and Lee Young-wook note, the Korean abstract painting

signifies the lack of Korean-origin modernism, while the unusually extravagant

chandelier hung in a low-middle class living room is an effective and necessary cover for

the shoddy construction of the apartment itself.114 It truly is a fetish, a visual spectacle,

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industrial consumerist society because it also coexists with a third-world mentality. Paik Nak-
chung “Conversation with Frederic Jameson: Marxism, Postmodernism, and Minjok Cultural
Movement” in Ch’angchak kwa Pipy!ng (Spring, 1990), 291.
113
Literary theorist Ackbar Abbas’s analysis of image politics in pre-handover, 1990s Hong
Kong likewise makes the mistake of triumphing the postmodern superficiality as indicating the
absence of essence that is the Hong Kong identity. For Abbas, art reveals truth only in so far as it
is so blatantly fictional and postmodern. Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of
Disappearance (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997).
114
The story with the chandelier comes from Sung Wan-kyung’s biographical reference in his
essay on new generation artists. According to Donald M. Lowe’s three-level analysis of
postmodern commodity value, the chandelier is the signifier (the cultural value) of the signifier
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that sutures the lack. Yet, Mipiy"n members’ dystopian declaration—that all Korean

cultural forms eventually are kitsch and signify a lack—comes dangerously close to a

wholehearted internalization of the center-periphery power relations vis-à-vis the “West.”

In other words, even in lamenting the colonization of culture, these critics have deeply

internalized the colonial hierarchy, as if fulfilling the colonizer’s desire—what Homi

Bhabha terms “colonial mimicry,” which is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable

Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite.”115 Recognizing

the self (in the periphery) as the “other [who is] almost the same but not quite” (with the

center), the early 1990s art critics, as well as 1980s minjung critics, turned to an

obsessive and masochistic internalization of one’s own lack and, eventually, to a futile

search for a truth with which to fill this space of lack. The battle with kitsch for neo/post-

colonial Korea, in the 1980s or in the early 1990s, was thus an inevitable search for a

truth—the truth that would speak to the unjust history of modernization that was the

history of unequal subjugation and exploitation.116

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(the exchange value) of the signified (the use value or the accumulated labor). Lowe,
“Postmodenity and Postcoloniality,” Positions 1.1. (1993): 282-3.
115
Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 122.
116
Unlike theorists like Homi Bhabha and Judith Butler who in the early 1990s recuperated the
subversive power in mimicry—colonial mimicry, for Bhabha, as both “resemblance and menace,”
(123), and drag, for Butler, as expropriated act of gender performance—the Korean critics were
not quick to deconstruct the truth claims. The “correct version” of truth—or “our truth”—was
thus manifested in the various forms of the myth of self-creation and self-reliance, promulgating
the signifiers of minjung in their consolidated images, figures, and essential qualities such as the
moral superiority, ethnicity, and collective memory of oppression. Bhabha writes: “Under cover
of camouflage, mimicry, like the fetish, is a part-object that radically revalues the normative
knowledges of the priority of race, writing, history. For the fetish mimes the forms of authority at
the point at which it deauthorizes them. Similarly, mimicry rearticulates presence in terms of its
“otherness,” that which it disavows.” p.130.
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Here, I am not quick to criticize this history of Korean art criticism as naïve or

theoretically unsophisticated when juxtaposing them with postcolonial and postmodernist

theorists working in Europe and America at the time, like Bhabha and Butler, who found

in mimicry and drag the deconstructive potential to undermine the normative ideals such

as the white race and the heterosexuality. The Korean critics misrecognized Choi’s work,

not because they considered it a copy of the Western model, but because they did not see

that it was a copy of something else. When it comes to the history of modern and

contemporary art, Choi’s art thus complicates the center-periphery mimicry that Korean

art had with the imperial metropoles like New York, Paris, and Tokyo. It is not a copy or

a derivative or a “colonial mimicry” of American- and British-born Pop Art. As I will

reveal in the following section, Choi mimics the “spontaneity” of vernacular culture,

thereby beginning an effective critique of the colonial mimicry albeit a different one from

Bhabha’s. For Choi, it is the visual ways in which mass produced objects are presented

and used in the everyday urban space that he documents as street photographs and that he

replicates and mimics in his installation work, interior design, and curatorial projects.

Furthermore, the newly forged mimetic relationship—which moves away from the

center-periphery binary—serves in a more fundamental way a much-needed critique of

the internalized cultural flunkeyism hidden behind the excessive privileging of “Korean

essence” in the 1980s.

The Vernacular and the Mimetic

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Choi calls his street photographs the “image collection.” The photo archive’s

sheer size gives it a weight, revealing the degree to which Choi cherishes the sceneries

and objects of his fascination, and moreover desires to give them eternal life in the ways

they are used in situ. These images are not only collected into his archive but are shown

on his website and during his public talks. Those who have attended Choi’s artist talks,

which he gives rather frequently, must remember the abundance of Choi’s street

photographs—sometimes over a hundred slides are shown in one sitting—which easily

triggers our admiration for the artist’s diligent fanaticism.117 One photograph, dated

March 30, 1987, captures the back of a peddler’s handcart full of household items. [Fig.

2.5] From bright blue buckets to stainless strainers, orange dustpans, hot pink and blue

plastic packing strips, and heavy-duty broomsticks with wooden handles and neon green

plastic brushes, the peddler has it all. The contour of the cart is not visible, hidden

beneath the cluster of domestic articles. Even the cane of the peddler, from which he

gains the much-needed extra push forward, is barely seen. The large part of the

composition devoted to objects, in addition to their vibrant color palette, rivets our

attention to these plastic things, especially because the background is an otherwise banal

street scene of Seoul, or any other city in Korea. A non-descript, five-story brick building

is simply there. A large blue truck, frequently seen on the streets even today, stands still

on a dark-grey asphalt road, or it was moving so slowly that Choi was able to capture it

without a blur. This photograph, like dozens of others, demonstrates that Choi is
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117
The immense scale and the obsession with which Choi accumulated street photographs as well
as the particular aesthetics (cropping, composition, colors, and a focus on objects) were well-
known among the circle of contemporary artists in Seoul. Author’s interview with Jeon Yong-
suk.
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inherently drawn to a group of objects that together form a world of their own, often

made in plastic with a vibrant color scheme. Interacting with one another, these objects

shape a scene with a certain narrative of togetherness thanks to the composition. Each

one of the photographs represents the explosive, live energy of street life—and together,

in their seeming infinity, they compose a world of objects, colors, and food items that

Choi likes to be surrounded by and rubbed against, while constantly interacting with

them.118

The absence, or partial presence, of people in the photographs is typical of Choi’s

documentation of the vernacular life of objects. Another photograph that Choi almost

always shows in a public lecture is that of a chair. [Fig. 2.6] It is not a usual chair; it is a

composite of three broken chairs assembled by someone who was in need of a simple

seat. An orange plastic chair without legs but with its seat and back intact is tied to a stool

with four legs with the help of cheap white plastic strips. Another set of legs had to be

tied to the chair’s malleable back to make it stay straight. This, basically a combination of

six wooden legs and one legless chair, is what Choi proudly introduces to us as his

“master instructor,” or sabu in Korean, with the connotation of the mater-disciple

relationship in martial arts. By this appellation, Choi pays homage to the talent of the

street that cleverly assembles the broken, seemingly useless items, giving them a new

life. Here, Choi’s philosophy coincides on many levels with that of Michel de Certeau

and Henri Lefebvre in their emphasis on the “practice of everyday” and the

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118
Lee Young-june, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” Imichi Pip!ng: Kkaetip m!ri put!
inkongoeis!ng kkachi (Image Criticism: From Leaf-style Hair to Satellite) (Seoul: Noonbit
Publishing, 2004)
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“representation of lived space.” Not coincidentally, the first Korean translation of

Lefebvre’s 1968 Everyday Life in the Modern World came out in 1990, and the Cultural

Studies turn in South Korean academia and the increasing attention paid to popular

culture began to ruminate in the early 1990s.119 The creative use of urban space and

commercial objects constitutes a production of new meanings and values—and

eventually a new social space. In the lived urban site, the model of anti-dominant practice

is born, conjuring moments and space of resistance against the normative use.

But more importantly, what Choi’s photographs are best at capturing are Korean

vernacular culture and its post-colonial inflection.120 If popular culture and mass culture

are implicated in the binary of high/low, the notion of vernacular culture is burdened with

another related binary of power: that of center/periphery with the spatiotemporal

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119
La vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne by Henri Lefebvre (originally published in French
in 1968, English translation published in 1971; the Korean translation published in 1990).
Everyday life in the modern world. trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Hy!ndaesaegye #i ilsangs!ng translated by Park Ch"ng-ja (Seoul: Saegye Ilbo, 1990). These
practitioners including the by-then former members of Mipiy"n like Lee Young-wook translated
parts of de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday in 1994 to be included in an anthology Culture,
Everyday, Masses: 8 Inquiries about Culture with also featuring the writings of Stuart Hall, John
Fisk, Tony Bennett, etc. Even though these critics did not consider the everyday theory to shed
positive light on the “kitsch generation,” they were aware of it and the discourse was part of the
early 1990s circle of criticism, both in art and literature.
120
Critics Koh Dong-yeon and Shin Jeong-hoon have argued this before elsewhere. Koh Dong-
yeon, “1990 ny"ndae ret!ro munhwa !i t!ngchang kwa Choe J"nghwa !i p!llas!tik paradais!”
(The Emergence of Retro Culture in the 1990s and Jeonghwa Choi’s Plastic Paradise), Hankuk
kicho chohy"ng hakhoe, Vol. 13. No. 6 (December, 2012), 3-15. The English translation of the
title is Koh’s. Shin Jeong-hoon, “K"ri es" paeuki: Choe J"nghwa !i dijain kwa sopiju!i
tosiky"ngkwan” (Learning from the Street: Choi Jeong-hwa’s Design and Consumerist Urban
Landscape) in Sidae #i nun: Hankuk k#nhy!ndae misulkaron (The Eye of the Period: Theorizing
South Korean Modern and Contemporary Artists) (Seoul: Hakkochae, 2011), 309-343. While
Koh links the retro impulse in an earlier Choi with what she understands with the recycling
impulse of a later Choi and Shin’s article effectively charts the resistant spirit in Choi’s objects,
but both do not situate Choi within the larger discourse of art, urban space, and politics of
minjung/post-minjung that my chapter seeks to parse out.
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associations therein.121 According to the Latin etymology of “verna” as in a “home-born

slave,” the vernacular gains its connotation of being “native” against the imposed, foreign

power. As such, a cultural practice—i.e. architecture, art, language, and aesthetic

sensibilities—can become “vernacular” (i.e. indigenous, home-grown) only when another

culture from elsewhere asserts its normativity. For Miriam Hansen in particular,

vernacular is helpful to understand in the context of “vernacular modernism,” which she

theorizes as “a cultural counterpart and response to technological, economic, and social

modernity (emphasis mine).”122 Both photos, of the peddler and the chair, are

“vernacular” not only for their presence in the everyday street life and outside the modern

institution of high culture, but also, more importantly, for their opposition to the

increasing dominance of sleek, glass-covered skyscrapers and minimalist interior designs

most aptly simulating the logic of global finance capital in 1990s Seoul. For instance, the

249 meters-high, or 816 feet-tall skyscraper called “6.3. Building” in the financial district

of Yeouido and designed by the Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill, was completed in 1985, setting a standard for all other glass towers to spring up

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
121
In language, for example, a dialect can be a dialect only in so far as there is the “standard”
form of speaking that language. Kobena Mercer, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures. ed. Kobena
Mercer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; London: Institute of International Visual Arts, c2007).
122
An advocate of the term vernacular modernism rather than popular modernism, Miriam
Hansen writes: “The dimension of the quotidian, of everyday usage, combined with the
connotation of language, idiom, and dialect, makes me prefer the term vernacular, vague as it
may be, over the term popular, which is politically and ideologically overdetermined and
historically just as unspecific…I develop the concept of vernacular modernism, as a cultural
counterpart and response to technological, economic, and social modernity.” Hansen, “Fallen
Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism” Film
Quarterly 54.1 (Autumn, 2000), 10-11.
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in Seoul and to fulfill the desire to welcome the yet once more improved capitalist (post-

)modernism.123

Noting the vernacular nature of Choi’s work, critic Lee Young-june, the cynical

critic who gradually became Choi’s closest friend, introduces the term Chasaengch!k

munhwa, which he translates to English as the “spontaneous culture” and which refers to

an uncompelled and unforced manifestation of cultural activity. Spontaneity, Lee argues,

describes the type of cultural practice that Choi cherishes—the kind that has “actively

evaded the structure, standard, codification and such, which intellectuals and cultural

professionals define and according to which they rate [the works’ value].”124 The color

blue, so vivid without a single trace of fading, found in the large tarpaulins to cover

goods in traditional markets, such as that of the Namdaemun Market in Seoul or the

Moran Market in Sungnam, is an illustrative example suggested by Lee as having vibrant

life energy that is only possible because its maker did not consult the blue of “van Gogh

painting or Koryo Dynasty celadon vases.” This absence of reference is not obtained

automatically or naturally. Even if it may have been caused by a lack of knowledge, it is

an ignorance accompanied by an active will not to copy, follow, and emulate the

ostensibly superior forms of precedents; it is a refusal to practice a “colonial mimicry.”

From this refusal, we can thus locate an ample effort of resistance and alternative spirit

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
123
Not that Korea has not undergone modernity of the early and mid 20th century, but the changes
in the early 1990s were immense. Only in the post-Olympic era, the homogeneity of glass-and-
steel towers hovering over previous building structures has become a norm. In the pre-Olympic
era, technological modernism was signified by the Corbusier-inspired concrete block buildings
such as the Seun Arcade and the Samik Apartments constructed in the 1960s and 1970s. The shift
to International Style occurred, for Korea, in the mid-1980s.
124
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” 218-219.
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because such a defiant move against the dominant always requires a spirit of resilience,

persistence, and tenacity. In other words, even though that which is spontaneous does not

express its intention to claim resistance, it is full of antagonistic power because, as Lee

claims, it “escapes all the powerful forces of dominance and insists on hanging in there”

in each instance of its iteration.125

What lies behind Choi’s ostensibly casual remarks about his preference for certain

things, is the fundamental desire of the artist to center the new relationship of art and life

on the visuality of such “spontaneous” aesthetics that disrupts the presently dominant

hegemonic system. With the act of archiving scenes and objects imbued with spontaneity,

he seizes the fleeting moments of counter-hegemonic urbanity, only to share the

photographs with even more viewers in a range of settings like public talks, books, essays

in magazines, and artist websites. To this extent, I would advance my argument so far as

to insist that the enormous amount and equally vast kinds of Choi’s artistic projects—

publication design, interior design for bars and cafes, architecture planning, curating

cultural events like experimental performance and independent music concerts, and art

directing for cinema, as well as producing installation art pieces—concerns the central

strategy of Choi’s productions: the broadest possible dissemination of the spontaneous

counter-hegemonic sensibility through the strategy of replication and mimicry.

If Choi’s street photographs represent his activity of fishing the aesthetics of

spontaneity from the urban streets, he mimics such aesthetics in both his installation art

and interior design. The ways in which the colorful plastic and nickel-silver plates spread

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
125
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa,” 219.
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over the market floor and form an organized chaos [Fig. 2.7] are transferred to a light

fixture installation in a gallery or a lighting device in the café Plus Minus, whose interior

Choi designed in 1994. [Fig. 2.8 and Fig. 2.9] Choi has always engaged with a broad

spectrum of activities that might evade the categorization of art, which is most apparent

in the fact that Choi made his fame as an interior designer in 1987, when he joined an

interior design firm called A4 before he founded his own in 1991. At a time when cafes

in Seoul were undergoing major stylistic renovation, Choi participated in designing a few

that, instantly or gradually, became cultural hubs in Hongdae and Taehakro, the two

neighborhoods in Seoul housing a cluster of universities. As college student-driven

districts, Hongdae and Taehakro are two of the half dozen districts most prone and

vulnerable to up-to-date fashion and style in the Seoul metropolitan. But the Choi-

designed cafés stood out as an anomaly at the time of the shift from tapang (literally “tea

room”), typically displaying chunky sofas and dim lighting, to k’ap’e (café), filled with

light filtered through large glass windows for the youth and young adults. In short the

brightness and transparency of international style was the language for interior design at

this time. In the café/bar Ozone executed in 1991, Choi, by contrast, utilized recycled

wood panels and bars to build a wall, leaving bare the uneven texture and sometimes

discoloration of the used wood. Long town hall tables make the seating communal, not

private. What is most peculiar about the use of material and design in Ozone is in fact the

chairs, which resemble the three foot-long benches quoted, or perhaps recycled, from the

culture of p’ochangmach’a (literally meaning a food truck with a makeshift roof, to

indicate Hakka food stalls) and wrapped up with cheap, brown packing tape at a time
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when the previously ubiquitous scenery of p’ochangmach’a, along with tabang, began to

disappear from the Hongdae neighborhood. [Fig. 2.10]

When fragments of vernacular architecture are caught on Choi’s radar, they make

a return as an installation or as furniture in Choi’s interior design. Mimicry is as much a

raison d'être as a tactic of prosperity. Such a mechanism with a certain “belief” in

mimicry therefore reveals that the criticism of Choi’s work on the basis of the derogatory

conception of copy, such as the criticism by Mipiy"n members, is completely unfitting.

For Choi, a claim to originality always gives him discomfort; for example, he is always

reluctant to insert his signature to installation works, even when museums request it upon

acquisition. He also welcomes the copies of his “copy aesthetics”: the discovery that a

counterfeit of his moniker installation—an inflatable flower sculpture—was made in

China, where a patron hired a Chinese artist to produce a “Choi Jeong-hwa,” thrilled the

artist so much that he added the very work to his own portfolio (instead of filing a lawsuit

against the parties involved).126

When compared minjung critics and Mipiyon members’ understanding of Korean

culture as kitsch (the formal copy of an original), Choi’s mimetic art advances a different

logic of mimetic relationship. What Choi tends to replicate is not the form of the signifier

but the newly acquired signified by the activities of use or display. In the case of the

plastic baskets in My IQ Jump (1993), what is replicated is the spontaneous way in which

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
126
Choi’s interview with Im Geun-jun in March, 2013, as a public event attended by author. His
1992 interview with Kim Mi-kyung was titled “Oh, there too goes my work!” and indicates the
two-way mimicry constituting his art-making. He is always busy and diligent to learn from the
streets, and does not shy away from claiming the aesthetics that he likes, or he would’ve created,
as his “work.”
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they are displayed en masse in the market or on the peddler handcart, and not the original

use of containing things within the basket. The amalgam of broken chair parts is an

inspiration (or a “master instructor”) precisely due to its roughly composed, spontaneous

togetherness, which Choi repeats in his clever combination of objects and materials for

interior design. Choi’s work essentially replicates the situation in which a “look” delivers

a new signified, that is, the aesthetics of spontaneity; all copies are thus re-contextualized

in each situation in which the visual aesthetics of spontaneity is re-enacted.127 In short,

Choi’s productions are not mere reproductions of an existing art style per se or an object;

instead, they are enacting an active mimicry with the vernacular manifestation of

spontaneous culture, which sits on the changing commodity culture, the shifting

urbanspace, and the evolving subcultural scene in certain neighborhoods in Seoul.

No pre-set formula that Choi defines—or I would dare to define—as constituting

“spontaneous culture” exists. Yet, it is certain that the formally fundamental elements of

color, rhythm, and composition play a significant role in making a cultural manifestation

spontaneous. Depending on how it is displayed and contextualized within the given

environment, any object or material can trigger the beholder to experience the aesthetics

of spontaneity. The objects that might not resemble materially can also exude a similarly

spontaneous air; in other words, in a given setting two different objects could “look

similar” to each other while looking spontaneous. In the range of mediums and practices,

Choi has developed what Walter Benjamin has conceptualized as “mimetic faculty”—the

“gift of producing similarities” and “the gift of recognizing them”—what we humans

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
127
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge,
1994), 86.
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practice through dance, astrology, and even language, such as children’s mimicking

animate and inanimate beings, astrology’s equating the stars with humans, and shamanic

mimicry of non-human creatures.128 Many of the words used by Choi to summarize his

artistic philosophy are examples of onomatopoeia, the foremost instance of linguistic

mimesis per Benjamin: saengsaeng (dynamic), singsing (fresh), ppag#lppag#l (wavy or

crowded), jjamppong (mixture or medley), nalcho (counterfeit), !ngt!ri (hack or rubbish),

saeksaek (diversity, a light breath, or repetition of the Sino-Korean word for color/lust),

pusil (bankrupt or ruin), wak#lwak#l (crowded), and more. Some considered

quinessentially and purely Korean (read: non-Sinophonic or non-Anglophonic) while

others, to a certain degree, considered vulgar in their status as slang, these onomatopoeia

are all embedded in a rhythmic repetition or can be uttered with a playful emphasis in the

tone. (Curiously, minjung cultural practitioners never played with onomatopoeia in their

emphasis on the essence of “Korean culture,” as if they were uncomfortable with non-

serious playfulness and lightness.) But by and large, the mimetic aesthetics of Choi is

manifest most powerfully when the agency of Choi (as an artist and as an author)

becomes weak because he seeks to be similar to the objects he likes. The identification is

neither to a Western model of art-making nor to what is “inherently Korean” as in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
128
Walter Benjamin, "On the Mimetic Faculty," Reflections. (New York: Schocken Books, 1986),
331-6. According to Chungmoo Choi, minjung practitioners’ use of shamanism and magical
realism can be explained through the Benjaminian mimetic faculty and “nonsensuous
similarities” that trigger associations that are not obvious or rationally comprehensible. Mimesis,
as Choi argues, prevailed as a minjung counter-narrative strategy to put an end to the “endless
reproduction of simulacrum and its hidden violence” that is colonialism and imperialism. I would
argue that Choi Jeong-hwa’s mimesis likewise disrupts what Chungmoo Choi calls the pastiche
of imperialism, by discovering a new formula of mimetic relationship and pressing hard on the
vernacular culture of urban streets; but the lack of narrative in Choi’s art defies a direct
comparison between Choi and other minjung practice of nonsensuous similarities. Choi, “The
Discourse of Decolonization and Popular Memory: South Korea” Positions 1.1. (1993): 95-6.
 110
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minjung art, but is to the spontaneously erupted environment composed of objects that

dissipates into, literally, the urban environment.129

Choi’s mimetic art, and its radical recontextualization of postcolonial politics and

oppositional aesthetics, is effective at pointing to the possibility of envisioning politics

that do not begin with the notion of human agency. In other words, rather than asking the

questions of labor, nation, and ethnicity that culminated into the notion of oppression

strictly tied to the figuration of suffering minjung, Choi’s art demonstrates that resistant

politics can be counter-hegemonic without reciting counter-narrative or without forming

counter-memory as a narrative. In the absence of narrative and figuration, other sensorial

aesthetics take center stage. Soon afterwards, by 1994, critics in Korea began to see

Choi’s work in a different light, recognizing a potential, in Choi’s art, to reinvent the

political art after minjung art—or, even further, to re-evaluate the legacy of minjung art

itself. One can say that minjung politics is a lens through which to analyze Choi’s art. For

the reasons that I will explore in the following section, it would not be incorrect to argue

that Choi’s art brought the discourse of minjung politics to another level. Without the

figural depiction of minjung and its suffering, the “creative potential” of minjung erupts

from the dynamic formal, material, and spatial elements in Choi’s work.

Temporality of Resistance

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
129
Roger Caillois discusses the depersonalizing effect of mimesis. Although he considers this as a
disease, in the name of psychasthenia, the relationship between renunciation and mimesis is
helpful to understand the weak authorship that Choi promotes. Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary
Psychasthenia” (1936) translated by John Shepley in October 31 (1984),!12-32.
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In his 1994 essay based on an interview with Choi, critic Lee Young-wook is apt

to detect the key aesthetic concepts with which to reconsider Choi’s work. Much

deserved attention to Choi’s words and his work is paid here, allowing the critic to do

away with the existing theoretical framework, and see for the first time what he finds in

the work. His observation therefore begins with an impression, as opposed to an analysis,

and this impression is first and foremost an olfactory one. These “objects, spaces, signs,

and publications [exude] Choi Jeong-hwa’s odor,” writes Lee. Even though Choi never

used an explicit perfume or odor for his work (except in one occasion), Lee describes

encountering Choi’s work infused with synesthetic symptoms, as Choi’s work triggers

something more than what is visualized within.130 I argue, this transference of the

visual—to the smell, the sound, the fear, and even an all-encompassing experience such

as “memories of sexual desire in adolescence” (per Lee)—is rooted in Choi’s selection

and display of mass-produced objects such as plastic baskets, anime masks, and body

scrub towels. As discussed earlier, the compilation of such objects en masse recurs in his

installation work, while photographs also represent a similarly obsessive aesthetic logic.

Such a synesthetic experience, for Lee, is acquired from these photographs as well as

objects that Choi avidly collects. Lee’s placement of equal weight on Choi’s images and

objects emphasizes the importance of the overall ambiance, or the “odor,” created by the

collection or in between the individual oeuvres that make up Choi’s artistic world. “The

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
130
Despite the danger of underplaying the Korean/Asian philosophy on the vision and the smell, I
bring Adorno and Horkheimer here. Adorno wrote “When we see, we remain what we are; but
when we smell, we are taken over by otherness.” Adorno and Horkeimer, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1946; 1972), 184.
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unbearable lightness of being,”131 “the photographic image of plastic and nickel-silver

plates spread over the market floor,” “the harmony of unsophisticated but lovely colors,”

“the pleasure derived from freedom and inartificiality of those [objects] scattered in

negligence,” “the vigor felt from the sounds, different and diverse but all vivid, echoing

together simultaneously”—these phrases represent Lee’s attempts to capture the ambient

feeling emanating from Choi’s work. All of these descriptions are subsequently followed

by the final word of the above quoted paragraph, with a question mark: “minjung-ness

(minjung s!ng)?”

The question mark that Lee adds after “minjung-ness” (or the characteristic

essence of minjung), and the word’s singular presence without any syntactic context,

expresses the critic’s uncertainty about such an assertion. Like an afterthought, Lee does

not seem to know how to elaborate on this remark. Indeed, anyone with a slightest

understanding about the 1980s art’s manifestation of the notion of minjung might detect a

profound disconnect, or a logical leap, in this association. The operation of minjung art,

be it protest art or photo collage, is firm on staying on the level of meta-discourse,

whereas Choi’s art defies such an ideology-driven mechanism of signifying. But we also

have to note that the notion of “minjung”—the social and cultural signification

recognized by the public when one utters the word minjung in relation to art—has

changed by the year 1994. In December of 1993, the multicultural turn in the 1993

Whitney Biennale was restaged in Seoul because the National Museum of Contemporary

Art in Korea imported the entire show for the Biennale’s only overseas touring occasion.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
131
A phrase coined by Milan Kundera, which Lee quotes in his earlier kitsch article from 1992,
and repeats in this 1994 essay too.
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Despite the controversy about artistic imperialism, the artistic manifestations of identity

and social issues on the American soil delivered a fresh shock to many in Korea, at least

on the diversity of formal experimentation and the conceptual spins on political messages.

In February 1994 the same national institution hosted 15 Years of Minjung Art, 1980-

1994, the state-sponsored retrospective of minjung art that was hastily put together less

than a year after the first civilian president, Kim Young Sam, had taken the office.

Everyone knew that the show was driven more by political motives than an art historical

agenda. As critic Sung Wan-kyung regrettably agrees with many others who called it “the

funeral of minjung art,” the exhibition seemed to mark the end to an era. The funeral was,

however, a belated one, coming several years after the actual death, which might have

coincided with the end of the social movement (1987), or even the beginning of

postmodern discourse and the emergence of the new generation artists like Choi (1987-8).

Between the actual death and the symbolic death of minjung art, the shift in newly

envisioning socially relevant art production had already been under way, so much that

Mipiy"n, unofficially but widely known as the second generation minjung critics,

announced its dissolution in 1993.

The recognition of minjung-ness in Choi’s work by the former Mipiy"n member

Lee in 1994 therefore signifies not only the recuperation of politics from Choi’s art but

also the reoriented understanding of minjung art.132 After all, the term “minjung-ness”

appears out of syntax. Behind Lee’s cautious claim of minjung-ness resides something

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
132
Mipiy"n members journeyed on separate paths. Lee was one of few who stayed in art criticism,
while Beck developed her career as a curator and Park and Lee Young-chul departing to the U.S.
for further studies.
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quite radical: Lee conceptualizes the reclaiming of the minjung revolutionary spirit in

more visual and sensual terms than ideologically rigid class division. To emphasize, the

use of minjung in Lee’s essay is more than a simplistic designation of secondhand

markets and traditional markets (sichang)—the main sources of inspiration for Choi—as

the site of economically and socially marginalized people. Instead, colors, pleasure,

harmony of seemingly unrelated objects, and the emancipatory feeling from the very lack

of order are the terms in which a new possibility for a change comes to vision. Even

though Lee does not articulate it, I would press that: if Choi had previously posed as a

problem case for Mipiy"n critics, a possibility to reevaluate Choi’s art within the

lingering aspiration of the minjung art movement has effectively erupted from Lee’s 1994

essay. I would even go as far as to argue that Choi’s ability to trigger a certain

emancipatory feeling is more liberating than 1980s minjung art ever could be. And this

emancipatory feeling—of Choi and of the newly envisioned democratic aesthetics—is

imprinted on the plane of a particular temporality—of ephemerality—because it is a

glimpse of a sensually-activated, sentimentally-rich moment that occurs in a split of

second, or a brief sniff at a fleeting scent. It can only be triggered, in other words,

momentarily. In its momentariness and lack of monumentality, it is emancipatory.

The ephemeral temporality signifies the refusal of essentialism and stability. “The

new in Choi’s work is vulnerable to imminent deterioration; the old in Choi’s work looks

new,” notes Chan-kyong Park in 1998.133 In the most transparent way, Park seems to

refer to Choi’s installation, Rotten Art, Degradable Art (1992), wherein two dozen photos

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
133
Park Chan-kyong, untitled, in Mom Magazine Vol. 36 (November, 1997), p. 45.
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of grocery items in various stages of decomposition over time are installed side by side

across a gallery wall. [Fig. 2.11] But in his plastic series, like Plastic Paradise or in the

picture of the peddler carrying plastic stuffs too, it is not hard to sense on a visceral level

the imminent use and disuse that these items face. They can be tossed away at any

moment. Also in the photographs of food in his image collection, such as the extreme

close-ups of vibrantly red turnip Kimchi or a mount of fish entrails found on the fish

market floor, the rawness and liveness of the photographed highlight their fast-

approaching decay. [Fig. 11] Vulnerable to an imminent conversion into something else,

the objects captured in the still photographs almost look “moving” as if captured in

moving images. Young-june Lee too notes that the most valuable aspect of Choi is

capturing momentariness, as if the viewers are given a glimpse at a transitional moment,

an unstable space of contingency.134 Here, Lee’s comment operates on the aesthetic level,

about the moment of visceral encounter between the viewers and the work, whose

intensity is augmented because of its momentariness. In its movement, the object (or the

image) moves us, albeit momentarily.

Another case in point, in which the notion of short-lived temporality is in full play,

is the 1995 curatorial project called Pp!: Instant Gallery (inst!nt# gael!ri or ilhoeyong

gael!ri). [Fig. 2.12] The Korean word pp! is literally translated to skeleton, but in the

context of the exhibition the tense sound usually pronounced in fortissimo has more of a

sonic value than a denotative one. This is apparent in the impromptu, hand-written banner

attached atop the entrance as a welcoming marquee: Pp! (written in Korean language

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
134
Lee, “Multiple Choi Jeong-hwa.”
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han’g#l) and the subtitle “instant gallery” (written in roman alphabet). Two elongated,

probably recycled, chipboards vertically also hang below the title banner, each reading

inst!nt# gael!ri (which literally translates to “a gallery for/with convenience foods”) and

ilhoeyong gael!ri (“a gallery for one-time use”). In fact, the temporary space of this

“one-time gallery” was open 24/7 during the time of exhibition; a variety of

“convenience foods” were at anyone’s disposal to consume. The “instant” nature of the

structures and the foods add to the temporary nature of the exhibition as an event, housed

in the empty residential building in the Hongdae district facing a fast-approaching

demolition.

Choi’s curatorial projects—often merging both visual art and performance—

exemplify his understanding of temporality, just as his image collection reveals much

about his approach to the vernacular aesthetics of the everyday urban space. The café

Ozone, earlier described as an instance of Choi’s vernacular interior design, served as a

safe house for the most radical performance events in the early 1990s hosted by Choi. He

was the curator and event planner of the café-cum-art gallery-cum-theater. Between

December 19 and 23 of 1991, for instance, a daily performance event titled Bio

Installation Ozone (paio ins#t’olleisy!n ojon) invited a group of energetic performers and

artists like Lee Bul, Kim Hyong-tae, and Kim Sa-ha to occupy the space. The rough and

ready aesthetics of the event poster is indicative of the provisional or even subcultural

nature of Choi’s curatorial projects, as the event title and timeline were silkscreen printed

(for letters) and crudely handwritten (for numbers) on weeks-old newspaper spreads. [Fig.

2.13] The paper’s ultra-thin layer, in conjunction with its dated nature, emphasizes the
 117
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instant quality—quick, cheap, and easy to consume and waste. Even though this re-use of

major daily as one poster collapses the announcement of performance (which at moments

involved naked bodies and most often loud screaming out of joy) and the announcement

of politically punctuated worldwide news (which included the first African-born Nobel

prize winner in literature Wole Soyinka’s criticism of Nigerian government’s violation of

human rights, Korea’s loss to Cuba in a handball game, and Nelson Mandela’s visit to the

UN), such a layering does not have the same politically motivated effect in 1980s artists’

use of newspapers such as Kim Gun-hee’s (Chapter 1). Kim’s is a silkscreen montage

linking the newspaper dated May 1980 (of the Gwangju Massacre) with a commercial

advertisement for popsicles in order to critique the mass media’s complicity to the

dictatorial regime. In Choi’s Bio Installation Ozone poster, the use of newspaper as

fragile, inexpensive material gains a political meaning, only when juxtaposed to the

aesthetics and materiality of the more and more ubiquitous fancy printing culture of

homogeneity supplementing the equally numerous big-budget arts events that aspire to

join the altar of “global standard.”135

Many have noted that the extremely playful, garishly colorful, and even

mischievous aesthetics of the poster, banner, installation art, exhibition, and performance

event, can be associated with the adolescent regression and individual desire. Some of the

objects and references certainly point to symbols widely recognized as belonging to

youth culture. Think of My IQ Jump (1993) with the cheaply made golden plastic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
135
This trend began with corporation-supported art foundations instituted in the 1990s, starting
with Daewoo’s Art Sonje Center (est. 1994) and Tong’a Daily’s Ilmin Cultural Foundation (est.
1995).
 118
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trophies most frequently given to the winners of various adolescent competitions in sports

and arts, in addition to the title’s reference to youth comic magazine. Either referring to

the youth culture or the by-now adults’ rekindling with its memory, this regressive

overtone might be present in Choi’s work, sometimes even propelling the association

with essentialist qualities of otaku culture such as obsessive collection-building and

repetition. But for my argument, such a gesture of “returning the clock” is important

insofar as it is a commentary on temporality in Choi’s work. Instead of a psychological

regression, Choi’s work radiates something of a retro impulse—a desire to bring back the

mundane objects and inglorious cultural activities of the recent past, which, per Svetlana

Boym, contests the perceived linearity of historical progressivism.136 When recently

outmoded objects punctuate the increasingly standardized urban space and inject the

aesthetics of obsolescence to the forward-leaning urban development, they participate in

disseminating, albeit briefly, the kind of visual resistance smeared with Choi’s odor.

Interfering Reality, with Persistence

During an interview in 1992, Choi was asked about what would happen if the

sites of his inspiration cease to exist: “If ‘that place’ from which you always snatch

something disappears [one day], how will you produce work?” “As a place of human

habitation, the place in which [something] is produced and wasted cannot disappear,”

responded Choi.137 This is telling of Choi’s conception of reality, and more precisely his

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
136
Svelta Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
137
Kim Mik-yung and Choi Jeong-hwa, “There, again, is my work: Contemporary Art and
Material” in Choi Jeong-hwa (Seoul: Kain Design Group, 1995), 185.
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investment in engaging with its shifting spatio-temporality. If the interviewer’s

commentary places emphasis on the status of disappearance, or even on the verge of

being obsolete,138 Choi seems more interested in the possibility of continuing intervention

into the constantly changing urban space that is his “playground.” To be sure, the word

“intervention” falls short of adequately illustrating the playful, ambiguous relationship

Choi has with the everyday reality. Indeed, the commentary on the disappearance is

preceded by equally telling statements.

Interviewer: What is it that you ultimately desire?

Choi: The world with visual expression. I want a balance. There are so many
places without balance. For example, the imposing skyscraper near the Seoul
Station and the [small merchants’] display stall in the underground tunnel beneath
the building. …[To break the imbalance] I want to switch their places.

Interviewer: After switching the places of A and B, another change will be called
forth. What will you do then? Switching them back [to the original state]?
Probably not.
Choi: There must be another way. The point is that the notion of “switching place”
means a desire to propose [the possibility of] change—not just a single way but
many ways of change.
[…]

Interviewer: To change our ways of seeing, one has to engage not only with issues
of visuality but also with issues pertaining politics, society, and culture. Is it true
for you?
Choi: [Yes, so that’s why] I want to have courage, and not be lazy… like a visitor
or an investigator.

Interviewer: If your visit or investigation doesn’t change the world, it might be

seen as a curse (yok) to a small minority and as insanity (chiral) to a vast majority,
no?
Choi: I could care less. I will continue to send out the signal (palsin).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
138
The fascination with urban scape on the verge of disappearance is nothing new in the history
of modernity. Think of Benjamin’s Arcades Project or Eugene Atget’s street photographs.
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Interviewer: If “that place” from which you always snatch something disappears
[one day], how will you produce work?
Choi: As a place of human habitation, the place in which [something] is produced
and wasted cannot disappear.

Choi has always avoided the title “artist” with alternatives such as “emotion-emitter

(kams!ng palsincha)” and a “cultural meddler (munhwa kans!pcha).” He meddles with

the hy!nsil that he recognizes, and interferes the visual norm by injecting and emitting

rays of widely disseminated, temporarily existent, counter-hegemonic energy. Rather

than the low/high of pop art and kitsch discourse, it is the spatialized urban practice that

most aptly defines Choi’s work.

Additionally, the act of urban interference is foremost importantly done with

diligent persistence, like an overactive spinning wheel that is constantly at work but does

not move forward. As an alternative model to the mega-machine of developmentalism,

what Choi proposes is not a permanent stagnation—as in going back to a pre-modern

time or pursuing a life outside global capitalism. Choi seems to envision a group of

insignificantly small yet innumerous machines constantly and persistently overworking

just below the point of breakdown so as to repeat the empty spins over and over again.

But by 1997, Choi’s understanding of the ever-changing, temporary nature of

counterhegemonic reality seems to confront head-on with South Korea’s seemingly

endless march toward economic advancement, thus causing a conceptual—and

aesthetic—conflict. The Asian Tiger’s bubble economy, assisted by the political

transition into liberal democracy ten years prior, abysmally popped. Writing amid the

Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8), Chan-kyong Park’s reading of Choi’s The Joke (1997)
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clearly had in mind the bankrupt nation whose breakneck speed industrialization was put

to an abrupt stop. [Fig. 2.14]

[The operating logic of our time is] ‘the more the better, the bigger the better.’
Choi Jeong-hwa is aware of [another logic]: ‘the more the lighter, and the bigger
the smaller,’[which has led to] a splendid failure. Just like the repetition-
compulsion of penis growing and shrinking in the stages of pre- and post-
masturbation, the [energy of] bombastic over-exaggeration has reached the realm
of truth. In the very place where the repetition of quantity and size absorbs and
simultaneously eliminates any “meaning,” Choi’s work becomes terribly sobering.
Witnessing as the fabric crown [The Joke] swells up, we become utterly
speechless. In our speechlessness, we cannot help but accept the cultural,
psychological bankrupt of the rushed development and the failure of bubble
desire-economy.139

As bright and clear as this reading might be, the post-IMF Crisis reception of Choi

became once again vulnerable to misrecognition, as if the late 1990s economic crisis did

harm to Choi, whose work now seemed to have a more stable meaning as a critique of

modernity or economic development.

The Korean economy recovered sooner than the one-sided reception of Choi, as

the globalization of art circle required ethnographer-artists who would spectacularly

critique the non-Western society of their origin—and Choi’s art seemed to fit the role

perfectly. The inflatable balloon installations soon became Choi’s best sellers abroad,

eventually compromising the intricate artistic, conceptual, formal, socio-cultural context

of late 1980s to mid-1990s South Korea of which Choi’s art was a part. Mounts made

with plastic baskets, especially starting from Plastic Paradise of 1997, also proliferated

around the world. [Fig. 2.15] A towering installation of neon yellow-green plastic baskets

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
139
Park Chan-kyong, untitled, in Mom Magazine Vol. 36 (November, 1997), p. 45.
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in ten different sizes, Plastic Paradise displays cynicism even in its title. Two round

baskets of same size make a single “sphere,” and these spheres are mounted on top of

each other, with the largest sphere at the bottom, hence making a fairly balanced, cone-

shaped tower. A total of 19 towers were then laid out in an equilateral triangular form

like billiard balls on a pool table, against a backdrop of flaring red composed with staked-

up plastic baskets in red. We are told that despite the careful composition, the imminent

collapse of the green towers is unavoidable and the fall will be all the more stunning

thanks to the sensational effects of contrasting colors of red and green.

For the artists to come after Choi—in post-IMF age which also happens to be the

Internet age—the ever more forceful tides of neoliberal logic are manifested in various

shapes. The recuperated role of the state in shaping the rules of economy in collaboration

with and on the behalf of the mega-conglomerates of Korea such as Samsung is an

example of this. The intensified proximity between the domestic art scene and the

international one also, more than ever, affected the vernacular everyday on the ground.

Even though “a place of human habitation... the place in which [something] is produced

and wasted” did not disappear, a new spatialization of the vernacular and a new

temporality of the counterhegemonic began to face a growing urgency. The model of

persistent interference or empty spinning might no longer be valid in the post-IMF era.
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Chapter Three

Democracy in Urban Space: Publicness as a New Vision of Reality (1998-2007)

Now that we have achieved liberty and equality in the political and economic sense,
we must bring our attention to “forms of life” on the most concrete level.
– Sim Kwang-hy"n (1998)

In October of 1998, a display of unusual objects occupied the Sungnam city hall

lobby. Vertically erected TV monitors on the floor screened black and white videos of

Sungnam streets; lined up six by eight, a 48 green foam brick oasis stood on the floor like

an architectural model for a miniature city; unfinished sweaters with strands of yarn were

pinned to the wall. [Fig. 3.1 and 3.2] All these objects composed a mixed-media

installation by a group of seven artists in their twenties and thirties called Sungnam

Project. A satellite city adjacent to Seoul’s Southeast corner, Sungnam was the first state-

planned modern city in Korea, built on top of rice fields and mountains, to which the state

government relocated residents from multiple slums spread across Seoul in the 1970s.

From its birth, Sungnam was thus marked by its socio-economic marginality. As

Sungnam Project’s research revealed, each evicted family was granted 20-py!ng

(approximately 66 square meters or 710 square feet) on which to build a house, in an

extremely hast manner without much notice or time for preparation. By the late 1990s

when the artists stumbled upon the city, the small, narrow houses covering the hills

quietly told the tragic stories of forced migration. The artists faithfully documented what

they saw, shooting the video on a motorcycle while driving through the sloppy alleys of
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Sungnam, to reflect the psychosomatic experience of Sungnam on the ground. The

sweaters came from the small-scale sweatshops operating in local half-basements.

To encounter these objects neatly displayed in the lobby would have intrigued

some viewers visiting the city hall, but it is also plausible that many of these works might

have gone unnoticed as an “art exhibition.” This confusion was deliberate for it had been

the artists’ intention to carefully maintain the lobby’s calm and orderly “administrative

look.” Even the slim, four-page black and white brochure accompanying the exhibition

(which the artists called “catalogue”) feigned the look of a modest promotional flyer

distributed free of charge. After all, the lobby was already decorated with several

tableaux-size photographs of Sungnam’s more recent construction of high-rise apartment

building forests in the 1990s. Hung on the wall, these electrically back-lit, full-spectrum

color photographs advertised the city’s newly acquired, or aspiring, middle class identity

through its new neighborhoods.

Despite its ostensibly insignificant appearance in the lobby, this exhibition titled

Sungnam and Environment-Art (S!ngnam kwa hwanky!ng misul) marked the beginning

of a particular methodological trend in artistic practice in South Korea: research-driven

preparation processes requiring on-site documentation of the urban neighborhood in

question. These methods used ethnographic research of the residents (gleaned through

interviews and demographic statistics), and the history of the neighborhood—particularly

the recent history of urban developments engineered by the municipal or state

government. Sungnam Project’s 1998 exhibition thus served as an effective point of

reference for another group, FlyingCity, which formed three years later in 2001. All three
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members of FlyingCity had also worked individually on projects based on urban

geographic research about particular districts in Seoul and as a group likewise spent

considerable time on archival and ethnographic urban research. Representative of

FlyingCity’s practice is the seven-year magnum opus called Cheonggyecheon Project

(2003-2009), which takes its name from the neighborhood of the Cheonggyecheon (or

Ch’"nggyech’"n, lit. the “Clear and Pure Stream”) in downtown Seoul.

In 2002 the City of Seoul proposed an urban renewal project along the

Cheonggyecheon first by demolishing the Cheonggye expressway (which since its

completion in 1968 had covered up the stream for a faster inner city circulation of traffic

and symbolized the country’s march towards spectacular, bullet-speed industrialization),

and then by transforming the restored stream into a public park with flowing water,

flowering greens, and pedestrian paths. FlyingCity’s Cheonggyecheon Project began a

few months after the mayor’s announcement of the redevelopment plan. The group’s first

steps involved conducting ethnographic and urban geographic research of the street

vendors and small-scale metal workshop owners, who faced eviction or the loss of their

livelihood because of the renewal plan. The workshop owners— themselves craftsmen

who have worked in the district for as much as three decades— became FlyingCity’s

major inspiration for producing the research-based works consisting of texts, drawings,

photographs, a PowerPoint presentation, and architectural models.

Both Sungnam Project and FlyingCity took interest in urban areas subjected to

state-driven urban developments first under the military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s

and then the democratic administrations in the 1990s and 2000s. It is through such on-site
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investigation of urbanism and urban space in transformation that a new search for critical

art (pip’an ch!k misul) began in late 1990s Korea. Instead of making general critiques of

“South Korean reality” or “the oppressed Korean people,” these new groups of artists

pursued area-focused, pedestrian-oriented on-site research, leading them to formulate a

poignant diagnosis of a certain reality—one shaped most prominently by urban

development (both policy and the capital) and the ecology of urban life in all of its

material and socio-cultural forms. Such a diagnosis inevitably led to innovations in

formal aspects of critical art vis-à-vis the 1980s political art in South Korea; unlike Choi

Jeong-hwa and his cohort, who in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s sought to start

from a ground zero (Chapter 2), the artists in Sungnam Project and FlyingCity were

“students” of minjung art with varying degrees of self-consciousness, brought together by

the urgency to discover a new artistic form of political engagement in the post-minjung

era. The decade of 1998-2007, for some artists, was thus a period of “re-learning” the

minjung period, an active “going back in time” in order to move forward.

In 1998 cultural critic Sim Kwang-hy"n wrote that by 1996, very few people

would have disputed a presiding “failure” in the South Korean political system: that the

political reform propelled by the June 1987 revolution had failed to deliver its promises

of economic equality and social stability. The 1997-8 Asian Financial Crisis further

brought back the memories of dictatorship—this time the IMF—in South Korea,

spreading the ample belief that institutional democracy had little to say about the tides of

“flexible” global capitalism that affected every corner of South Korea. “The era when we

believed that politics would provide answers to all problems has ended with the IMF,”
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wrote Sim.140 The unemployment rate tripling from 2% (1996) to 7% (1998) was only

one indication of social instability while the rising homelesness and a sharp increase in

the suicide rate caused by economic duress may be have been others. As I have shown in

the previous chapters, the politically active and creative artists of the 1970s and 1980s

became political by standing against military dictatorship, while those of the early to mid-

1990s became political by appropriating commercial culture that stood outside the rigid

structure of ideology (either statism or anti-statist activism). The end of the 1990s,

however, posed different challenges. The government was considered democratically run,

and had learned to work with cultural practitioners like artists: the influx of governmental

and quasi-governmental support (i.e. funding agencies under the Ministry of Culture and

municipal cities) rose as major player in the contemporary art scene. As the practice of

working with the government and its subsidiaries became the most viable option for

artists, the key questions surfaced: how can artists work with a democratic institution that

is not fully exercising the ideals of democracy? How does politics arise outside simple

binaries: working for the government or taking it as archenemy, and criticizing

consumerism or embracing it? Of course such dilemmas do not belong solely to this

period, but the late 1990s posed a particular challenge to the artists plunged into the

whirlwind of another paradigm shift in politics and culture.

The artists of Sungnam Project and FlyingCity respond to this new political

environment. The state government ceased to become the target in this period, not simply

because the government was considered democratic (and thus a viable collaborator) but
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
140
Sim Kwang-hy"n, Seroun ‘misul undong’ !n pilyohanka? (Do We Need a New “Art
Movement?), Forum A Vol.2 (July 30, 1998), unpaginated.
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precisely because its “democratic nature” was deemed irrelevant for the type of artistic

endeavor that locates a new site of politics and a new form of political aesthetics.141 The

urgency to find a new form of visualization compelled the artists in Sungnam Project and

FlyingCity to carefully examine various lived spaces—where production and

consumption coincide and creative actions result— even if they might not constitute the

quintessential spaces of dissent (i.e. streets and squares). As Sim further noted, “Now that

we have achieved liberty and equality in the political and economic sense, we must bring

our attention to ‘forms of life’ on the most concrete level.” 142 In the era when the

question political liberty became a matter of formality and an ineffective trophy achieved

from the bygone minjung period, it was in concrete forms and aesthetics that new politics

could be rediscovered, documented, analyzed, and re-presented.

That artists’ attention turned to urban space and urbanism is not an entirely new

artistic strategy; but there are important particularities and points of divergence between

Sungnam Project and FlyingCity, on the one hand, and other Korean and non-Korean

examples on the other. Compared to minjung artists, especially those of Reality and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
141
The question of irrelevance became apparent in the mid-1990s through the two incidents, or
public spectacles of mourning: the sudden crumbling of the S"ngsu Bridge in 1994 that killed a
dozen citizens and over thirty injured, and the collapse of the Sampung Department Store in
1995, which resulted in over over 500 deaths. The inexcusable corruption and irresponsibility in
maintaining built structures that resulted in such massive casualties forced South Koreans to
question the ethical foundations of society.
142
Sim Kwang-hy"n, “Misulsa roput" !i talchul: sinch’ech"k sak"n kwa kamkaknolli !i hoebok
!l wihay"” (A Flight from Art History: To Recover the Event of Body and Logic of Senses,” in
Konggan #i p’akoe wa saengs!ng: S!ngnam kwa Pundang sai (The Destruction and Formation
of Space: Between Sungnam and Pundang). ed. Kim Tae-h"n (Seoul: Munhwa Kwahak, 1998),
11. Park Chan-kyong also wrote a text for this edited volume accompanied Kim Tae-h"n’s solo
show on Sungnam. For the exhibition, the three-story gallery in Sungkok Museum in Seoul
presented six bodies of work in mediums of photography, painting, drawing, and “pin-up” style
photo installation of public art sculptures found in public schools.
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Utterance, the artists in this chapter do not rely on the generalized and coherent binary of

the rural and the urban space, and instead seek the particular material manifestations of

urbanism and urbanization in post-authoritarian Korea. In particular, the artists

interrogate the country’s urbanization and development of mega cities in the 1990s,

which coincided with the general consensus on the utilitarian value of arts and culture in

urban space. In this moment, public commissions for eye-sore sculptures in so-called

public spaces abounded, while cities were busy initiating urban beautification projects,

which often propelled “local folklorism” (per FlyingCity) that explicitly engineered

promotional values of the local cities or neighborhoods.143 This phenomenon is not unlike

Rosalyn Deutsche’s observation of policy makers’ increasing interests in the role of

culture in urban spatial politics in 1980s and 1990s New York, wherein the public art and

architecture projects signified a democratically open space while in truth served to cover

up or transcend economic, political, and social inequalities that existed at the site.144

Substituting genuine debates of publicness and public space with what Deutsche

adequately terms “pseudo- or private-public spaces,” the urban developments in both

Seoul (the capital with 10 million residents) and Sungnam (the first and largest satellite

city off Seoul) threatened rather than fostered a critical inquiry into how the notions of

democracy and publicness might be perceived, performed, and fostered on the ground. As

I will later discuss, the pursuit of publicness that Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s work

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
143
Jeon Yongsuk, “Chiy"k ju!i e k!nk"han tosis"ng !i chaemaekrakhwa: por"m ei (Forum A) !i
!iche” (Recontextualization of Urbanism Based on Regionalism: Agenda of Forum A), The 4th
Gwangju Biennale Invited Group’s International Workshop_Community and Art (Gwangju:
Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2002), 2-6.
144
Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996),
xiii.
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visually expressed is substantially different from the model of critical, and thus

commendable, public art proposed by US-based art historians Deutsche and Miwon

Kwon, because of these Korean artists’ conceptualization of the role of artists and the

temporality of publicness. This chapter will therefore demonstrate how the newly

invested interests in the politics of urban space examined in Sungnam Project and

FlyingCity interact with the oppositional politics of minjung and the vernacular aesthetics

of Choi Jeong-hwa, as well as the discourse surrounding public art and site-specificity in

contemporary art criticism.

The “Resident Arts” versus the “Decorative Arts for Architecture”

Founded in April 1998, Sungnam Project was a self-designated “temporary artist

group,” whose members included Kim Hong-bin, Kim Tae-h"n, Park Yong-s"k, Park

Chan-kyong, Park Hye-yôn, Im Heung-soon, and Cho Ji-eun.145 The group’s intense

research constituted weekly discussions for six consecutive months (April-September),

during which the members focused on learning about the city’s history of urbanization,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
145
The group’s collaboration lasted for two years. Among these members, Cho Ji-eun and Im
Heung-soon in 2002 launched a collective called Mixrice, which explored the life of migrant
workers in South Korea, starting with holding a media education class for migrant workers
mostly from other parts of Asia. Mixrice as it is currently constituted with Cho Ji-eun and Yang
Chul-mo has, since 2006, waged multiple projects focusing on the neighborhood of Masôk, once
known as a relatively secure haven with autonomy for migrant workers. Im went a separate way
under his own name but his practice still revolves around examining particular communities—
housewives in Geumcheon, Seoul or that of female activists participating in the minjung
movement during the 1970s and 80s—through the mediums of video and installation. Park Chan-
kyong became a renowned photographer and video artist by the 2000s and in the late 2000s began
his second career as a film director, collaborating with his famous film-director brother Chan-
wook Park, a Cannes award winner. The Park brothers together founded a film production
collective called Parking Chance, showing their work in festivals like Jeonju, Berlin, Rotterdam,
etc.
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rather than theorizing their artistic mandate (like Reality and Utterance of the 1980s in

Chapter 1) or studying art theories (like Mipiy"n of the 1990s in Chapter 2). In contrast

to these previous models of artistic collaboration in Korea, Sungnam Project relied on

collective brainstorming of the project’s contour.146 Together, they gathered and studied

texts, ranging from the municipal city-generated records about the genesis and

administration of Sungnam to 1970s minjung literature about the dire living situation for

the then newly relocated residents. Taking photographs of Sungnam and sharing them at

the meetings for further discussions were important too, as they were not only part of the

process through which to communicate each member’s ethnographic observation and

somatic experience but also an integral part of the eventual installation. 147

The story of how this group came to be is worth narrating in detail. In spring of

1998, Park Chan-kyong proposed to make a collective work with other artists, when the

curator Lee Young-chul (Park’s former colleague at the art criticism group Mipiyôn)

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
146
In its group structure, Sungnam Project differs from the previous art collectives (i.e. Reality
and Utterance, Tur"ng, Imsulnyôn, etc.) and art associations (i.e. the Association of Minjung
Artists) active during the 1980s whose fairly rigid structure reflected the groups’ belief in the so-
called larger causes (i.e. providing an alternative to the status quo of abstract painting and serving
as propaganda team of pro-democracy movement), or from the coteries of artists and musicians in
the 1990s whose unsystematic and spontaneous collaboration took the neighborhood of Hongik
University as a stage. Such collaborative method as Sungnam Project’s would reappear in many
more contemporary collectives in the 2000s. The more contemporary exemplary of
interdisciplinary collaboration among designers, architects, artists, musicians, and filmmakers are
Listen to the City, Part-time Suite, etc.
147
As Cho Ji-eun recalls later, the younger members like herself lacked the awareness that their
documentary photographic practice shared similarities with the 1980s reportage-style minjung
photographs. Cho is right to assume that Park Chan-kyong and Kim Tae-hôn would have
recognized the connection but their inability to share this knowledge demonstrates the idea of
promoting or forming a certain “lineage” with minjung was not pertinent in the beginning. The
most important part was to observe the city and learn from it. The reference to the minjung period
appears in Park’s essay included in the exhibition catalogue. Author’s interview with Cho Ji-eun
on June 20, 2014.
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invited him to Lee’s upcoming curatorial effort on city life and urban architecture: 98

City and Media: Clothing, Food, House, soon to be known as a landmark group show of

contemporary Korean artists held at the Seoul City Museum of Art (October 16 –

November 4, 1998).148 At that time, Park had just written an essay for Kim Tae-h"n’s solo

exhibition of Kim’s three yearlong art productions in and about Sungnam. With Kim,

Park invited other members, then young graduates of Ky"ngwon University (in

Sungnam) and Kyewon University (in Anyang, another satellite city off Seoul), where

Park was a lecturer of art, to prepare a research-based mixed media installation for a

show in October. The group thus presented at the Seoul City Museum of Art Sungnam

and Modernism, an almost identical installation to the one described earlier at the

Sungnam city hall lobby. Both exhibitions took place simultaneously, and the city hall

lobby edition was in fact planned as an additional, duplicate exhibition for the purpose of

showing the resultant works to the Sungnam civil servants.149 What this story tells us

about Sungnam Project is that firstly, the group was representative of a wider range of

artists and practitioners who, by the late 1990s, gave a serious thought to urban life and

spaces in Korea. Secondly, a more flexible relationship between art and the government

was envisioned, at least on the part of the artists in Sungnam Project, with the belief in

communicating with those in decision-making positions. And thirdly, from the process of

production to that of display, the group practiced the act of collective learning and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
148
At that time Park had returned from his studies with Allen Sekula at Cal Arts (1996-7). His
1997 homecoming solo exhibition Black Box: Memories of the Cold War Images, which uses
photographs as documents and texts as part of critical investigation of the North-South Korean
relationship, is thus the influence of his time in LA as much as the continuation of his activities in
Mipy!n.
149
Author’s interview with Cho Ji-eun on June 20, 2014
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sharing, thus making the exhibition’s underlying premise a certain form of storytelling

with pedagogical implications.

The final works included in the exhibition were therefore executed in various

mediums that were more expository than expressive. At the city hall edition, to which I

will now, each of the works and its display method were intent on showcasing the

research findings. On the topic of the slanted slopes of Sungnam, Cho Ji-eun, Park Hye-

y"n, and Im Heung-soon cast nine cement blocks in nine locations with different

inclinations. [Fig. 3.3] The congregation of these nine blocks, (along with the plywood

box used to cast the blocks on the road) on a knee-high stand that belonged to the city

hall, was designed to reveal the broad range of slopes as well as the incredibly steep

inclinations of some. The accompanying instruction eradicated any possibility of

mistaking these ostensibly minimalist blocks as merely establishing a repetition of form

in their arrangement: “Sungnam Project’s Method of Slope Measurement. 1. Select the

average inclination of the road. 2. Install the mold on the slope. 3. On step 2, pour the

cement mixed with water. 4. Wait until firm. 5. Remove the cast.” The indexical

relationship between the block and the site is further emphasized in the neighborhood

names (Sinh!ng-dong, Taepy"ng 2-dong, etc.) written in black ink on the lower right

corner of each block. The 10 minute-long, black-and-white video, titled Taepy!ng-dong

Arirang, intermixes the scenes captured from a camera held by Cho on a motorcycle

driven by Im through the narrow alleys with the post-production voice recordings of

Sungnam residents telling the story of surviving Sungnam. [Fig. 3.4] These anecdotes,

sometimes entering the screen as inter-titles, have a direct connection to the materiality
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and history of development. For example, the saying that “In Sungnam, you can live

without a wife but never without a pair of rain boots” indicates that the hasty construction

skipped the process of solidifying the soft, swampy ground in these neighborhoods. Shot

with a camera tilted 90 degrees to the side and screened on two vertically placed

monitors, the video put a repeated emphasis on the verticality of the landscape forged not

by high-rises but by the narrow alleys dotted with mostly three-story residential

buildings.

One wall presented the materials gathered from an ethnographic inquiry into the

small-scale garment workshops predominantly occupying the half-basements of these

buildings. In addition to documentary portraits of the workers in action or during breaks,

the installation included parts of clothing items made in the workshops. As the wall text

explained, these small workshops would receive commissions (including yarn, thread,

and design) to make parts of the sweaters (arms, bodices, etc.) which would then be

assembled in a different workshop, before being transported by truck to Seoul for

domestic consumption and Germany for overseas consumption. The fragments of sweater

became the objects that illustrated the production process. The black and white four-page

exhibition brochure available on-site, which the artists called “a catalogue that is part of

the works on display,” was printed on glossy A3 sheets and included diagrams that

illustrated this production network. Here, the rolls of thread, fluorescent ceiling lights,

ventilation fans on the wall, and the entrance to a workshop on the hill captured in the

documentary photographs were also rendered as simple line drawings in a diagram titled

“The Sungnam Garment Manufacture Organizational Diagram.” [Fig. 3.5]

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The city hall lobby as a site of display resulted in a powerful play of juxtaposition.

Between the unfinished sweaters on the wall and the TV monitors showing rough

aesthetics on the floor, there was a 9 by 6 foot steel frame surrounding a full-color

photograph of a high-rise apartment building forest. Illuminated by electricity, this

glowing photograph was in its semi-permanent display at the city hall of Sungnam, a city

that by the mid-1990s sought to distance itself from its 1970s pioneering phase marked

by the influx of low class evictees. Reinventing itself as the largest satellite city,

Sungnam now welcomed the wealthy middle-class excess population of Seoul. In

between the folds of mountains, hundreds of apartment buildings rise to the blue sky, shot

in the photographic perspective that looks down from a mountaintop as if the camera-eye

has discovered a paradise. But what this promotional image emphasized is neither

Sungnam’s proximity to nature nor its perfect combination of nature and city but the

degree to which the gigantic apartment forest makes a city of its own with all the

conveniences of urban life, like those in Seoul, and thus generating a potential real-estate

investment value. Next to the self-promotional media play that the city government

engaged in by constructing a clichéd third-world equation of concrete apartment

buildings with a desirable urban life style, the Sungnam Project installation might read as

a minjung-style juxtaposition between a minjung’s reality and a media-generated false

reality as analyzed in Kim Jeong-heon’s Life of Plenty (1980) in Chapter 1. The method

of juxtaposition indeed cast into high relief the politics of Sungnam Project, generally

speaking out an opposition to the new waves of urban development in Sungnam that

thrived on the lines of class division drawn between the old neighborhoods and the new
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neighborhoods. But such juxtaposition was only one part of the project as a whole, as

Sungnam Project did not perceive the life in the old neighborhoods as an entirely

suffering one. Furthermore, the core of Sungnam Project’s work was reliant on another—

and more important—juxtaposition, one that at once moved away from the class politics

in the 1980s rhetoric by interrogating the notion of art in relation to city and publicness.

This new juxtaposition comes forward in the four-page brochure, packed with

textual and visual information (photographs, diagrams, a table, and essays) and stacked

on the floor. The brochure as a whole poses a central question: what if the everyday

objects re-appropriated by the residents in the hilly neighborhood for new uses are

examples of truly public art, especially when compared with the so-called public art

officially sanctioned by the city government and the state law? These two categories of

visual objects—what Sungnam Project calls “resident arts (chumin yesul)” and what the

state law designates as “decorative arts for architecture (k!nchukmul misul

changsikpum)”—require further explanation if we were to understand the political import

of this juxtaposition. According to an essay included in the brochure and written by Ma

Inhwang (a director at the Sungnam Culture Research Center and an avid supporter of

Sungnam Project), such an odd category as “decorative arts for architecture” has its

origin in the state law. In 1972 the South Korean state began to recommend an addition of

public art sculptures to newly constructed buildings. Starting in 1995—under the Culture

and Arts Promotion Law: Article 9 Installation of Art for Architecture—the state

mandated that all new buildings above a certain size dedicate approximately 1% of the
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total construction cost to art works in or around the building site.150 The essay by Ma,

which runs on the brochure’s second and third pages, attempted to chart out the

characteristics of sculptural works commissioned under the law (arousing a “sense of

repulsion” and “imposed authority” as if they are “remains of military culture” and “anti-

public” than “public”), the problem of the law, and even some suggestions on how to

envision a new direction for a more adequately public promotion of arts in urban space.

His essay was accompanied by photographic documents of such hideous eyesores in

deadpan straight shots or contextualized within a park and a simple table listing facts

about 79 “public art” monuments (title, location, cost, and material). [Fig. 3.5] As readers

of Korean can easily discern, all works are large sculptures made with bronze, steel,

granite, marble, except a few oil and acrylic paintings. Most of the works were also built

not in the old town of Sungnam but in its new district, whose development of wide four-

lane streets and commercial district coincided with the year 1995, when more strict

reinforcement of the Culture and Arts Promotion law was instituted.

When opened, the brochure’s fourth page rhymes with the first page, each

featuring photographs of a Sungnam slope (on top) paired with texts (at bottom). [Fig.

3.6] Featured in the photograph on the right side (on the first page) is a downhill slope,

with a line of compact cars parked on the right side and leaving just enough room for

another car to pass through the alley. In the photograph on the left (on the fourth page),

the cars have emptied out, perhaps during the day, replaced by what the residents call

“parking-free obstacles” such as plastic buckets, used tires, old chairs, and paint cans.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
150
Park Chan-kyong and Yang Hy"n-mi, “Konggongmisul kwa misul !i konggongs"ng” (Public
Art and Publicness of Art,” Munhwagwahak 53 (2008), 98.
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The essay featured in the bottom half of the fourth page functioned as the Sungnam

Project’s manifesto and is titled The Pinnacle of Korean Modernity and Korean Modern

Art: Sungnam and Decorative Arts for Architecture. Composed by Park Chan-kyong, this

eight-paragraph essay is as ambitious as the manifestos of Reality and Utterance and

Gwangjahyôp that we have seen in Chapter 1. Here I will attempt to deliver the summary

and a few selected quotations from the text, despite the danger of doing injustice to the

sometimes poetic and other times declarative rhetoric. My analysis of the text will also

bear in mind how the rest of the mix-media installation operates according to the artists’

intention outlined in the manifesto.

The essay starts by positing the particular genesis of Sungnam as a test case of

South Korean urban developmentalism in two waves (in the 1970s and then in the

1990s), exploring how the spatial logic of Sungnam is itself an imprint of an “intense

reality” (hy!nsil). “To experience the essence of modern Korea, one must climb up and

down the narrow slopes in the old neighborhoods of Sungnam.” The emphasis put on the

corporeal experience is a strategic move away from a grand, sweeping criticism of city

planning. It also prepares the reader for the ensuing juxtaposition made between art and

life. “In such a city,” Park asks, “what kind of art can surpass, if at all, the intensity of

reality (hy!nsil), the twists and turns of its commotions, and the rich exposures of life

traces—if art is not used as a tool to forget or escape reality and if, as often argued,

‘contemporary art’ is to be most faithful to its place and its time?” This question at once

posits art as an entity dependent on reality that at the same time has the capacity to

surpass it—what Sungnam Project seems to call for. As Sungnam Project’s research into
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“decorative arts for architecture” has revealed, this call could not be met in the current art

scene, which was dominated in part by this law and its practice of reproducing the most

vulgar abuse of modernist sculptural autonomy in the form of atrocious plop art objects.

The only aspect of reality that these so-called public art works prompted, emphasized

Park, was the reality of corruption, wherein “certain dealers, sculptors, and painters

illegally shared with building owners [the by-product profit].”

In the end, Sungnam Project contended that the call to find a new matrix of art

and reality—where art is coexistent with and contingent upon reality—could be realized

by “switching the location of art and reality,” and residents of the old neighborhoods of

Sungnam had already been practicing this swapping:

Let us point out an example, where the location of reality and arts is
switched; this is an important case for the reasons of both aesthetics and
reality. When the city construction plan for Sungnam was launched, the
government at that time swiftly stripped off hilly slopes before distributing
twenty pyông to each evicted family who would then hastily build their
houses there. As a result, alleys that are too narrow for taxis to pass through,
let alone fire trucks, are innumerable. For a single car to climb through these
alleys, a stunt driving is inevitable. Since walking up and down the alleys is
even more strenuous, many residents drive their own cars, further
aggravating the parking situation, which is far worse than Seoul’s. So the
residents “install” various objects in front of their houses to prevent others
from parking at their spots. For those without cars and in need of securing a
pathway in and out of their house, “sculpting” permanent “parking-free
obstacles” in cement is frequently seen as a viable solution. From peculiar
items to refrigerators-turned-objets, they make up a large exhibition hall of
[everyday] articles in the most literal sense, delivering a powerful and clear
message.

The objects of everyday utility, such as refrigerators, have lost their original function;

they instead obtain a new meaning and a new role as “parking-free obstacle” sculptures.
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When Sungnam Project unveils the residents’ creative act as art, it mimics the language

of art criticism with “to install,” “to sculpt,” “objets,” and “exhibition hall.” If residents’

art is a conceptual art practice that overturns the system of signification, Sungnam

Project’s framing of such a production as art and the officially condoned public art as

non-art rhymes such a conceptual move. The narrative of replacing “art” with “reality”

and vice versa is itself a conceptual practice. By the act of discovering and documenting

instances of art in the everyday reality, Sungnam Project thus challenges the existing

institution of art that recognizes the “decorative arts for architecture” as art and that

dismisses the aesthetics of everyday life in Sungnam. Even though the slide carrousel is

lost and no documentation of the slide show remains, artist Cho Ji-eun, who devised the

narrative order of the slides with Park Hye-y"n, recalls that the slide show also attempted

to highlight the contrast between art and non-art by lining up the documentary

photographs of resident arts, sceneries of hilly neighborhoods, “public art sculptures,”

and promotional images of Sungnam city.

Publicness of Art as a Definition of Art: “Conceptual Realism” and Publicness

Indeed, it is a Duchampian question about authorship and authority that Sungnam

Project revives: Who is to ask the definitional question about art? Who has the authority

to designate something as art? The brochure’s first page and a banner hanging from the

lobby ceiling featured an invented conversation among historical and fictional characters,

translated in its entirety below. [Fig. 3.2 and Fig. 3.6]

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Bertolt Brecht (theater producer): But why do we have to continue the tradition of
calling those who wear nice clothes refined and cultured, but not calling those
who know how to make nice clothes as such?
Park Eun-ha (art lover): It’s because the act of making and the act of creating are
two different things.
Marcel Duchamp (artist): If someone designates it as art, it is art.
Park Eun-ha (art lover): Who designates what is beautiful art?
John Cage (musician): To say something is beautiful does not mean much besides
that we approve of it.
Park Eun-ha (art lover): … …

What is questioned in this imagined conversation between historical masters (European

and American) and the fictional character Park Eun-ha (Korean), is the idea of production

and creation, the authority to designate value or identity to art—essentially the

ontological questions about art that conceptual artists, after Duchamp, have asked and

Sungnam Project sought to revisit. For Sungnam Project, this questioning was more than

philosophical—it was driven by the particular manifestations of “decorative arts for

architecture” in South Korea.

But unlike the Duchampian question that gave more weight to the authorial power

of the artist (to say what is art, in the affirmative way), Sungnam Project sought to disrupt

the authorial power of the law and the institution of art. In Korea even now and especially

then, few art institutions can claim independence from the state because almost all large-

scale art museums are state-run and the curators in those institutions maintain their status

as civil servants. To this end, the question posed by Sungnam Project spoke to the

definition of art in relation to the corruption or malfunctioning of the particular

institutional structure on which contemporary art practice in Korea continues to depend.

The time has come, Sungnam Project argued, to think about and within the institution,
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rather than thinking outside the institution. The proposal of Sungnam Project was

therefore doubly bound by two motives—denying “what is considered and officially

sanctioned as art” and affirming “what could be, and should be, art”—which to a degree

echoed the binary between sunsu misul (pure art) and hy!nsil ju!i (aesthetics of reality)

envisioned by minjung artists. Yet what Sungnam Project denied in the examples of

kongkong misul (public art) was its very promise of publicness and democracy, requiring

us to examine the interface between publicness and reality as the focal point of Sungnam

Project’s criticality.

Hence, the discursive exercise of seeing Sungnam Project’s conceptualization of

publicness or good public art practice in light of Rosalyn Deutsche’s analysis of spatial

politics (in particular Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc controversy), becomes extremely

important. Deutsche’s investigation into the urban development and public art in New

York throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s in relation to the question of democracy

brought her to the theories of Radical Democracy put forward by Chantal Mouffe and

Ernesto Laclau starting from the late 1970s. Deutsche thus became the first art historian

to consider the space of democracy as that of social relations and one lacking a coherent

image or a homogeneous public that is often assumed. Many more art historians and

critics have followed her lead since.151 If art were to be public (“public art”), following

Deutsche, it should reveal what democracy truly is—which is less about consensus and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
151
The earliest ones among them are Olivier Marchart, Miwon Kwon, and Claire Bishop.
Marchart, who studied political philosophy with Ernesto Laclau, has also nuanced his own take
on radical democracy theory and art. See Olivier Marchart, “Art, Space and the Public Sphere(s).
Some basic observations on the difficult relation of public art, urbanism, and political theory”
(eipcp.net/transversal, 2002)
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universal sameness than dissensus and partiality. Serra’s Tilted Arc (1982-9), for example,

demonstrated precisely the conflict that erupted when a curved steel sculpture disturbed

the seemingly unifying space of the Federal Plaza in the 1980s. This conflict was one that

contested the “dictatorship of the people” as it was exercised by the federal state, that, in

the “name of the people,” claimed authorship of the space and denied the artist the same

claim.

For Deutsche, the work of Tilted Arc stopped being public once Serra began to

assert his rights to the artist’s free speech and when his followers began to base their

support on the myth of great art: an emphasis on genius and the heroic artist’s political

vangardism. Such a claim to an external location from which to see and critique society

dangerously echoed the neo-Marxist urban geographers’ totalizing impulse to map and

criticize the workings of late capitalism.152 “Public art,” for Deutsche, therefore, “must

disrupt, rather than secure, the apparent coherence of its new urban sites” increasingly

claimed by various parties—the government, the conservative politicians, the neo and

post-Marxist theorists with masculine vision—in order to recognize the space as social

relations constantly negotiated by multiple partial subjects and “[defend] the democratic

potential of site-specificity against its depoliticization.”153

For Sungnam Project, this particular role of artists—that is producing an object or

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
152
Deutsche states: “For vanguardism implies the existence of sovereign subjects whose superior
social vision can penetrate illusions and perceive the people’s ‘true’ interests, and this idea has
itself been charged with authoritarianism—even with the attempt to eliminate public space.” See
Deutsche, Evictions, 268. Deutsche’s latter critique of the masculine, political vangardism is
useful in the Korean case when it comes to the mechanism of social critique developed by the
1980s artists. Only they could fight for the truth, and it was their truth that was the real truth.
153
Deutsche, xiii.
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an image that reveals incompleteness and incoherence of the social—was less important,

however. For such a social space of negotiations was already visualized and practiced by

the “resident arts” and “parking-free obstacle” sculptures. “Public art” had already

existed even before the artist entered the picture and proposed his/her partial vision as a

tool with which to elucidate the false claims to democracy and publicness. The opposite

of usefulness—as promoted by the government officials for the utilitarian values of “new

public art” and urban “revitalization” projects—did not necessarily have to be useless-

ness. “Parking-free obstacle” sculptures were not only useful; they were also powerfully

public precisely in their claim to the injustice in the urban development history and their

daily negotiations of their rights to the city. For Sungnam Project, the relationship

between the site and the site-specific art also did not have to follow a contested model

theorized by Miwon Kwon. Even in their affectionate relationship with the site, the

residents of Sungnam’s hilly neighborhoods had devised a way to manifest politically

charged and epistemologically sophisticated claims to what democracy means in an urban

space. The neat categorizations of public art that Kwon has laid out—“art in public

space,” “art as public space,” and “art in the public interests”154—may be less relevant to

Sungnam. Or even further, this categorization hides the possibility for excavating the

practices of publicness that have already begun their work in the urban space. The

powerful visuality of the chairs, the broken refrigerators, and the delivery boxes filled

with concrete, not only challenged the fixed image of uneven development as

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
154
Miwon Kwon, “For Hamburg: Public Art and Urban Identities,” Public Art is Everywhere. ex.
cat. ed. Christian Philipp Muller (Hamburg: Kunstverein Hamburg and Kulturbeh rde Hamburg,
1997), 95-109.
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reproducing injustice but also altered the very signification of the slope—not as a

symptom of the vicious cycle of capitalism but as a site of contested meanings and

reclaimed rights. As such, Sungnam Project incidentally provides a lucid critique of neo

and post-Marxist urban geographers’ reading of city as a symptom of base structure.155

What, then, is the relationship between artists of Sungnam Project and these
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
155
Even at a first glance, Sungnam Project is informed by the South Korean cultural studies scene
that in the 1990s produced writings on urban spaces under the rubric of “ethnography.” Recall
Beck Ji-sook’s 1994 essay, cited in Chapter 2, which called for an “ethnographic look” at Seoul’s
urbanscape and its popular culture by comparing the neon signs (mass culture) with the art center
(high art). Writings by literary scholars such as Kang Nae-h!i (1994) in the field of comparative
literature and communications examine the districts of Hongik University and Sinchon, by
including their own participatory observation in the symbols of consumerist capitalism. These
accounts attempt to “read the neighborhood as a text” and their reliance on theories of urban
geography (David Harvey and Edward Soja) are explicitly stated. The method of cognitive
mapping promoted by Frederic Jameson, whose 1984 essay “Postmodernism: or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism” Kang translated in 1989, seemed to serve as crucial for these scholars.
Echoing the rhetoric of these American postmodern critics, Kang’s own essay “Seoul, Its
Everyday Dynamics” (1994) criticizes the fragmented urban space—and the fragmented
subjectivity of urban dwellers—subsumed in the late capitalist logic. Kang Nae-h!i, “S"ul, k!
ilsang gonggan !i tonghak” (Seoul, It’s Everyday Dynamics), Munhwa Kwahak 5 (January,
1994), 13-44. Also see: Im S!ng-h!i, “90 ny"ndae saeroun sobiju!i munhwa !i s"nggy"k—
hongdae chuby!n munhwa sarye buns!kt” (The Characteristics of 1990s New Consumerism—A
Case Study of Culture in the Hongik University District) in Hankuk!nronch!ngbohakpo 4
(August, 1994), 204-232. Compared to this tendency to textualize space in order to gauge a meta-
criticism about capitalism, Sungnam Project’s research is more modest in its scale. Its lengthy
research time and its focus on the designated city of Sungnam allow its members to “find”
concrete materiality that makes up the lived space rather than imposing an existing thesis onto the
abstracted space (i.e. infiltration of consumerist capitalism in urban development). More
importantly, while Sungnam Project implicitly acknowledges the mutual dependency between the
economic structure of capitalism and the organization of urban space—the two poles that
construct neo-Marxist urban geography—the artist group’s activities do not simply arrive at
positing the latter as a mere symptom of the former. The notions of “reality” and “art,” or
economic base and artistic/spatial representation, are indeed the key vocabularies; but they are
also reinvented and contested through the project, and the indexical use of documents illustrates
this point. Such a trajectory of Sungnam Project can make it seem as if the group has been well
aware of feminist art historian Rosalyn Deutsche’s criticism that these male urban geographers’
attempt to remap urban space only produces a masculine position of totalization (that accounts for
only economic difference and no other differences). Sungnam Project’s field research is not for
gathering information and knowledge that can then be transcended to an abstract idea of a certain
phenomenon or a class-based analysis of the district but for finding the format of reality as the
starting point of the debate that is both affected and reflecting the “excess value” of labor (care
and creativity) outside work.
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public art objects? Where is Sungnam Project’s point of entry into this new equation of

publicness and reality? As Park Chan-kyong’s essay in the brochure makes clear,

Sungnam Project documented the instances of public art that reflected the intensity of

reality, and presented these documents in the fictional language of institutions.

Documentation and fictionalization were simultaneously at work to bring to light the

aesthetics of reality and publicness in Sungnam.

As our own method [of art-making], Sungnam Project prefers the genre of
‘documentary” or “reportage” where arts and reality crisscross and support each
other. Following footsteps of the early- and mid-1980s literature, Sungnam
Project believes that reportage as a genre takes importance because visual and
literary arts, rather than shaping reality and its dynamism, always rush around
belatedly. At the same time, it is not that art as “fact” and “exhibition value” is an
“accurate” reflection of reality, but what we actively expose to our audience is
that the fact that art is a fiction regardless of the ways in which it is fictionalized.
This exhibition (in Seoul City Museum and Sungnam City Hall) in particular
emphasizes what kind of clear information we provide, and “how” we process
such information. For example, the visual order created in such economical
methods as diagrams and statistics straddles the gap between image and language,
while at the same time playing a secondary role in showcasing the unfriendly and
boring repetition of bureaucratic system.156

Park’s understanding of the document-fiction dyad as the language of representing reality

is similar to the doubly-bound notion of the index. As a physical mark and imprint of

something that exists, an index conjures a one-to-one relationship with its referent. At the

same time, an index can be a list, such as we find in the back of a book, which points to

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
156
Park seems to have learned his lesson from minjung literature, and documentary filmmaking—
for example, one of the most prominent examples of the latter is Sanggyedong Olympics, which
Park repeatedly mentions as one of his inspirations. The emphasis on the narrative structure of
literature becomes clearer in Park’s later works that merge photographs and texts.
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location and content by way of a certain rule of categorization.157 Here, Park is implicitly

(if not directly) engaging with the 1980s paradigm of hy!nsil ju"i or the minjung

aesthetics of reality. As discussed in Chapter 1, the aesthetics of reality in the 1980s

underwent two simultaneous developments: as a critique of media spectacle and

ideological apparatus (in Reality and Utterance, for example); and as performative

participation in the site of political demonstrations (in Gwangjahy!p, for instance). Park’s

re-conceptualization of the aesthetics of hy!nsil in this era (late 1990s and early 2000s)

should thus be read as a critique of 1980s realism through the author’s heightened

awareness of language as fiction and his consideration of such language-fiction as a site

of artistic intervention. At a time when the mechanisms of power through which the

government operated depended on such organization of facts, presentation of papers, and

construction of diagrams and tables, this attention to the language of institutions gained

political import.158

At the same time, Park’s attention to the question of institution also responded to

what he learned from the 1970s conceptual art practices in America and where he thought

the 1980s minjung artists had fell short. Until the 1980s knowledge of visual styles and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
157
Mary Ann Doane,“Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” The Historical Film: History and
Memory in Media. ed. Marcia Landy (London: Continuum, 2001), 269-285.
158
Foucault said in 1979, “The state is nothing else but the effect, the profile, the mobile shape of
a perpetual statification (étatisation) or statifications, in the sense of incessant transactions which
modify, or move, or drastically change, or insidiously shift sources of finance, modes of
investment, decision-making centers, forms and types of control, relationships between local
powers, the central authority, and so on. In short, the state has no heart, as we well know, but not
just in the sense that it has no feelings, either good or bad, but it has no heart in the sense that it
has no interior. The state is nothing else but the mobile effect of a regime of multiple
governmentalities.” The technocratic mechanisms of governing is the “fictional forms” that Park
seems to be interested in. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de
France, 1978-79. ed. Michel Sennelart. trans. Graham Davidson (New York: Palgrave MaMillan,
2008)
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techniques were transmitted through poorly reproduced, mostly black and white images

of original works flattened as a text without a context, and removed from the material and

institutional understanding of post-war development of contemporary art.159 In this

context, Park’s reference to American conceptual art in his later writings should be read

not as a superficial citation but as a structural attempt to find the language through which

to present differently—that is, differently from minjung art—the “intensity of reality.”

Park’s activity with Sungnam Project inevitably fostered his later conceptualization of

kaeny!m ch!k hy!nsil ju!i (conceptual realism or conceptual aesthetics of hy!nsil) in

2000-1, a theory through which Park ambitiously sought to learn from and

simultaneously undo the politics of minjung hy!nsil ju!i (minjung realism) by critically

analyzing the institution of art and institution of art criticism.160

The concentrated effort placed in the form of presentation reveals another

significant philosophy underlying Sungnam Project’s practice. Note that when Sungnam

Project zoomed in on “residents’ art,” the focus was on the everyday making of objects,

and not simply the objects or the makers. Compared to minjung reportage literature and

film that privileged the stories of people/residents/minjung and Choi Jeong-hwa’s art-

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
159
Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"m ch"k hy"nsil ju!i not'!: han p’y"njipcha !i chu” (A Note on
Conceptual Realism: An Editor’s Footnote) in Forum A. Vol. 9 (April 16, 2001), unpaginated.
160
Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"mmisul, minjungmisul, haengdongju!i r!l ihaehan!n kibonj"gin
kwanj"m” (The Fundamental Points for Understanding Conceptual Art, Minjung Art and
Activism), Forum A. Vol.2 (July 30, 1998), np. Also see Park Chan-kyong, “Kaeny"m ch"k
hy"nsil ju!i not'!: han p’y"njipcha !i chu” (A Note on Conceptual Realism: An Editor’s Footnote)
in Forum A. Vol. 9 (April 16, 2001), np. Forum A also ran a special edition on the 1999 Queens
Museum of Art exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s-1980s, by including
Korean translations of two catalogue essays—Mari Carmen Ramirez’s “Tactics for Thriving on
Adversity: Conceptualism in Latin America, 1960-1980” and Peter Wollen’s “Global
Conceptualism and North American Conceptual Art”—in Forum A’s 7th volume published on
February 28, 2000.
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making that put inanimate objects before human subjects, Sungnam Project was

interested in the everyday practice of people—what Deutsche would call the constant

negotiations among situated citizens against dominant forces of capital and the state—as

such a practice was materialized in and through objects and their environments. This

explains why Sungnam Project’s representational tactics included not only documentation

of everyday practice but also production that required artists to replicate such practice,

like a metonymic re-creation of Sungnam—by producing a video that required the

journey in and out of neighborhood alleys, making cement sculptures (the slope

measurements) that incidentally resembled some of the “parking-free obstacles,” and

laying out these art objects-turned-everyday objects (or vice versa) in the space of

institution, that is, the city hall.

FlyingCity: Reality and Fantasy

In December 2000, artist Jeon Yong-suk (who, in October 2001, would form

FlyingCity), criticized Sungnam Project by pointing out the group’s engagement with the

minjung-period tradition of documentary reportage. For Jeon, there is a certain

“misunderstanding” about reality (ri!liti) made by Sungnam Project causing a problem

for the group. This misunderstanding is the lingering obsession with realism as an

aesthetic trope that holds onto faith in truthful depiction of the world as it exists.161 For

Jeon, reality should be understood through the idea of “hy!njons!ng,” a

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
161
For example, Jeon notes that the power of Park Chan-kyong’s art [artworks and not criticism]
can be located in its narrative structure interwoven with photographs, that is, photographs as an
archive [with its own fiction and narrative]. See “Email Roundtable,” Forum A No.8 (December
26, 2000), unpaginated.
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phenomenological concept signifying “actuality as the quality of existing in the present

moment”:

To obtain hy!njons!ng by intervening in politics is no other than to have a

command of realism by exposing that reality is fantasy. Onto this [matrix of
representation and reality], a third perspective needs to be conjoined to streamline
[such an activity] as an art movement. Here, the third perspective is the
perspective of a subject [a subject position] that reaches to the formal decision,
that is, why choose this particular form/structure among all others? In other words,
it has to be a position of desire. Of course the question of desire has to be dealt
with the complexity of modernism. That is, not to satiate the other’s desire but to,
as #i$ek argues, “become aware of” the desire by way of making the object
hy!njon (or, to exist in the present moment).162

This is a phenomenological and psychological inquiry, concerning the subject position

vis-à-vis one’s surroundings. This position, which sits between reality and politics, takes

seriously the question of form. As Jeon’s more recent assessment tells, what drove his

activities as a member of FlyingCity all along was the search for “Ur-form (wonhy!ng),”

for it expresses and is ingrained in the dynamics and intensity of life.163 If interests in

urbanism and modernization link Sungnam Project and FlyingCity together, the latter’s

emphasis on the inevitable connection between desire and form stands out as a difference.

In other words, if Sungnam Project used fiction to dialectically present and deny reality,

FlyingCity sought to locate the desire, fantasy, and narrative within everyday life, and to

multiply and intensify them through representation.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
162
Jeon, ibid.
163
Jeon at the first meeting of Chiy"k Misul Y"ngu (Local Art Research), which I took part in
between February and June, 2013. The research group members included Jeon Yong-suk, Cho Ji-
eun, Kim Hee-jin, Lee Young-wook, and staff members of the Alternative Space Pool.
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Indeed, the inspiration to start the “urbanism research group FlyingCity” came

from a particular scene in the documentary film Sanggyedong Olympics (dir. Kim Dong-

won, 1986). Well-known as having pioneered the reportage-style documentary in South

Korea’s film history, Sanggyedong Olympics is representative of the 1980s minjung

realism that Sungnam Project sought to emulate. Director Kim had captured how the

evicted low-income families of the shantytown in the Sanggyedong district fought against

the government that had torn down the slum in 1986, just before the 1988 Seoul

Olympics torch march would pass by it.164 What caught FlyingCity’s attention was a

particular architectural structure that stood amid the demolished neighborhood in the film:

a makeshift watch tower the residents had built with metal pipes and tires and

affectionately called “Goliath,” after the moniker given to a gigantic shipyard crane in

Ulsan that had become famous as the site of ship-making workers’ strike. [Fig. 3.7] As

Jeon wrote later: “The tower stood there awkwardly among the demolished houses, like a

spaceship landed among ruins. This scene made a picture that was aesthetic (simmi ch!k)

and also earthy and real (hy!nsil ch!k) at the same time. The name FlyingCity directly

came into my mind, and it became our name.”165 A gush of energy springing forth from

the destroyed life is at once a response to tragic injustice and a powerful vestige of

utopian hope and resistance. When seen in person, this “spaceship”—like a “parking-free

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
164
Kim Dong-won follows the families to their first relocation to the Myongdong Cathedral, at
whose backyard they built tents to continue the struggles, and then to an empty field near
Sungnam, where the government promised a patch of land for them. The 27-minute film narrates
the three year-long documentation that required the filmmaker to live with the evicted in these
locations.
165
Quoted in Mark Kremer “See Seoul, Then Die: The flyingCity Experience,” Hermès Korea
missulsang (Seoul: Hermès Korea, 2004), 86-93.
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obstacle” sculpture par excellence—must have exercised a fantastic and affective impact

on its viewers.

FlyingCity, inspired by the “spaceship” and pronounced and written in Korean as

pûllaing siti, thus began its life in October 2001 as a loosely defined network of three

artists, including Jeon Yong-suk, Chang Chong-kwan, and Kim Gi-su. By that time, they

had executed individual projects in urban spaces and neighborhoods in Seoul, 166 and had

already become close friends by virtue of activity in two other networks: Forum A (a

discursive platform founded by artists, curators, and critics for workshops and publication

activities in 1997-2005) and Alternative Space Pool (an alternative art space founded by

many of Forum A members, from 1999 to present).167 These networks represent the

collective efforts among artists to rethink the history of Korean contemporary art and its

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
166
For example, Jeon Yong-suk curated a show titled Sinsadong yak’ul#t’# achumma:
p’yomy!nt#l (Sinsa-dong Mrs. Yogurt: Surfaces) in Gallery Ut"k in 2000, which invested a
particular neighborhood district (Sinsa-dong) and a profession (the delivery women, mostly
middle-age, who carries a refrigerated hand-cart and sells yogurt and milk).
167
Forum A, founded in October 1997 by Jeon Yong-suk and Park Chan-kyong, among others,
and continued until 2005, was a network of sixty some artists, curators, and critics in their
twenties and thirties whose main goal was to foster in-depth and critical discourse in the arts.
They sought to build a site of discussion, publish Forum A journals online and in paper (self-
designated as “quarterly tabloids of art criticism”) and expand its network beyond Korea by
establishing coalition with other artist and critic groups like Finger in Germany and
Protoacademy in Scotland. Some of the Forum A’s members, like Park Chan-kyong, Lee Young-
wook, and Beck Ji-sook, were members of Mipiy"n (1988-1993), as I analyzed in Chapter 2. The
eponymous quarterly of Forum A remains today the most lucid record of the art criticism that
reflects the questions, desires, points of reference, and vision of these practitioners between 1997
and 2005, until Forum A dissipated. Some editions, such as the seventh volume on avant-garde
(February 2000) presented the translated writings of Peter Wollen and Mari Carmen Ramirez,
thus introducing conceptual art not only from North America but also Latin America, the latter
playing an important source of inspiration from other “third world cities” (che samsegye tosit#l).
By February 1999 the members of Forum A launched a site of exhibition and discursive activities
called “Alternative Art Space Pool (taean kongkan p’ul),” an unprecedented exhibition space run
by a collective of artists and critics. Pool and Forum A were the networks of critically-minded
artists, which fomented the founding of FlyingCity in 2001.
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engagement with social reality, the efforts that FlyingCity actively took part in.168 Since

its inception FlyingCity continued to draw new members from these networks, as it has

remained loosely defined and always open to other artists to join. With the exception of

Jeon Yong-suk who is active under the name FlyingCity even today, the artists who came

in and out of FlyingCity are plenty, including Ok Jung-ho, Song Sang-hee, Koh Seung-

wook, Lee Jin-kyung, and others. Such a flexible collaboration model, even further

evolved from that of Sungnam Project, signals the spreading interest in urban research as

a mode of artistic practice among a wide range of Korean artists, while increasing the

possibility of sustaining long-lasting group activities beyond the immediate years.

FlyingCity’s manifesto titled “The Agenda for Urbanism Group FlyingCity”

(2002) states that the group investigates the relationship between art and South Korean

urbanism. Urbanism, when discussed in terms of the conflicts brought by urban

development, “packages the abstractness and ambiguity of urbanism as a dominant

discourse, and contributes to reinforcing the domination of spectacle and, as a result,

concealing the significance of the everyday to urban life.”169 FlyingCity proposes an

alternative possibility that “rediscovers the abstractness of urban life from the level of

concrete reality (hy!nsil) and resocializes it.” In the beginning, FlyingCity’s practice was

influenced by the Situationist International and dematerialized art activities, which the

agenda identified as sources of inspiration. Their versions of mapping the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
168
Community and Art (2002) was a workshop among alternative art spaces sponsored by the
Gwangju Biennale, which resulted in a publication. The 4th Gwangju Biennale Invited Group’s
International Workshop Community and Art (Gwangju: Gwangju Biennale Foundation, 2002).
169
“Agenda for Urbanism Group ‘FlyingCity’” drafted by Jeon Yongsuk, and uploaded to their
website on March 13, 2002, two months after the group opened their website flyingcity.org. (last
accessed on March 11, 2014)
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psychogeography of certain neighborhoods in Seoul were documented in two videos:

Something to Do on the Land of Destruction (2002, 18 min), where the artists violently

tore and destroyed objects left behind by their previous owners in an evicted apartment

building, and Shouting in the Mt. Bukak (2002, 14 min 45 sec), in which the artists

shouted out loud scripts of South Korean films about inter-Korean conflicts near the Blue

House, the South Korean presidential office and resident.170 [Fig. 3.8 and Fig. 3.9]

Photographs taken from daily strolls on Seoul streets were uploaded alongside

corresponding comments on the group’s website as part of the image-and-text series

Today’s Objet (2002-2006). The first photograph uploaded on January 23, 2002 is a shot

of the newly built UFO-like Jongro Tower designed by Rafael Viñoly Associates, [Fig.

3.10] while the second page, uploaded the following day, is a text that asks the viewers to

envision the sculpture of General Lee Sunsin (b.1545–d.1598), commissioned by the

dictator Park Chung-hee, without presenting the image. [Fig. 3.11] For a year, each time

FlyingCity uploaded a photograph of an urban scene mostly devoid of human presence,

the photograph rarely failed to attract comments from other artists and the online

public.171 To a more participatory end, the group offered classes to children helping them

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
170
In addition, Temporary Sculpture in Mangwondong (2001) documents how FlyingCity and
other artists build a temporary sculpture in a playground by using the recycled materials from the
neighborhood of Mangwondong.
171
At this point, South Korea already had its version of Facebook avant la lettre called Cyworld
(1999 to present), which quickly became extremely popular and promoted the online culture of
taking photographs, commenting on them, and then generating conversations on Cyworld pages
or other blog sites. The advent of the “selfie” (in Korean called selka, shortened from selpû
kamera) coincides with this period, and the culture of inserting one’s own opinion in considerably
short writing came with the necessity of the visual element, whether the picture included the self-
portrait or one’s subjective comment written in the casual manner. FlyingCity’s Today’s Objet
series benefited from this culture of commenting and communicating online on the verge of rise
in early 2000s.
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draw psychogeographical maps that reflected their experience of living in their

neighborhood (such as the route from home to the kindergarten), and then had them make

corresponding architectural models out of cardboard. [Fig. 3.12 and Fig. 3.13] These

models and drawings, along with the videos of FlyingCity’s performances, were

presented at their first one-group/solo exhibition, Invitation to Drift in February 2003.

Soon afterwards, however, the group abandoned the practice of performance—

that is, themselves playing the role of vessel through which the urban psyche is enacted.

Instead, they turned to a research-based method, by which the group sought to decipher

the abstractness (“the realm of senses that combines pleasure and politics”) from the

“concrete reality” (the everyday) of other people, such as schoolchildren.172 In short, a

shift occurred from an act of performing the predetermined script or urban psyche to a

long-term process of learning and excavating. For the Cheonggyecheon Project (2003-9),

the objects of ethnographic research and partners of collaboration were the merchants and

vendors in the Cheonggyecheon district. FlyingCity’s turn to urban geography and

ethnographic research in a target neighborhood was anticipated in the group’s agenda,

which, in hindsight, made the early performance pieces an exception to the group’s

practice. As I will demonstrate below, the group in the early to mid-2000s was interested

not in claiming the fixed identities of urban residents or location but in tracing the

historical process and subject formation ingrained in an urban setting that the subjects

have transformed over time:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
172
FlyingCity’s first “solo” museum exhibition (Invitation to Drift or Pyoryu eûi ch’odae) was
held in February 28-March 12, 2003 at Maronier Art Museum in Seoul.
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… What interests us is a question of historical awakening, which is far from the

strategy that materializes a particular locality of the city and has little to do with
the symbolic expression of locality or the sharing of certain common signs in a
particular community. In other words, our site of intervention is the city as a
historical space and how the realm of psychological/mental life transforms [over
time] and is not the intensity of expression or eruption of symbols [in privileged
moments]. Rather, our interests lie at the opposite direction from them [the
intensity of expression and eruption of symbols] for they tend to fix meaning.173

It is this historical mandate that compelled FlyingCity to explore the materiality of the

Cheonggyecheon district and the social network of its actors built and transformed over a

duration of time. Moreover, this diachronic inquiry constituted the “general statement”

that Jeon had earlier designated as problematically lacking in the work of Sungnam

Project. For FlyingCity, the history is not only that of failure—the failed minjung

revolution and the failed achievement of economic equality even, and especially, after

institutional democratization—but also the utopian moments that always coexist and are

commingled with the tragic stories of urban development. Or perhaps, finding the

moments of utopian future in the history so as to recuperate them was the very question

of historical awakening that FlyingCity pursued in the Cheonggyecheon Project.

In what follows, I will explore how FlyingCity’s activities, especially in the early

phase of its Cheonggyecheon Project, responded to the group’s agenda and have

motivated the group to continually reinvent their tactics of engagement with urban space.

My analyses will begin with This is not an electronic fan (2003), a mixture of text and

image in the form of a power point presentation, and end with All Things Park (2004), an

architectural model with which FlyingCity reached the pinnacle of its utopian aspirations.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
173
“Agenda for Urbanism Group ‘FlyingCity,’” Ibid.
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This is not an electronic fan (2003)

The PowerPoint presentation This is not an electronic fan (2003) is timed to

change slides every 1-3 seconds for the duration of 3 minutes and 24 seconds. This

prompt speed necessitates that we give the texts and images a concentrated reading

before they quickly disappear from our eyes, a type of reading that the Quick Time-run

video of the Seoul-based web art collective Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries (1999-

present) requires of its viewers. The content of the presentation derived from

FlyingCity’s ethnographic and urban geographical research of the metal workshops, such

as the excerpts from interviews with the entrepreneur-craftsmen, photographic

documentation of their work environment, and the web-like map of the alleys. I single out

this time-based presentation as an effective representation of how the group wanted to

bring to the fore the utopian aspect of Cheonggyecheon workshops by enhancing the

humor that already existed in the site.

The slide show begins with the Ch"nggye Jonghap owner Han Unyong’s story,

from which the slide show acquires its name. All the slides for this story have only texts,

except for one that shows a composite of machine parts that loosely make up the shape of

a fan. Below is the transcript, with the slash (/) indicating the turning of the slide:

In the 70s / there was a shortage / of fans. / People / swarmed / to Hwanghak-dong

/ requested / to make [for them] / fans.%/ [I] had to salvage and gather /
abandoned / motors / and fix them %/ but with no technical skills / at first / %[I]
rubbed %/ added lubricant % / and in some cases / broken / motors / with some
lubricant / would start running. / So / where / and how much %/ to add lubricant /
% [I] taught myself %/ and later / made propellers, %/ assembled the frames %/ the
legs %/ or anything.%/ So every summer / to the point of / lacking sleep hours / [I]
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had a good [profitable] time / Seeing this / the police / threatened. / “Why
without permission [do you] / make and sell / fans? %/ “This / is not / a fan.” /
“What I / made / is just a machine / that makes the wind”%/174

These phrases are truncated so as to be read within as quickly as a slide per second. They

are sometimes garnished with the musical note symbol. When seen in this format, the text

turns the audience into an amateur “rapper,” who would make the beat to the story that

has now become lyrical lines in a “song.” The phrases with bigger fonts would be

emphasized and they are usually placed towards the end of each sentence, thus creating a

crescendo effect. (For the purpose of transferring the PowerPoint presentation to its bare

textual form, I marked these big-font phrases in bold, although the effect is not

completely delivered).

The story, “This is not an electronic fan,” had in fact appeared earlier in

FlyingCity’s Today’s Objet a few months prior. [Fig. 3.14 and Fig. 3.15] In the web

layout of Today’s Objet, the story is in a longer, more prose-like, and less rhythmic text

than in the PowerPoint format. Here too, what accompanies the text is the

aforementioned image of machine parts which gives the impression of a fan, and which

FlyingCity explains as “a certain object made by interweaving Cheonggyecheon-

produced machine parts in a shoddy and haphazard way.” The description, “in a shoddy

and haphazard way,” expressed in an onomatopoeia (“!lgis!lgi”), is how the actual fans

in Mr. Han’s story are portrayed because they were made with any available machine

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
174
The translation is mine. Even though I tried to keep the order in which each slide has the
words, due to the difference between Korean and English linguistic structures, I made minor
revisions in the syntax by swapping the order of words within the sentences. The added words are
in brackets.
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parts like propellers, motors, and frames. In the absence of the actual fans allegedly made

by Mr. Han, FlyingCity provides the viewers with a fan of Cheonggyecheon as a network

in its entirety—a magically appearing machine that works and does its job against all

odds. This touch of magic is intensified, when the story is turned into a moving image or

a poem to be sung with a rhythmic beat. The fan is a metaphor for the Cheonggyecheon

community, with all of its tensions suspended between play and survival tactics,

originality and sloppy replica, enchantment and trickery. What is certain is that the

PowerPoint places its viewers in the world of Cheonggyecheon, between its fan and a

fan-like thing, between its essence and excess.

Leaving behind this ambivalent yet humorous first impression, the rest of the slide

show gradually presents the production network of Cheonggyecheon with an equally

surrealist wit. The introductory slide shows a chaotic drawing of color dots and curvy

lines intertwined with one another, with a subtitle “From the outside, [they say that the

Cheonggyecheon metal workshop district] is entangled like an anarchic chaos,

senselessly disheveled.” The clean white page on the following slide reciprocates in

agreement: “That’s right. It’s not a misunderstanding but a correct understanding.” The

next slide has a simplified street map in scale, with main roads and narrow alleys. Cut to

another slide: colorful dots, similar to those previously seen in the first image of chaotic

mixture, are laid on top of the map. And the next slide has equally colorful lines linking

the dots. This step-by-step presentation gradually and ultimately informs the viewers of

the logic of representation FlyingCity pursues: the dots indicate individual shops, color-

coded according to their specialties—black for “casting (chumul),” dark blue for
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“bending steel (sibori),” yellow for “wood patterning (mokhy!ng),” etc.—while the lines

refer to the inter-shop connections. [Fig. 3.16] The rest of the PowerPoint show

introduces the processes of casting, bending steel, wood patterning, and using a lathe, by

presenting the entrepreneur-craftsmen specializing in each stage of the production. On

one hand, the presentation delivers factual information, teaching viewers what each

process actually does—the sporadically inserted documentary photographs of craftsmen

inside their workshops are helpful here—and how these small-scale workshops

subcontract each other in order to complete a final product. On the other hand, the

presentation is garnished with texts resembling folklores and heroic tales (e.g. “casting

leaves steel droppings like bats”; “sibori breathes enchantment into steel”; “Nobody can

defeat the superiority complex of wood pattern designers”; “Can you really make any

pattern? “Yes, everything and anything. Do you want me to make one of you now?”) and

the corresponding visuals (e.g. comic drawings and photographs) interwoven into these

aphorisms and quotations. [Fig. 3.17] Thus, any risk of mistaking the stoic expressions of

the craftsmen and the bulky metal tools surrounding them as reportage-style documentary

photographs is usurped through the witty puns and visual paraphilia decorating them.

This PowerPoint presentation as a virtual tour of Cheonggyecheon’s metal

workshops makes one thing clear: the heart of Cheonggyecheon is located the

connectivity among these multiple shops, a network that is in place and that is instantly

mobilized when a customer visits the district to make a commission, however small the

quantity might be. FlyingCity’s mapping highlights and traces this commission-based

production line, which depends on the human geography built over decades; this map, or
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this remapping, thus serves as an alternative to the grid-like mapping or the real-estate

profit driven zoning. This reconceptualization of the network too has previously appeared

in Today’s Objet as a diagram titled Drifting Producers.175 [Fig. 3.18] Bubbles with the

workshop’s commercial names written inside float among curvy lines that indicate the

(inter-)contractual relationships. This diagram, FlyingCity wrote, seeks to visualize the

network that is “at once solid and flexible” and exists “in a chaotic order.”176 As a

FlyingCity member witnessed while interviewing the owner/craftsman of Daehy"ng

Mokhy"ng, the owner/craftsman of Sin’a Jumul barged in for a moment, uttered

something in fragments, and quickly went about his way. That was the latter giving the

former a subcontracting job.177 That is how tight the interdependency is—no need for an

official contract or even a complete sentence. This diagram and its appropriation in the

PowerPoint presentation constitute a new version of psychogeographical map that

FlyingCity had previously learned from the Situationist International but has since

reinvented by adding new elements of human dependency and social network in

Cheonggyecheon’s production industry. Here, for example, the estimates of proximity

and distance are not only psychological but also entrenched in lines of production.

This remapping of Cheonggyecheon reveals the underlying politics of FlyingCity.

Even though FlyingCity does not pick an enemy or a straw man to blame for the district’s

declination and foreseeable eviction, the PowerPoint presentation enacts the politics of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
175
FlyingCity writes that this term comes from an analysis of an Italian region, where the family-
scale handcraft business has flourished after the mass-production model has lost its appeal.
176
FlyingCity.org (last accessed March 11, 2014)
177
Cheonggyecheon Festival News dated July 25, 2005. Accessed through FlyingCity.org (last
accessed March 11, 2014)
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publicness.178 The revolutionary aspect of FlyingCity’s politics is that the group does not

begin with defining “who the public is” and “what the public good is.” FlyingCity is

interested in the “everyday life histories (saenghwalsa),” in Cheonggyecheon and how

they rely on, transform, and are transformed by the site. The “publicness” therefore is not

inherent to the identities of a certain people or a certain site. It is the transformative and

intersubjective social processes between peoples as well as between the social actors and

the urban space. Such a thought process is constitutive of the pursuit of publicness.

This understanding of urban publicness is radical precisely because it stands

opposite the government’s logic for the Cheonggyecheon redevelopment project. The so-

called Cheonggyecheon restoration project begins with the government’s mandate to

promote the “public good” of a clean urban district viable for commercial interests of

tourist and financial industries. In this equation, “the public”—whose interests the city

protects and promotes— essentially comes down to the property owners, office workers,

and tourists. This post-Fordist turn with its emphasis on culture, tourism, and real-estate

values, is a well-known formula of urban redevelopment that inevitably thrives on the

logic of exclusion as well as inclusion. “Culture” in this formula operates in the

temporality of instantaneity. City-sponsored festivals erupt one afternoon to attract a

crowd and then disappear the next day. Only the numbers—e.g. how many citizens

showed up? how much of trickle down economic effects was generated?—are important

outcomes of these usually exorbitant events, offered as evidence of good city governance.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
178
Artist Lee Eunu recalls interviewing FlyingCity in 2007 as part of her MFA degree at Korea
National University of Arts. She was surprised to hear that FlyingCity was not interested in
advocating the rights of the merchants. I argue in this paper that the politics of FlyingCity lies in
visualizing hy!njons!ng through new forms of representation.
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For Cheonggyecheon, the city government’s proposal to create a public space depended

on restoring the natural stream and the pre-modern artifacts such as Choson Dynasty

bridges, both of which, according to the government, the lifting of expressway was said

to guarantee.179 Here, the relationship between the site (i.e. nature and artifacts) and the

human subjects (i.e. tourists, office workers, and property owners) is an ossified one built

squarely on the latter’s objectification of the former. The process of ossification also

operates on another level: the site cannot be transformed by the subjects who occupy it.

This understanding of the public, public space, and publicness encompasses the various

components that make up city life, by totalizing the public and urban space while

colonizing the potential for utopianism found in the everyday practice of publicness.180

For FlyingCity, culture is not represented by a predefined object (a park or a

premodern bridge) transplanted to a given site; it is a practice, just like the machine-

making culture that has flourished in Cheonggyecheon over the three decades. This

culture is not only a productive culture in the literal sense but also a productively

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
179
Of course this turned out to be untrue, as the government ended up injecting water from the
Han River to run this artificial stream (with a concrete bottom) because the tight construction
schedule (to be completedd before the mayor runs for president) disallowed a through ecological
possibility of a viable stream in downtown Seoul. The restoration of Choson Dynasty bridges and
other artifacts did not happen either, as the city ended up “burying under the concrete layer”
instead of properly unearthing the artifacts. The three (?) bridges we see now along the
Cheonggye artificial stream are reconstructed from the existing documents and images. Most
NGOs vehemently opposed the unsuitable restoration, whereas FlyingCity argues that what the
artist group wanted to focus on was neither the stream nor the artifacts but the social ecology that
would be destroyed because of this political acrobat. The tragic story begins after the alleged
restoration is complete, however. Many Seoul citizens are still under the spell of “real water
flowing at the heart of Seoul,” ignoring the structural lies, exclusions, and eradications that this
“naturalization” of the city has cost them all.
180
This entire paragraph is inspired by Rosalyn Deutsche’s theorization of art, democracy, and
urban politics, and especially her critique of rhetoric of the new urban renewal policies. The look
of backwardness, filthiness, and obscurity stands against the government’s redevelopment project
that privileges transparency, light, and cleanness. See Deutsche, Evictions.
 164
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imaginative one whose survival is contingent on the narratives of urban legend and the

fantasies of the entrepreneur craftsmen. This culture is also a public one, which

recognizes that hy!njons!ng (“the actuality as the quality of existing in the present

moment”) of a self is always contingent upon that of others—human actors, or machine

parts. And the ways in which FlyignCity visualizes the invisible forces of hy!njons!ng

involve rhythmic beats, swirly line drawings, and humorous aphorisms. These elements

are, I believe, the very forms of life that Sim Kwang-hy"n described in the epitaph. As

these forms are vulnerable to historical evolution—not a linear progress but a prolonged

process of tweaking and mutating—they neither lay claim on an essential notion of

tradition nor attempt to adhere to it. Such an understanding of locality as a practice

provides new insight into the belief that locality is an entity to deny wholesale or else risk

being coopted to the “lure of the local.”181

By 2004, FlyingCity was a well-known artist group in South Korea, enough to be

nominated as one of the three finalists for the 2004 Hermes Prize, alongside Park Chan-

kyong and Jung Yeon-doo.182 For the competition exhibition, FlyingCity produced All

Things Park (Manmul Kongwon), a room-size, labor-intensive, and ambitious

architectural model made with wood boards, sheets, and strips, all floating at waist level.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
181
Miwon Kwon, “Imagining an Impossible World Picture,” Sites and Stations: Provisional
Utopias (1995), 77-88.
182
Launched in 2000, the Hermes Prize has built over the years its reputation equivalent to the
Hugo Boss Prize or the Turner Prize in the U.S. and the U.K. respectively, thanks to many
reasons including the Prize’s generous grant to make new productions for the competition
exhibition. The reasons for the high reputation of Hermes Prize are plenty: its selection
committee is comprised of a mixture of Korean and foreign curators and critics; the three finalists
are each given a generous sum of KRW 30,000,000 (approximately $30,000) to make a new
production for an exhibition, according to which the final winner is selected; the winners of the
prize have all proven artists of great caliber; and the lack of other comparable prizes make it more
outstanding.
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[Fig. 3.19 and Fig. 3.20] It was a model, or a proposal, for the Dongdaemun district of

Seoul that the city had promised to the Cheonggyecheon vendors as a potential

destination for their relocation. The city, more specifically, was preparing to convert the

Dongdaemun Stadium (previously used for professional and amateur baseball matches)

into a commercial mall. At a time when the details of this plan had not been confirmed,

FlyingCity decided to propose a sort of an industrial park that could house not only the

former street vendors, but also the metal workshops, garment worships, design studios,

and more industries from Cheonggyecheon—and as its name “All Things Park” suggests,

this park would have it all. Together, with proximity to each other, these industrial

sectors would spawn a synergetic production network, one that existed in the

Cheonggyecheon district prior to redevelopment. The exhibition text defined it as “a

space of alternativity that is at once a theme park, a factory, a market, and a playground,

as well as an ancient stadium and a residential space.”183 The flexibility of the site’s

function and the energy that it could generate for all of its participants and visitors,

seemed to be expressed through the model’s wood strips projecting like emitting

radiations. The unfinished nature of the model, in conjunction with its free-flowing state,

adds to the utopian aura. Here, utopia is a potential that can be realized. It is also a dream

that is called for, despite the dystopian direction most likely to be taken by the

government-driven urban regeneration project, because FlyingCity has seen and learned

about the “power” of Cheonggyecheon.184

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183
Hermès Korea missulsang (Seoul: Hermès Korea, 2004).
184
Adorno, Theodor, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Georg Lukacs.
Aesthetics and Politics. (London: Verso, 1980); Felicity Scott, Architecture or Techno-utopia:
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But without knowing FlyingCity’s extensive preparation—ethnographic and

somatic research, multiple concept drawings, and dozens of Today’s Objet—it is hard for

any viewer to recognize the depth of FlyingCity’s message. Instead, we are left to gaze in

awe at the impeccable craft skills and the imposing scale. In other words, the imaginative

leap that FlyingCity took to envision a future image of Cheonggyecheon, or of today’s

post-Fordist world more broadly, fell prey to misrecognition as a gigantic spectacle.185

The model All Things Park thus reveals little more than the sheer difficulty of

constructing as an image the spirit of optimism and creativity and publicness without

contextualizing it within a larger framework or relying on a time-based narrative.186

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Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). In her archeological study, Scott
goes back in time, to the 1960s and 1970s, to excavate the dynamic intersection and juncture,
where utopian dreams met dystopian complacency.
185
As one viewer notes in a blog, the model turned the exhibition into an “architecture major’s
studio.” Another viewer, who has left frequent comments on FlyingCity’s website and seems to
have personal connection with the group, expressed the following concern which I find accurate
and reasonable. She wrote: “FlyingCity exhibited the final edition of the Cheonggyechon Project,
spearheaded by the [architectural] model as the product of numerous all nighters and spewed
blood therein. It was the most labor-intensive work [in the exhibit.] It was possible for me to
understand the context and imagination driving the huge model, because I am fully aware of how
they crisscrossed the entire Cheonggyecheon on foot, made drawings, and gathered ideas. But in
the eyes of others, it is only the efforts of handcraft that is visible. If it were less perfect and
smaller in size, would they have appreciated it [more]? When the work’s size and density
become immense, does it automatically get understood as a spectacle despite of the production
process that leads to it? But what can be done in this case, for a model short of such caliber would
fail to deliver ideas?”
http://blog.naver.com/PostView.nhn?blogId=bluetulip&logNo=70027193756 and
http://daradara.egloos.com/458189 (Last accessed June 25, 2014)
186
The metal workshops are existent even today, despite the decreased presence and energy from
the surrounding industries. The winner of the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival, Kim
Ki-duk’s Pieta (2012) features a loan shark whose main customers are metal workshop owners.
The alleys and the metal objects encapsulate the film’s inexplicable darkness. A striking birds-
eye-view shot from the exterior staircase belonging to one of the 1960s buildings captures the
Cheonggyecheon workshops from above, as if a premodern village or a chaotic organism
enclosed by the otherwise bright, post-industrial city streets that surround it. By 2006 the
completion of the Cheonggye artificial stream enlarged the “temporal lag” as well as spatial
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The Practice of Oppositionality

By 1998 the South Korean artists’ conflictive relationship with the government

(the institution) became complicated when Kim Dae-jung, the opposition party leader

who had participated in the country’s democracy movement, took the presidency. Not

only had many artists begun to see collaboration with the government as a viable option

but the government also actively sought to support cultural sectors through various

channels of newly instituted funding agencies. Dissident artists like Kim Jeong-heon

formerly known for their activities as part of minjung art collectives, for instance, took

leadership positions in the subsidiaries of the Ministry of Culture and advocated for the

artists whose allegiances are similar to theirs. By 2000, Alternative Space Pool began to

receive various governmental funds to continue its operation, and the alternative spirit

was no longer independent from the state governance.187 The forms of life to which Sim

Kwang-hy"n wanted to pay attention seemed to occupy the minds of both the artists and

the government.

Much of the hope that the artists invested in the opposition party’s administration

during the decade of 1998-2007, first under the president Kim Dae-jung and then Roh

Moo-hyun, was, however, proven a waste. This decade is now assessed as the beginning

of South Korea’s rapid march to neoliberalism, as Kim Dae-jung’s ascent coincided with

South Korea’s entry into the rules of the IMF. The ascendancy of the former Seoul mayor

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
difference between Cheonggyecheon metal workshops and the rest of the city, and the film profits
in the increased peculiarity of Cheonggyecheon as an isolated neighborhood.
187
Kim Jang-un, “Sangching kwa sot’ong—chik!m hankuk es" kongkongmisul !n "ti e
wich’ihako inn!nka?” (Symbols and Communications: Where is Public Art located in Today’s
Korea?) Visual, Vol. 7 (2010).
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Lee Myung-bak (who bulldozed over the Cheonggyecheon district during his mayoral

term, 2002-2006) to the presidency (2008-2013) further accelerated the practice of

deregulations.188 The making of art, while bearing in mind the fundamental goal of art as

a pursuit of publicness, posed a fundamental political dilemma, one that is linked with

multiple levels of governing structures within and outside the national framework. In the

case of critically minded South Korean artists active in late 1990s and 2000s, their pursuit

of publicness ended up putting them back to the extremely difficult position of “choosing

a side.” Even though the decade of 1998-2007 at first gave the impression that the state

government’s pursuit of publicness seemed viable, it quickly turned out that one must

find an alternative to the existing, state-driven paradigm of publicness.189 The works of

both Sungnam Project and FlyignCity are at once a testament to the dilemma posed to

artists during this period and the artistic efforts to reconfigure the legacy of the 1980s

minjung oppositionality and the political impasse prevailing the 1990s into something

new.

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188
It is no doubt that South Korean nation has a long history of feeding its citizens with
entertainment, as seen in the 1970s and 1980s 3S policy as a foil and distraction of the otherwise
unfree administration or in the 1990s institution of large-scale festivals like the Busan
International Film Festival and the Gwangju Art Biennale all funded by the national and regional
governments. But the “festivalization” of the everyday urban space, which filled the calendar
with small, incessant, and never-ending cultural events spread across the city, is a more recent
phenomenon that came with the country’s entry to neoliberal governing in the late 1990s. The
neoliberalization of South Korea coincided with the Asian Financial Crisis and was later
propelled under Lee Myung-bak’s administration—the construction company CEO turned the
Seoul Mayor (2002-2006) and then the president (2008-2013) synonymous with neoliberal
deregulation.
189
As Deutsche emphasizes, one of the most important definitions of public space that came out
of the court hearings in support of Richard Serra was made by Douglas Crimp and Joel Kovel
who argued that “a distinction between public space and the state apparatus is essential to
democracy.” Deutsche, Ibid., 267.
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To find a new form of oppositionality, the artists of Sungnam Project and

FlyingCity looked to critical practices of conceptual art as well as surrealist performance

of the Situationist International. Their critique of 1990s urban revitalization projects

aligns them with Rosalyn Deutsche’s privileging of publicness as social relations. But

unlike Deutsche, who suggests a form of conflict-producing public art, these Korean

artists turn their attention to the existing object-making practices at the site (or productive

practices in the district) as negotiating the multiple forces that affect both the site’s

human agencies and geographic shapes. Despite the widely received notions in Korea of

participation and social engagement developed in Grant Kester’s theorization of the

dialogical relationship between artists and viewers-participants, the late 1990s beginning

of artistic collaboration—between artists and non-artists—envisioned a much more open

and fluid relationship. Thus these artists also betray the model of art-making proposed by

Kester, who places his belief in art’s ability to provoke “being in common” among

community members with existing conflicts. What then becomes ambiguous is the role of

the artists in Sungnam Project and FlyingCity. If Deutsche argues for a partial subject

who reveals the incompleteness of the social, and Kester constructs a “context provider”

who facilitates a task-oriented conflict resolution efforts or dialogues, the artists featured

in this chapter might straddle the roles of analyst and ethnographer. Compared to the

image of the vanguard visionary (for minjung artists) and a fan (Choi Jeong-hwa), these

artists resemble a group of researchers developing a certain “instructive manual” or a

“score” about the creative public practices, which can be disseminated and performed by

a wider audience. At the site that closely resembles the mechanism of hy!njang, the
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understandings of reality and publicness collapse into one to give birth to the oppositional,

alternative, and democratic art in circa 1998-2007 Korea.

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Chapter Four

Democracy with(in) Division:

From Imagined Unification to Ethical Subjectivity

[There] is an inherent limit to democratization in a situation of national division.

At the same time, the relative success of democratization must measure both the degree
of North-South rapprochement and the advance of democracy within the South.
–Paik Nak-chung (1993, emphasis original)190

One of the foremost public intellectuals in South Korea, Paik Nak-chung (b. 1938)

is best known for founding in 1966 the literary quarterly Creation and Criticism

(Ch’angchak kwa pip’yong), where he voiced his theory of National Literature (minjok

munhak)—massively influential to the pro-democracy cultural movements in the 1970s

and 80s. In post-authoritarian South Korea, Paik’s continued inquiry into the shifting

cultural and political dynamics of South Korea began a more self-reflexive theorization

of South Korean society vis-à-vis its relationship to the North, or what he termed the

Division System (pundan ch’aeche). This system, or the political regime that rules the

two interlinked nations, is in perpetual self-reproduction, locked in itself. In Paik’s words,

the division system is a historically specific concept that “refers not simply to a territorial

cleavage but to the formation of a self-reproducing system of a sort in which the North

and the South are interlocked in a curious symbiotic relationship.”191 Hence, any analysis

of South Korean democratization—or, even more broadly, South Korea and South
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
190
Paik, “South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge,” New Left Review (January-
February, 1993), 71.
191
Paik, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Vol.14, No.1 (2013), 160.
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Korean cultural production—must take into account the divided nature of the Korean

nation. The most fundamental value of Paik’s writings on the peninsula’s division system

can be located in its move away from the otherwise diplomacy jargon-laden, nuclear

weapon-focused, and human rights-driven discussion of inter-Korean relationship. His

philosophical prescriptions for the divided nation and his historically grounded analyses

of political subjectivity are therefore extremely helpful for the purpose of this chapter,

even though his writings lack close readings of literary and cultural works. What this

absence might signify, I believe, is that the complexity of Paik’s division system theory

did not originate from a group of art or literary works but is instead rooted in a

sociopolitical understanding that, in and of itself, has a fundamentally aesthetic,

philosophical value. Its very complexity signals the difficulty of locating cultural works

that reflect similar levels of complexity. As a way of addressing and overcoming this

difficulty, this chapter seeks to analyze South Korean visual arts that seek to visualize the

realities of division, desires for unification, and fantasies about North Korea. Singling out

Paik as one of the most sophisticated cultural theorist and philosophers of the divided

peninsula, this chapter will activate and nuance his theory. The points of convergence and

divergence between visual productions and the larger sociopolitical shifts in the

peninsula, as they are highlighted in this chapter, will thus serve two objectives: first, to

introduce the discourse of visuality and aesthetics to the discussion of division system in

relation to the country’s democratization; and second, to build a historical understanding

of South Korean artists’ critical engagement with the country’s divided nature.
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The chapter’s historical discussion begins with the 1980s, during which artists

negotiated the authoritarian regime’s censorship, and continues in the 1990s and the

2000s, when post-authoritarian South Korean society experiences multiple

epistemological shifts when facing North Korea. This diachronic analysis, which is

interlinked with the development of Paik’s division system theory over the three decades,

will at once articulate and complicate the dialectical relationship between division and

democracy suggested in the epigraph. To this end, the second half of the chapter is

devoted to analyses of a South Korean artist Seung Woo Back’s photographic practice

that involved visiting North Korea and reimagining the democratic relation with the

division in photographic terms.

The 1980s: Trapped in the Triad of Autonomy-Democracy-Unification

Generally speaking, South Korean artists and citizens have experienced greater

freedom in speaking their opinions about inter-Korean relations, despite the fact that the

National Security Law, instituted in 1948, legally bans any praise of the North Korean

regime even today. The turning point was the resignation of the dictator Chun Doo-hwan

in 1987, after the 1987 June Uprising. But, although it may seem obvious, not all

artworks by artists with anti-government, anti-dictatorship agendas were censored under

the authoritarian regime, even if they all spoke to an inter-Korean relationship. Any

discussion of the genealogy of artworks on the matters of national division, therefore,

must begin with the mechanisms of censorship under the dictatorial rule. This chapter

will therefore articulate the distinction between the prohibited and the sanctioned
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artworks in the 1980s, thereby revealing how the rhetoric of division developed under

Chun’s dictatorship.192 In other words, what was the matrix of division and

authoritarianism?

For the purpose of comparison, I will begin by analyzing two realist paintings by

well-known minjung artists: Sin Hakchul’s Rice Planting (1987; oil on canvas; 130 x 160

cm) [Fig. 4.1] and Oh Yoon’s National Longing for Unification (1985; oil banner

painting; 138 cm x 349 cm). [Fig. 4.2] In terms of the large-format depiction of human

figures, use of metaphors and symbolism, and reference to agriculture and the rural life,

the two paintings reflect the prevalent use of magical realism in the 1980s among artists

who comment on the contemporary Korean society as discussed in Chapter 1. And yet,

their fates took on different paths: Shin’s painting was deemed as violating the National

Security Law, resulting in the police confiscation and the artist’s 10-month imprisonment

in 1989, while Oh’s painting survives until today as a benevolent artistic gesture for

unification.

Sin’s Rice Planting follows the often-used trope of juxtaposing utopic and

dystopic visions of life. The upper half of the composition depicts rural life of farming

enriched by the successful harvest and life of plenty. The prelapsarian community whose

joyous atmosphere is demonstrated by smiles on the farmers’ faces and their dancing

gestures is located under what resembles the Mountain Paekdu—the mythical birth place

of all Korean people and the tallest mountain in the peninsula currently off-limits to the

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192
Scholarly literatures and news reportings about the instances of censorship are plenty; so are
the writings about the artistic bravery to produce any commentary on division. But it is the
comparison between these two categories of art about division that this chapter brings to light.
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South Koreans because of its location in the far northern boundary of North Korea. The

lower half of the composition, on the other hand, is filled with another group of farmers

engaged in hard labor. The time of joyful harvest is far in the remote future for this group,

because they are not only bending their back to transplant rice but also painstakingly

pushing a swarm of unwanted garbage off the field. The “garbage” is represented with a

composite of commercially available mass media images (coca cola, foreign cigarettes, a

scene of embrace from a Hollywood movie), images of militarism (nuclear weapons,

tanks, an Uncle Sam hugging bombs, barbed wires coiling a plaque scripted with “38” as

an indication of the partition along the 38th parallel), and non-human monsters (a

screaming goblin and non-descript body parts). Such a pictorial collage of objects and

figures that explicitly refutes their original scale is characteristic of Sin’s representative

work, Korean Modern and Contemporary History (Hankuk kundaesa, 130 x 390 cm,

1983), for which the artist painted human figures and objects as if decontextualized from

other pictorial spaces and then “collaged” together as comprising a part of a larger

organism with a monstrous vitality.193 [Fig. 4.3] The rather surrealist depiction of the

garbage in Rice Planting, with its collapsing of space and scale, stands out amid

otherwise straightforward realism.

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193
Sin, who did not belong in any of dissident art collective up until the early 1980s, is famous
for having abandoned his object-based sculptural practice of the 1970s when he in 1979
discovered a photography album of Korean modern history. Since then, his works developed into
photo-collages and paintings pictorializing collages of commercially available objects and
human/non-human figures. His second solo show in 1982 showcased these collage-based works
that the dissident art critic Hwang Jiwu noted as “breaking out of the [shell] of [Korean]
modernism from its back door.” Chan-kyong Park, “Shin Hak-ch'"l: S"min!i Y"ksar!l K!rida”
(Sin Hak-chul: To Draw People’s History,” Munhwa Kwahak 19 (Fall, 1999), 223-245.
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The painting was submitted and presented at the 1st Unification Exhibition

sponsored by the Association of Minjok Artists (Minjok misulin hyophoe) in 1987. Its

image was then included in the calendar published by the Association in 1989. It is this

image, which a dissident youth group in the Inchon area used to adorn paper fans and

distribute to the public, that caught the eyes of the police. Two years after Sin painted the

picture, the police made an unannounced, early morning visit to his house and arrested

him on the charges of infringing the National Security Law. What frustrated Sin the most

during the interrogation, as the artist recounts, was the police’s own interpretation of the

painting regardless of the artist’s intentions. For the state authorities, the painting violated

the National Security Law because the upper half of the composition was seen to depict

“North Korea,” as utopically, while the lower half of the composition would depict

“South Korea,” dystopically. The artist, however, argues that the entire picture is about

unification and the upper half is an imaginative stage after the unification is complete.

Oh Yoon’s National Longing for Unification is likewise a painting about

unification as an accomplished fact; but this painting was never questioned as threatening

national security. Oh’s direct reference to unification in the title and the insertion of tiger

and bear—the two animals featured in the mythical tale of Korean nation’s birth in Mt.

Pekdu—point to an uncomplicated interpretation that the vertically elongated wave of

people symbolizes the geographic shape of the Korean peninsula. In this metaphorical

space, the people of “Korea,” without any trace of ideological and political differences,

together are able to form the shape of the peninsula in its entirety. The premodern-style

farming clothes dressing the figures place the temporality of the jubilant celebration of
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one-ness squarely in the past, as if the partition line first drawn in 1945 and the post-war

history of American and Soviet occupation of the peninsula can be lifted without any

trace. The future of re-unification collapses onto the past of one-nation. More research

needs to be done to find out how this work was first exhibited, because the large banner

format already hints at its use in an outdoor setting, but what is clear is that its image was

never censored by the government despite the multiple commonalities that it shares with

Rice Planting.194 They are both vertically hung paintings depicting farmers in an

imagined, virtual space.

The two paintings’ dramatically different fates mark more than the arbitrary

nature of censorship in general. Their divergent paths represent the larger ideology of

division in which the South Korean authoritarian government condoned; that government

furthermore supported a certain type of unification politics while suppressing others. A

selective survey of other paintings that depict the history of division or the desire for

unification, such as the infamous arrests of Lee Sangho and Jon Junho in Gwangju for

their banner painting A New Day of Reunification at the Foot of Mountain Pekdu (1987),

illuminate that the police censorship is not as arbitrary or farfetched as it seems. [Fig. 4.4]

It follows a clear logic, targeting the depiction of spatial separation with any indication of

praising the Northern half. Even if Sin argued that the upper half represents the future—

and not North Korea—such a temporal separation within the pictorial space failed to

register, at least in the eyes of the police. Any depiction of symbols solely belonging to

North Korea—the North Korean national flower, for example—also served as an easy
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194
It began to circulate, at least through the 1990 publication celebrating the 10th anniversary of
the collective Reality and Utterance, in the public domain as an image of unification.
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excuse for arrests in the case of Sin Hak-chul, Lee Sangho, and Jon Junho. Oh’s painting

precisely lacked depiction of any synecdochical objects that link to North Korea. As

importantly, what the censor’s attention to the circulation and distribution of such

“problematic” images reveals is that the meaning of artistic productions, for the

government authorities, was located in the display sites and distributive channels as much

as what is in their frames.

As Paik cogently analyzes, reunification was a common denominator shared by

both the authoritarian regime and the pro-democracy activists. The two major pacts

between the North and the South prior to 2000—the 1972 Joint Communique and the

1991 North-South Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, and Cooperation and

Exchange—included a clause about a gradual but eventual march towards unification,

which Paik argues as examples of “simultaneously containing and exploiting the popular

demand for reunification.”195 Reunification was never a concrete plan but a loose ideal.

For unification activists too, as Paik argues, reunification was less a questioned goal than

a wholeheartedly accepted vision promulgated by all different factions of anti-state

activists. Different groups questioned the values of the first two ideals in the triad slogan

of Autonomy-Democracy-Unification (chaju, minju, t’ong’il), but rarely the third ideal of

unification.196 Cast in a retrospective light, it seems a mistaken step for the dissident

artists, whether self-claimed as “minjung artists” or not, to have too easily equated the

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195
In light of the fact that the two German governments steadfastly stood for the peaceful co-
existence and never reunification, this commonality linking the two Koreas’ reunification policy
is particular to the Korean context. Paik, New Left Review (1993), 72.
196
Even among the divergent activist groups, the unification agenda, due to its general and
abstract nature, did not prompt divisive lines in the dissident camp.
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reality of division with the future of reunification, without recognizing the connection

that the understanding of division must have with the ideals of autonomy and democracy.

For its part, the authoritarian governments under dictators Park Chung-hee and Chun Du-

hwan figured out its relationship with division: the popular sentiment of longing for

reunification in the most general sense was the official government policy, while any

indication of representing or sympathizing with the Northern regime was met with a

harsh punishment under the National Security Law.197 The government suppressed any

voice of dissent that can be recognized as pro-North Korean, prohibiting its citizens from

establishing any contact with their compatriots from the other side of the DMZ. The

National Security Law is thus an anti-democratic measure par excellence, and its

continued existence is, as the historian Bruce Cumings designates, one important

symptom of South Korea’s aborted democratization in 1987.198

Here, I am not simply stating the fact that some self-designated dissident artists

unwillingly aligned with the dictators in their uncritical proposition for reunification

while other artists, in their unknowing triggering of the National Security Law, uncovered

the undemocratic practice of the government’s division politics. The more significant
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
197
Since the split, authoritarian governments on both sides of the border have refused to accept
the impossibility of a coherent Korean national identity. For both Koreas, nationalist identity
could not be legitimated, while one-half of the Korean nation remained outside national borders.
And thus, the most convenient way of disavowing this contradiction was to declare the other
Korea as guerrilla and therefore an illegal state. The equally dictatorial regimes in two Koreas
during the three decades of 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, took extreme measures in their national-
building efforts: such as mandatory conscription, martial law, sanctions on labor unionization,
censorship of the press, nationalization of major industries, continuation of Confucius patriarchy,
and gender inequality. Although South Korea achieved a formal democracy in 1987, the “reality
of division” has always already granted the state government with the power to maintain the
“state of exception” in Agambenian sense.
198
Bruce Cumings “The Abortive Abertura: South Korea in the Light of Latin American
Experience,” New Left Review I/173 (January-February, 1989): 5-32.
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point here is that the totalizing logic of opposition (an enemy to kill) or togetherness (we

are of the same kin) hijacked the 1980s politics of division, and it is this political naiveté

that calls for criticism. The for-unification stand of the minjung activists mostly clearly

demonstrates the drawback of the ethnonationalism rooted in the minjung pro-democracy

movement. In the field of minjung art in particular, artists’ apparent failure to critically

engage with the spatio-temporal dimensions of division eventually flattened the

possibility of creatively visualize both the “reality” of division and the artists’ critique of

the government’s blatant pursuit of anti-democracy.

The Sunshine Policy (1998-2007) and the Civic Participation through Photography

If division is at the foundation of anti-democratic governance, how has a

“democratic” regime operated in the still continuing reality of division? What this

question essentially interrogates is the shifting understanding of division, as well as the

shifting democratic nature of South Korea in the age of the post-authoritarian regime. In

the early 1990s, the German unification case stirred a great deal of interest among South

Koreans, instigating a more practical and concrete inquiry into the possibility of

unification in the Korean peninsula, especially measured in economic terms. As Paik

writes in 1993, the relatively decreased government crackdown of any “pro-communist”

activities also altered the focus of public discourse about unification in South Korea: “[in

1993] the main issue is no longer the right to seek and discuss unification but rather the

kind of unity to be sought and ways of achieving it.” For many in South Korea, the

sobering lessons from the German case, in addition to the increasing disparity between
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South Korean and North Korean living standards, helped to spread a certain popular

sentiment against unification and for coexistence. In the post-socialist era, too, the

political rhetoric of North Korea seemed to share more in common with feudalism than

more similar to feudalism than that of communism, and any South Korean political

movement that takes the North’s claims at their face value was seen suspicious and naïve.

The difference in sociocultural practice, use of technology in everyday life, and economic

prosperity is too much to be simply ignored, even if the two Koreas belong to the same

ethno-nation. By the time Kim Dae-jung, the leader of the opposition party and a long-

time democracy fighter, took the presidential office in 1998, the only way unification

could have occurred, in the minds of both the public and policy makers, was through a

gradual process, after helping the North open up to the capitalist world as well as to the

South more specifically. Hence, Kim’s institution of the famous “Sunshine Policy”

(haetpy!t ch!ngch‘aek), with a telling pun on Aesop’s fable The North Wind and the Sun.

Included in the Sunshine Policy was the economic exchange, floods of aid in food and

energy, and, most importantly for this chapter, the possibility of engaging various civilian

actors from South Korea—as business entrepreneurs, cultural practitioners, and tourists.

My analysis of this period—the years leading up to the Sunshine Policy as well as its

effective years of 1998-2007—focuses on the role of South Korean civilian actors in the

changed dynamics of division when they cross the border with cameras and produce

images of North Korea.

The possibility of civilian participation in any type, level, and stage of exchange

between the South and the North, which only officially opened up with Kim Dae-jung’s
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tenure in 1998, has a political implication that had long been conceptualized and desired.

When Jurgen Habermas visited Seoul in 1996 to deliver a public lecture titled “National

Unification and Popular Sovereignty,” the philosopher recommended that the two Koreas

build a strong civil society before and towards reunification, for the lack of such civil

society caused tremendous problems for his own country of Germany after unification.

Habermas emphasized “a way of proceeding which permitted broader discussion and

opinion formation, as well as more extensive—and, above all, better prepared—

participation of the public” towards reunification. Paik’s response to the public sphere

theorist is brief and to the point: “But how shall we ensure such a way of proceeding in

Korea when it was not possible in Germany?” 199 Until the Sunshine Policy came into

effect, citizens from neither side could simply cross the DMZ, let alone form a common

public sphere to debate on reunification. Those from the North who crossed the border to

South Korea (usually via China and Laos, eventually taking asylum in the South Korean

embassy in Thailand) were accepted by the South Korean government as political

refugees before they eventually become second-rate citizens in prosperous South

Korea.200 On rarer occasions, when South Koreans undertook non-defective crossings to

the North, their returns were improbable. Not only did North Korea readily offer

permissions to South Korean citizens to depart its territories, but South Korean

government seldom accepted these cross-border renegades with open arms. For instance,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
199
Paik Nak-chung, “Habermas on National Unification in Germany and Korea.” New Left
Review I/219 (September-October 1996): 16.
200
Kyung Hyun Kim, “mea cupa” in Virtual Hallyu (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Kim
argues that South Korea’s neo-orientalist gaze at North Korean defectors serves as the basis for
the most recent South Korean popular cinematic representations of North Koreans.
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in the case of South Korean writer Hwang Suk Young, his “crime” of visiting Pyongyang

in 1989 forced him into political exile in East Germany (1990) and then into a 5-year

sentence in a South Korean prison (1993-1998). The artist Hong Sung Dam was sent to

the prison for mailing photo slides of banner paintings to the Pyongyang Art Festival in

1989.201 Retrospectively, the Sunshine Policy did change the mechanisms of “civilian”

involvement to a degree unimaginable to Paik and many others in South Korea during

Habermas’s visit, even though it lasted only for a decade.

An explosive number of South Korean citizens began travelling to North Korea in

the late 1990s and continued until 2007, as a direct result of the inter-Korean

reconciliation efforts of the Sunshine Policy.202 By 2008, the advent of a conservative

government in the South and the reemergence of hostile inter-Korean dynamics put a stop

to this brief decade of unique civilian exchange, barring yet again Southern citizens from

crossing the border. The historical significance of this period is however tantamount,

despite or perhaps because of its temporariness. This brief decade of 1998-2007 also

marks a historical break for South Korean visual culture and artistic production, as these

unprecedented physical encounters between the two Koreas were represented, especially

through the medium of photography, as a plethora of photographs of North Korea were

distributed as parts of travel journals, photographic albums, and online blogs. Despite the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
201
Choi Yeol, The History of Korean Contemporary Art Movement (Seoul: Tolbaegae, 1994),
202
In South Korea, it was only in the 1990s that the national security law’s ban on the production
and circulation of North Korea-related documents, especially those with the portraits of the
dictators, was lifted. Multiple efforts to abrogate the National Security Law tout court have been
unsuccessful, however, and many South Koreans, such as the congressman Lee Suk-gi and the
civilian Park Jong-nam, have been subject to treason, espionage, and instigation of pro-North
sentiments as recent as in 2012 and 2013.
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asymmetrical nature of this exchange—the North, unlike the South, refused to send

troops of tourists, government officials, and various social actors across the border—the

rise of photography as a popular medium of representation offers the possibility of

facilitating a new inter-Korean narrative forged “from the bottom” by South Korean

masses. Breaking away from the ideology-ridden, military-focused inter-Korean

relationship that the two governments have dictated as appropriate and thus legitimate,

the South Korean people’s production of North Korean images manifested a paradigm

shift in the larger economy of visual images allowed to travel beyond North Korean

borders.

The burgeoning photographic representation of North Korea by South Korean

citizens can be considered “democratic.” It is through the cultural and material

production of photography that we can gauge the aesthetics of division under a

“democratic” South Korea. Not only is it driven by millions of ordinary citizens, this

phenomenon of photographing North Korea gives a new sense of diversity to, and

expands, the limited spectrum of photographs about North Korea mostly controlled by

the few in power. But many of the terms with which such representation is discussed and

understood are dangerously squared with tourism and, perhaps, its neo-imperialist

implications as well as democratic ones. Photography’s ontological dependence on

tourism is therefore pertinent to our discussion of inter-Korean image production.

The genesis of photography as an indexical, reproducible medium of

representation shares a root with tourism; it is the democratization of travel that propelled

the invention of the medium. Led by the development of railroads in late 18th century
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Europe, an unprecedented number of non-elite, mass tourists who desired to seize fleeting

moments and exotic landscapes sought a proper medium with which to express such a

desire. It is therefore the collective desire and ethos, rather than the genius of a single

individual, that gave birth to the photochemical technique—one that coheres images of

scenes and people onto a light-sensitive surface such as copper plate, paper, glass, etc.203

Subsequently, the possibility of commercial gains, coupled with the sociocultural

demands for such visual form, facilitated a rapid increase in production and re-production

of photographs. For instance, the 19th century European imperialist desire to capture the

unfamiliar landscape and people of North Africa and Middle East—the then newly

developed tourist destinations—was effectively manifested in the creation of the carte

postale.204 These mass-produced photographic postcards of tourist sites were bought on

site and then sent to those back in the home country. Photography was born where the

sight (with the dictatorship of the ocular) collapses onto the site, giving form to the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
203
Photography historian Geoffrey Batchen discusses the collective desire for photography that
was on the rise in Western Europe in the early 19th century, during the first revolution in
transportation history, hence the difficulty of identifying Daguerre of France as the sole inventor
of photographer while denigrating Talbot of England to the position of a copier. Geoffrey
Batchen, Burning with Desire (MIT Press, 1997), 22-53. As revealed by photography historians,
multiple individuals “invented” various forms of photography in separate locales in France and
England around 1830, thus confirming the periodic desire for such medium. Carol Crawshaw and
John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel
and Theory. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 180. Dolf Sternberger, “Panorama of the 19th
Century” in October 4 (Autumn, 1977), 3-20..
204
The mass tourism emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century was inherently different from
the kind of elite travel of the 17th and 18th century, where European elites traveled to the South
(i.e. Italy) on the Grand Tour.
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“burning desire” for a new kind of production of memory, circulation of images, and

formation of (inter-)subjectivity.205

In the late 1990s, the influx of South Korean journalists, businessmen, and

tourists participated in such collapse of the sight onto the particular site of North Korea,

as the Northern territories became accessible to visitors for the first time since the end of

the Korean War. The amount of significance placed on the historic opening of North

Korea corresponds to the desire to capture the exotic life of the “other” Koreans in film

negatives. Many government envoys, academics, and non-for-profit organizations, with

the South Korean government’s permission, took trips to the capital Pyongyang; the

number of visitors augmented to thousands by the 2000s. But it is the Mountain Diamond

Head tourist district, located along the Eastern sea of North Korea and jointly developed

by the South Korean government and corporate investments, that South Korean citizens

were allowed to visit with relatively affordable package deals. The Mountain Diamond

being the most beloved pilgrimage site for centuries, as was recorded in multiple

travelogues of literati and artists, its opening to South Korean citizens after a half-century

ban, attracted close to two million tourists to the site, each of whom producing personal

images of North Korea or of themselves posing for the camera in front of majestic

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
205
In the Korean peninsula photography was introduced through the Japanese colonizers who
brought with them the tools and techniques of photography; the main function of photography
was to visually document the colonized land. See Gyewon Kim’s article for visual and cultural
analyses on ichthyology and the early use of photography in colonial Korea. Gyewon Kim,
"Unpacking the Archive: Ichthyology, Photography, and the Archival Record in Japan and
Korea,” in positions: east asia cultures critique 18.1 (2010): 51-88. About the use of first video
camera in the Korean peninsula, see Soyoung Kim, “Cartography of Catastrophe: Pre-Colonial
Surveys, Post-Colonial Vampires, and the Plight of Korean Modernity” in Journal of Korean
Studies. Vol. 16, No.2 (Fall, 2011): 285-301.
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mountain gorges.206 Some also willingly shared their tourist memory with others upon

their return, as seen in such photographs that are now readily available on numerous

blogs.207 In addition, South Korean government and corporations’ investment in the

infrastructure of the North’s Kaesong Special Economic Zone enabled repeated border-

crossings for those involved in the ambitious economic revitalization project. Business

trips to Kaesong were never purely about business; more than often, they included

sightseeing and photo-taking.208

The accessibility to the territory by the masses has therefore resulted in the rise of

photography as a medium of representation, communication, and creativity that South

Koreans came to possess when facing North Korea—a medium that was certainly not

available to artists in the 1980s whose only means of depicting North Korea was through

their imagination. Even though an extensive scholarly and media attention has been paid

to South Korean filmic representation of North Korea during the Sunshine Policy era—

perhaps due to the blockbuster success of such films as the Joint Security Area (2000),

TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War (2004), and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005)—

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206
Between November, 1998, when the first tour embarked, and July, 2008, when the South
Korean Ministry of Unification put a temporary ban on the tour after a killing of a tourist by
North Korean soldiers’ gunshots, a total of 1,955, 951 civilians visited the Diamond Head tourist
district. At first the ferry left the eastern shore from the South to arrive at the mountain resort in
the North, but a road that cuts cross the DMZ was built to transport the tourists by bus.
http://www.mtkumgang.com/ and http://reunion.unikorea.go.kr/ (accessed December 10, 2009)
207
South Korean secondary schools took students on school field trip to Mt. Diamond. Some
exemplary blogs are: http://blog.naver.com/ghks201/90038845210 (2008 trip);
http://sycho.kr/70097732768 (2002 trip). (accessed April 25, 2011)
208
This Korean blogger engages in trade business, and was invited to make investment in the
Kaesong Special Economic Zone in 2008, right at a time when this Economic Zone (located off
the North Korean side of the DMZ along the Yellow Sea) loses the initial optimistic projection of
profit expected from the successful precedence of Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in Southern
China: http://blog.daum.net/toogary2/15801719 (accessed March 28, 2011)
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photography was rarely recognized as an artistic and popular medium with which to

express, articulate, and re-imagine the South’s relationship with the North.209 Addressing

this omission, this chapter seeks to rearticulate photography as a crucial medium that

reflects and propels the formation of new inter-Korean subjectivity in the Sunshine Policy

era, during which South Korean citizens, although provisionally, took on the role of

producer, initiator, and visionary in re-shaping the North-South relationship. Even though

this inter-Korean relationship did not result in the “broader discussion and opinion

formation, as well as more extensive—and, above all, better prepared—participation of

the public” that Habermas had hoped for, what we have instead is the exchanges in the

visual and performative registers in spite of the absent transaction of rational ideas, verbal

or textual.

The Photographer as the “Third Party”

The emphasis on the visual and performative aspects of photographic production,

which I will develop in this section through works of artist Seung Woo Back, operate

precisely on the terms with which Paik Nak-chung envisions “overcoming” the division

system. The division system leading up to the Sunshine Policy period has already been in

crisis, as Paik’s 1997 book title of Division System in Crisis anticipates, because, as

discussed in the previous section, the division system as a self-reproducing, interlocked,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
209
The Joint Security Area (2000, dir. Chan-wook Park); TaeGukGi: Brotherhood Of War (2004,
dir. Je-kyu Kang); and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005, dir. Kwang-Hyun Park).
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symbiotic relationship between the two Koreas began to erode in the 1990s.210 The

balance upheld by the dictatorial anti-democratic regimes crumbled in the 1990s, gave

way to something similar to what Paik prescribes—a “people-oriented, rather than a

state- or ideology-oriented, approach to the reality of Korea’s division.”211 In the more

recent years, Paik’s privileging of actors with multiple interests in mind (over the mostly

policy-driven state government) eventually returns to, or at least rhymes with, the

Habermasean belief in the role of civil society. Paik’s most recent address of the process

beyond the division system designates civil society, which includes corporations and

individual citizens, as “the ‘third party.’” For Paik, these nonstate actors with their

alternative, reconciliatory thirdness would overturn “the two parties of North and South

Korean governments.”212 Responding to Paik’s more recent theorization of the division

system in crisis, my analyses of Seung Woo Back’s photographs of North Korea will

complicate such notions of the “third party” and designation of “nonstate actors,” by

questioning the “non-political” motivations of these individual actors and introducing the

question of ethics to the realm of civilian interaction. [Fig. 4.5]

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
210
Paik, “South Korean Democracy and Korea’s Division System” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Vol.14, No.1 (2013), 160.
211
Paik’s exact words are: “The division is commonly viewed in terms of the opposition between
two states, … between ideologies of socialism and capitalism, or between the peoples of North
and South. … But… the entrenched establishments on both sides, despite their belonging to two
very different and often mutually hostile societies, have common vested interests in maintaining
division… The opposition between the vested interest in both North and South and the majority
of North and South Korean populace who suffer from this system constitutes a more fundamental
social structure than the antagonism across the Military Demarcation Line. In other words, the
discourse of the division system calls for a people-oriented, rather than a state- or ideology-
oriented, approach to the reality of Korea’s division.” Paik, “South Korean Democracy and
Korea’s Division System” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Vol.14, No.1 (2013), 160.
212
And “by extension,” Paik continues, the third party becomes the “‘seventh party’ in the six-
party consultations in Northeast Asia.” Paik, “Towards Overcoming Korea’s Division System
through Civic Participation,” Critical Asian Studies 45:2 (2013), 285.
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A Seoul-based photographer Seung Woo Back’s travel account and photographs

from his 2001 visit to Pyongyang illuminates the dynamics of the discontinued

phenomenon of democratic image production, once imbued with incommensurable

potentiality. It is through Back’s photography series Blow Up (2005-2007) that I will

reconstruct the South Korean citizen’s desire to cross the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ)

before his journey, his confrontation with North Korean censorship in the Northern

capital, and his disappointment—and contempt—arising from his unmet, thwarted

photographic desire due to the mechanism of censorship in place. In this reconsideration,

I will articulate the photo-taking South Korean subject’s negotiation of the North-South

relationship as a characteristically democratic practice precisely because it embraces,

rather than dispels, division. My close analysis of Back endeavors to reconsider the

possibility of envisioning a democratic practice that would coexist with division,

questioning both terms—democracy and division.

Serving as a productive departure point is Seung Woo Back’s narrativzation of his

photographic desire before his Pyongyang trip journey, which points to a larger cultural

phenomenon, namely, the problematic association of North Korea as a touristic

destination or an object to be photographed. It is important to note that Back was not

automatically given the chance to visit Pyongyang; he had to “work” for it, because even

during the Sunshine Policy era a South Korean could not casually enter the Northern

capital.213 Photographer by training, Back discovered in 2001 that a Seoul-based fashion

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
213
According to my interviews with curators and artists who visited North Korea during this brief
decade, they made distinct efforts to visit Pyongyang (the capital) and not the Mt. Diamond
Tourist District (the mountain gorges). Because Pyongyang was off limit to regular tourists, they
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house was planning a show in Pyongyang—and this fashion show required a border-

crossing of not only clothes and models, but also a fashion photographer.214 Back sought

out the fashion designer, the well-known hanbok specialist Lee Young-hee—who was at

first unwilling to hire Back, an artist unrecognized as a top fashion photographer—by

delivering “small presents,” like confectioneries and rice cakes to the fashion house for

three consecutive weeks, the very duration of the trip the designer finally granted to

Back. The measures that Back took to cross the border demonstrate his desire to seize the

rare opportunity to produce creative, unique imprints of the particular locale, if not the

world’s last remaining terra incognita but at least a place of “exotic” civilization.215 The

primary motivation for him to enter North Korea, reveals Back, was not to photograph a

fashion show but to roam the streets of Pyongyang and arrest moments of North Korean

life, as if he were an invisible flâneur.216

This photographic desire for North Korea, which Back shared with many other

South Korean visitors, is deeply rooted in a particular historical moment of the Sunshine

Policy era. When compared with the Cold War era’s outright anti-communism, the South
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
had to follow tours unrelated to art or cultural scenes and sporadically and discreetly made
available through the South Korean government or peace-keeping NGOs whose main purpose
was to promote amity in the most general sense. These tours repeated the predetermined route of
visits and hardly fostered any artistic exchange; yet setting foot in the only country previously
unreachable to South Koreans functioned as personal reasons for joining the tours.
214
Back accompanied the internationally known chosonot (traditional Korean costume) designer
Lee Younghee, who now claims the title of the first South Korean designer to hold a fashion
show in the North.
215
The influx of tourist and journalist-generated digital photographs of North Korea is a more
recent development of the past several years, after digital recording technology became virtually
available to anyone with a smart phone and especially after the Associate Press’s launched the
first foreign desk in Pyongyang in 2013. When Back visited Pyongyang in 2001, it was extremely
difficult for the outsiders, especially South Korean citizens, to access photographic images of
North Korea.
216
The artist’s interview with the author on July 15, 2011.
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Korean perception of those living on the other side of the DMZ in the post-Berlin Wall

era entered into a new phase, where the strong will to demonize and eradicate the

“commies” gave way to the liberal notion of converting and reforming North Korea to fit

in the post-modern world of global capitalism. This photographic desire from the tourist’s

vantage point illustrates Paik’s historical account of shifting perceptions of North Korea

among the South Korean public in the 1990s. Doubtlessly, this liberal desire is already

reflected in the Sunshine Policy, wherein the economically superior South Korea sought

to exercise “soft power” (i.e. fashion shows) as much as a hardliner diplomatic push on

the insular, obsolete regime of little economic power. It is therefore not with a gun (to

shoot the enemy) but with a camera (to shoot the fashion show) that Back was able to

obtain the South Korean government’s permit to cross the DMZ. When the South Korean

self, empowered with the power to “shoot,” faces the camera-less North Korean

photographed on the streets, the subject/object relationship of photography laid onto the

“otherized” landscape and people ominously looms large.217

What makes Back’s street photography of North Korea decidedly “touristic” can

be explained by another side of Back’s photographic desire, namely, a yearning for

original, creative photographs that look different from all the other photographic images

of Pyongyang to which he had previously been exposed. On the subject of tourist

photography, Carol Crawshaw and John Urry note the net of inevitable, external

influences that affect image-making at the site. The tourists’ photographic memories
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
217
South Korean blockbuster films, wherein North Koreans are depicted as ethnically otherized
subjects, cast a “neocolonial” gaze onto sanguine brothers. Kyung Hyun Kim, “Mea Culpa:
Reading the North Korean as an Ethnic Other,” in Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global
Era, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 101-122.
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about a site-to-be-visited are constructed prior to their visit: “…people’s memories of

tourist sites are often invoked because of particular visual images which they have seen in

advance or seen while they are visiting. [M]any of the images that we visually consume

when we are travelling are, in effect, the memories of others.”218 As Crawshaw and Urry

conjecture, Back’s preoccupation with the originality of his photographs is also his

attempt to escape from the economy of memory production. By producing “unique”

photographs of Pyongyang, Back desired to avoid, moreover critique, the “memories of

others.” This rhetorical move away from typical tourist photographs that mimic the

archetypal shots of the given sites, however, is itself typical of tourist experience, falling

into what Jonathan Culler calls the “semiotic articulation of tourism.” For Culler, all

tourists—even the most snobbish and sophisticated ones—enter into the semiotic exercise

of reading tourist markers, because they are constantly compelled to locate the signifiers

of the authentic and the inauthentic.219 Participating in the semiotic interpretation of the

North Korean sites, Back’s photographs indeed invoke the tourist obsession, and

dilemma, surrounding the binary of authenticity and inauthenticity, and their desire to

locate what they perceive as genuine, candid everyday life. The striking absence of

spectacular icons such as the Juche Tower and the Mansudae Monument in Blow Up

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
218
Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, “Tourism and the Photographic Eye” in Touring Cultures:
Transformations of Travel and Theory. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179.
219
Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism.” In Framing the Sign. (Norman, Oklahoma:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1988),153-167.
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might explain this particular touristic desire to witness the “ordinary,” “real,” and thus

exotic everyday life of Pyongyang residents.220

Where the epistemologies of tourism and the photographic desire are mutually

implicated, the outsiders’ gaze laid onto the land and people of North Korea thrives as

part of cultural politics during the Sunshine Policy era. Yet, all images produced in North

Korea are also afflicted with another powerful ideological expression—the North Korean

government’s imposition of censorship. In Back’s artistic production, censorship

provokes a site of contestation over authorship and authority, wherein the photographic

representations of North Korea are unambiguously written in the language of prohibition

and control. On the one hand, Blow Up embodies a South Korean citizen’s fight against

such obstacle to freedom of expression. On the other hand, it points to an exit out of the

binary of individual freedom and authoritarian censorship, a binary that our individual

liberalism creates vis-à-vis the Northern regime.

The censorship industry in the North is well accounted for in the North Korean

history, and reaches a critical point in 1967, when Kim Jong-il consolidated the

propaganda department under his leadership.221 Especially for temporary visitors from

the South, the North Korean authority’s suspicion (of Southerners posing a threat to the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
220
Tourist guides to Pyongyang organize their narrative around these monuments and a map that
locates them. Chris Springer. Pyongyang: The Hidden History of the North Korean Capital.
(Budapest: Entente Bt., 2003).
221
In 1967, the Central Committee’s 15th meeting of the forth term became the infamous site
where Kim Jong-il purged several leading figures in the propaganda bureau and took control of
North Korean arts of propaganda.
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regime) provides an excuse for the arduous imposition of censure.222 Against such

restrictions of freedom to speak and travel, visitors responded with intense eagerness to

defy authority. At stake here is the authorship to photographic images, which no longer

belongs solely to South Korean visitors-cum-photographers but is controlled by the North

Korean authority—therefore further compelling South Koreans to insert their voice into

the frame. Innumerable accounts narrate North Korean censorship; Back’s fight against

censors is not unique. But it serves, in this chapter, as a vehicle with which to situate such

struggle within the larger context of ideological division that dichotomizes the peninsula.

To begin, the artist’s testimony is worth quoting at length:

During my visit to North Korea in 2001, I took pictures of Pyongyang, but only
within pre-selected districts. At the time of my visit, I was no different from other
tourists. The Communist regime imposed heavy guards and severe controls on my
visit. All my [exposed] 35mm films had to be thoroughly examined by North
Korean officials for security reasons [before my return to South Korea].223

The physical presence of a North Korean “minder,” combined with the authority’s

exercise of censorship of Back’s negatives, renders all the photographic records of North

Korea resembling one another by taking a certain form: a form that keeps the façade of

the North Korean regime, whether they are taken by foreign visitors or North Koreans

themselves. Due to such double-layered censorship—first established at the moment of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
222
South Koreans who visited Pyongyang during the Sunshine Policy era often recall that the
control was more severe on South Korean tourists than other non-Korean NGO workers. The
level of control differs depending on the nature of the trip too, whether tourism or business trip.
The level of control has shifted in recent days. When I, an overseas Korean, visited Pyongyang as
part of a group of American tourists in summer 2011, the minders’ control over photographing
activity was to the minimum. But even in this case, the censorship was exercised through limiting
the area of touristic activity: the tourists were not allowed to walk on the streets of Pyongyang,
pre-determining the range of sights to which I had visual access, and also eliminating any chance
to strike in-depth conversations with average Pyongyang citizens.
223
Artist statement.
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taking photographs and secondly reiterated at the inspection process—Back was able to

see the highly fabricated nature of his photographs.224 Perhaps, the powerful, immediate

presence of the North Korean minders in Pyongyang gave him the conviction that the

remaining negatives all together coalesced too well with the Northern regime’s narrative

about itself. In the end, what Back naively believed to be a subject-forming experience of

his picture-taking did not occur, as his individual subjectivity depended, perhaps too

profoundly, on the rules of the North Korean authority that have always already been

precondition for his entry.

If Back’s photographic activity had stopped at retrieving what is left of his 35 mm

film strips, his photographs would have made cliché examples of an individual’s fight for

artistic freedom in a censorship-ridden communist regime, while, yet once again,

highlighting the omnipresence of the meta-border, the DMZ, in every descriptive gesture

that South Koreans attempt to make about North Korea. Indeed, the utterly disappointed

and discouraged Back leaves the returned negatives buried in his personal archive for

four years. It was only in 2005 that Back revisited, for the first time, these archived

materials anew. This time, however, he felt “lucky” to have found a way to counter

censorship and photographic memory, and re-insert his subjective interpretation into the

photographs. With his post-production process, Back’s journey continues as a journey-

out of the North into the South Korean search for individual freedom against the

authoritarian regime of the division system.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
224
The artist tells me that the “minder” did not allow him to take photographs of, for example,
dirty street corners.
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While re-examining his negatives, Back located intriguing details that he had

previously missed. One photograph, for instance, presents two children, a boy and a girl,

playing a keyboard to demonstrate their skills in front of the visitors. [Fig. 4.6] What

seems a perfect theater of good-looking, well-dressed children skilled in their musical

instruments shares a striking resemblance with the usual propagandistic reproductions of

posters and paintings that visualize one of the phrases that tourists repeatedly hear in

North Korea, “we are happy.”225 In this quintessential propagandistic scene, the brand

label in white written on the black keyboard—YAMAHA—“pierced” Back.226 As

Yamaha is a Japanese brand, the North Korean inspectors working for a staunchly anti-

Japanese regime should have caught this error, thought the artist. It is a flaw in the theater

of a regime that constantly professes its self-sufficiency through the rhetoric of Juche

ideology (the ideology of “self-reliance”). Considering the regime’s strict prohibition on

the use of the English language or the Roman alphabet, in conjunction with the fact that

in “Yamaha” a Japanese brand name has been transliterated to the Roman alphabet, adds

to a sense of irony. So Back decided to repossess this detail from a corner of his original

negative by isolating, cropping, and enlarging it to fit in a 20 by 24 inch-large frame.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
225
An exhibition catalogue, Art Under Control in North Korea, which accompanies Jane Portal’s
exhibition on North Korean paintings and posters of the same title (The British Museum, London,
2005), features as its first image a painting that depicts a similar scene. This catalogue is the only
substantial book on art from North Korea published in English. Jane Portal, Art Under Control in
North Korea. (London: Reaktion Books, 2005.)
226
At a first glance, Barthes’s conceptualization of the punctum is a powerful tool with which the
operating model of division on the Korean peninsula can be disrupted. If one follows the earlier
Barthesian elegy to the author in “the Death of Author,” the reader (or the viewer) is born with
each reading that opens up diverse interpretative possibilities and thus giving more agency to the
reader. Similarly, a shift of power dynamics between the photographer and the viewer is what
Barthes attempted to achieve in his reading of photographs in Camera Lucida (1980). However,
Back’s search for the details seem to be motivated by rational and societal, rather than
psychological and personal, reasons.
 198
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Back also tells of his experience with a mysterious jogging woman in the

photograph on the bottom row, second from the left. [Fig. 4.7] This shot captures two

women on the sidewalks with an urban car street that separates them. The woman across

the street is running towards the right side of the picture plane, while in the foreground a

policewoman stands, with her back towards the viewer, looking also to the right. The

looming presence of a pedestrian overpass adds urban character to an otherwise empty

street. In front of his hotel, Back witnessed this jogging woman in chos!not (a variation

of Korean traditional costume adopted for everyday, contemporary use in the North)

passing by his hotel every morning at eight o’clock, as if a character out of The Truman

Show, the 1998 Hollywood movie about life that is staged, simultaneously “live,” on air,

and in real time.227 The fact that chos!not is not usually considered suitable as exercise

outfit, coupled, for this South Korean witness, with the sense of mystery about such

immaculate regularity in the anonymous woman’s jogging schedule, amplifies his

suspicion. The woman might, after all, have been hired by the regime to feign the look of

leisurely morning exercise for the audience of foreign tourists who stay at the Koryo

Hotel, one of the few lodging choices available to foreigners in Pyongyang.

Back’s re-reading of his own photographs, not as a photographer but as a viewer,

grants him the possibility of refusing the particular ways in which South Korean

individuals—as “third parties”—have to remember North Korea and its people. This

refusal, revealing the existence of a room for “play” within the seemingly impenetrable

situation of the “reality of division”—or pundan hyonsil in Korean—opens up a space of

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
227
Back makes the reference to the Hollywood movie in his interview with the author.
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imagination where one can disobey and re-interpret the ideology of division. But can this

“play,” and refusal, be on its own automatically and effectively read as the South Korean

citizen’s praise-worthy political critique of the Northern regime? Would not this play

only reinforce our own perception of freedom, which has its roots in the bourgeois

Enlightenment philosophy of Western Europe, applied to a territory that in many ways

resists the very notion of neoliberal-capitalist notion of freedom? North Korean

censorship does not signify the regime’s ban of all photography—both photography and

film are the most significant mediums of propaganda—but the regime’s own rules

applied to photographic representation, which scrupulously has to follow the visual

interpretation of the Juche ideology.228 Symptomatic of the clash between different norms

of representation, the censorship in North Korea reveals the ideological conflict

embedded at the site of photographic production. If the photographic representation is

inevitably written in the language of division that haunts the peninsula even today, is it

then ever enough to simply criticize the difficulty of producing censorship-free

photographs in North Korea?

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
228
A cultural study on North Korean journalist photographs that are published in the Rodong
Daily (rodong sinmun) details the ideological implications of photographic techniques in the
North. For example, the preference of full shots since the 1970s has substantially reduced official
appearance of close-ups in all visual mediums including photography and film. The close-ups are
considered “too formalist.” These manuals follow the directions noted in Kim Jong-Il’s articles:
Y!nghwayesulron [Theory of Filmic Arts] of 1973 and Uri Dang-ui Sinmunmaechewo
Chulpanmul [Our Party’s News Media and Publications] of 1974. As another point, the leaders’
portraits receive utmost attention from North Korean photographers, as both Kims should always
be in the center of picture frame. The Propaganda Bureau’s establishment of the manual to formal
details reveals that the photographic language functions to serve the ideological content. See
By"n Y"ng-wook, Kim Jong-il jaypiji imijiui dokj!m [Kim Jong-il.jpg: Monopoly of Image],
(Seoul, Hanwool Publishing), 42, 75, 119.
 200
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Certainly, unapologetic emphasis on individual subjects and personal freedoms

gives rise to the potential of dangerously affirming individual liberalism at the expense of

a self-reflexive perception of the self or a formation of collective. By praising Back’s

assertion of the self who triumphantly discovers and photographically documents the

oversights of the regime, one makes the mistake of simply accepting the terms with

which South Koreans are compelled to vilify Northern “others” and elevate the position

of the Southern self. The degree to which this discovery is significant to Blow Up—this

series is essentially made around the unintended details discovered after the 2001 trip—

problematically rhymes with the level of excitement with which South Korean bloggers

flaunt the few photographs that they are able to take when the North Korean guards are

looking away. These blog narratives are essentially written around the cherished

moments of individual triumph. The South Korean tourist’s search for “authentic” scenes

of North Korean life perilously merges with a detective-like quest for the “truthful”

images, or the moments of “truth” about the regime; these photographs in turn enable the

tourists-cum-detectives to criminalize the despotic regime and to make heroes out of

individuals. North Korea stands out as a unique site of photographic quest for truth-

searching from the daily lives of others especially in the era of emerging visual and

popular culture in photographic terms. Social networking and camera-inserted cell

phones allow the largest number of individuals in history to take their own photographs

and instantly make them available for anyone with Internet access to see. It is, however,

simply unthinkable, due to the regime’s strict surveillance of its people, that North

Korean civilians would capture honest portraits of daily life and self-broadcast them on
 201
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the web. (The irony here is that the age of digital photography depends on the cell phone

technologies for which South Korea is so famous.) Bearing in mind the highly fraught

nature of photography’s truth-searching operation and the aberrant geopolitical status of

North Korea that perpetuates it, I see Blow Up as Back’s play on our fantasy of asserting

the liberal (or neoliberal) self by profiting from the rare chance to photograph “truthful”

North Korea. Here, we are those who live outside North Korea (including South Koreans)

and who endlessly desire to represent unrepresentable others.

Post-Production as a Making of the Democratic Division

And yet again, the remarkably complex visuality with which Blow Up represents

North Korea nonetheless defies a singular reading. The South Korean citizen Back

visualizes not only the very problematics of this fantasy game but also an alternative to

the paradigm in which the act of praising the photographer as an individual genius or a

tragic hero against state authority reinscribes the very coordinates with which the binary

framework of freedom/censorship, capitalist democracy/authoritarian despotism currently

operates. How then does this alternative arise in Blow Up, an alternative sensibility that

takes into the ethics of representation—and furthermore the ethics of division? Where the

act of representing the other in the language of the self is highly contested and when the

task of learning the other’s language of representation is equally challenging, what kind

of intervention can Back as a South Korean citizen envision on the level of both

photographic practice and theoretical framework? Back’s post-production process

 202
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executed back in South Korea actively imagines the possibility of eradicating the Cold

War binary and the self-reproducibility of the division system.

Back’s post-production process (i.e. editing and enlarging) was first and foremost

motivated by his discovery of certain details that had been captured by the camera.

Back’s photographic production therefore involves not only his struggle against North

Korean authority but also the recognition of the third player in such a production—the

camera. The very language with which he was able to produce his photographs—not

painting or sculpture, nor travel journal—is mechanical and machine-like. Just as

importantly, it was the camera that planted the details that evaded the eyes of the

photographer as equally as the censorship board. The camera is more than an extension of

the photographer’s eye in Blow Up: the camera functions in place of the photographer’s

eye, while the “camera’s desire to see” facilitates the non-physical, non-verbal encounter

that Back had with North Korean subjects on Pyongyang’s street. 229 In short, it is not the

photographer but the camera that is “the third party” per Paik’s theory. Such use of

technology and renunciation of authorship—first to the North Korean authority and then

later to the camera—acknowledges the multiplicity of players in photography, troubling

the binary between the subject/the object, the photographer/the photographed,

freedom/censorship that only conveniently accommodates the opposition of South

Korea/North Korea. The recognition of multiple agencies collaborating, albeit

unwillingly, in the photographic production powerfully alters the logic of opposition—

the very operating model of the division system.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
229
Clive Scott, Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007),
57-59.
 203
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Furthermore, locating the camera at the threshold between the two competing

authorships opens up the possibility of re-conceptualizing these photographs themselves

as productive metaphors of in-between space that transcends the opposition between the

two nationalistic states. This liminal space is not simply made up of the physical borders

of the DMZ. Rather, it is a space of potentiality in which one can re-formulate the

concept of border itself as a site of constant negotiation. What kind of visual strategies—

in both production and exhibition—are then employed to present the photographs as a

metaphor of shifting border zone, or, in other words, a counter-visuality to the system of

division?

The process of enlarging photographic details in a darkroom produces half-tone

effects, graining surfaces, thereby rendering photographs blurry or seemingly out of

focus. In the absence of clarity—resulted from diluted colors and unclear contours—the

high-rise apartment buildings, the National Library, the profile of a guard in uniform, and

a grove of deciduous trees seem to dissolve into the air. These abstracted, de-stabilized,

or even dismantled sceneries of Pyongyang dexterously function as a critique of the

excitement built around the indexical images of North Korea, by refusing to give away a

proper set of information or data about the reality that lied before Back’s camera. Not

unlike Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 cult film Blow-Up, to which Back pays an explicit

homage by way of the title, Back’s photographs do not deliver forensic evidence for the

photographer-cum-detective character. The double meaning of “blow up”—enlargement

and destruction—is fully at work in Back’s Blow Up as well as in Antonioni’s; yet in

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Back’s photographs, what is destroyed (or murdered) is the very search for the

foreigners’ exercise of photographic truth claims in the hermit kingdom.

Additionally, Blow Up, as a composite of photographic details retrieved from

corners, edges, and margins of the original negatives, usurps the North Korean logic of

photographic representation. Rodong Daily, North Korea’s state-run newspaper, almost

always features a “group photograph” on its front page, featuring the leader Kim standing

in the center of a front row of officials, with dozens of party cadres lined up behind him.

[Fig. 4.8] Here, the individual faces fade into the background, the photograph acting

merely as vidence of the leader’s “generosity,” standing with the people. This type of

“class photograph” aptly represents the current state of the regime, which upholds only a

particular notion of collectivity—one that subsumes everyone into a group that can then

be led by the dictator whose body always marks the center of the composition and is

never to be photographed at an oblique angle.230 The close-up shot is highly discouraged

by the state’s official rules of representation; only the leaders—the Great Leader Kim Il-

sung and the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il—ever merit a particular kind of close-up: the

double-portraits that adorn every public building and private home, even after their

deaths. When Back zooms in on a schoolgirl and blows up her image as large as Kim Il-

sung’s head, placing her next to the re-taken portrait of the leader from an obtuse angle,

Back effectively nullifies this photographic logic. Back’s disruption of the North Korean

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
230
Byon Yongwook, Kim Jong-il.JPG (Gim Jongil. JPG) (Seoul: Han’ul, 2008). In a rather
simplistically critical depiction of the Northern regime, National Geographic Explorer: Inside
North Korea (season 21, episode 14, aired on February 27, 2007) captures fascinating and
poignant scenes in which the North Korean minders direct the camera man to capture the portraits
of the dear leader and the great leader only at a straight angle.
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photographic norm—and its social norm—continues when he extracts and prints

“insignificant” details such as a grove of leafy trees or a partial view of a North Korean

guide’s head. As a compilation of photographic margins, Blow Up imagines a different

picture––or indeed multiple close-ups––of a collective that is more heterogeneous,

contentious, and agonistic than depicted in the Northern regime’s image of national

collective.

In terms of display method, Back has chosen a way to defy the “totalizing eye” on

North Korea—imposed on the territory by both the foreigners and the regime itself—by

displaying multiple photographs in 20 by 24-inch frames together rather than

singularly.231 The grid-like composite of multiple photographs in Blow Up effectively

corresponds to disconnected pieces of memory from disparate times that refuse to form a

comprehensive narrative, but nonetheless interact with one another. The diversity in the

depicted referents does not synthesize into a complete picture but rather indicates the

incompleteness of the picture, as exemplified by how all the individual photographs on

display (except for two) do not fit into the uniformly sized frames. With the photographs

being surrounded by blank photographic borders on different sides, the picture frames in

Blow Up do not merely demarcate the end of the picture and the beginning of the real

space. They also point to the unyielding mechanisms of his process of “working,”

“editing,” and “compiling”—one in which each of these steps is accomplished only to the

degree that a dictatorial photographic system drives him to work.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
231
German photographer Andreas Gursky’s Pyongyang series, which captures frontal scenes of
the mass games of the Arirang Festival, exhibits large, glossy C-prints singularly, effectively
formulating a totalizing photographic vision onto the regime.
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To add another layer to the visual complexity, not all blank spaces are equal in

shape and size. The presentation of two kids standing by a Yamaha piano is, for example,

squeezed by two vertical blank spaces on the left and right sides of the frame. The frame

as a grid does not suffocate the image; in contrast, the blank space of emptiness gives a

breathing room to each image, a room for movement. This room for dynamic movement

gains another function, when the viewer connects a blank space in a frame with other

blank borders in other frames. The recognition of the frame between two blank strips

meets the possibility of crossing it, while the disruptive movement of back and forth

between the empty spaces produces a border zone that function as a link between

photographs. The participation of the spectator—the act of linking and connecting

practiced by the viewer’s active looking—is also furthered to include breaking, crossing,

and transgressing the frame, another symbol of border.

In viewing Blow Up, the spectator is invited to perform the simultaneous act of

recognizing and breaking the frame, linking individual pictures together; through this, the

spectator remains, however long she may, in the liminal space of perpetual lingering,

without asserting the material “division” between each unit. This elimination and refusal

of concrete borders contrasts with the ways in which the inter-Korean relationship is

increasingly has been considered a sum of two distinct units that solicit a game of

comparison.232 Art critic Park Chan-kyong articulates the visuality of such binarism

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
232
Comparisons can of course be helpful especially when a critical engagement with the
similarities between the two Koreas serves as a critique of South Korea, as well as the North. Cho
Han Hye-jeong and Wu-yong Yi, eds. T’alpuntan sitael#l y!lmy! - namkwa puk, munhwa
kongchon#l wihan mosaek (Opening an Era beyond Division: Toward Cultural Cohabitation
between the South and the North). (Seoul: Samin, 2000)
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found in the War Memorial’s display method. At the South Korean state-run War

Memorial in Yongsan, Seoul, the audiovisual material shown at the Museum’s theater

juxtaposes two screens on which similar scenes in North and South Korean histories are

projected side by side. As Park poignantly observes, when the right screen shows a

photographic documentation of the U.S. military occupying South Korea, the left screen

features a group of the Soviet Union soldiers marching into North Korea. This method of

double projection, Park believes, demonstrates the opposition between the two countries

in the “literal form.”233 The simultaneous presentation of division and linkage between

the two Koreas demonstrates the characteristics of self-sufficiency and self-containment

of the double framework. Because the visual language confirms and conforms to the

framework of identity and difference, the viewer is left to constantly linger within the

closed system of self and other. Park also notes that the current situations in the South

and the North, when presented as a pair, establish a temporal linearity, as if the South and

the North exist in different time zones, with the former always surpassing the latter.234 In

Blow Up it is precisely our inability to identify the North Korean others and to contain

them in an isolated frame (or past) that serves as the starting point for the non-

oppositional relationship with North Koreans, and moreover a different picture of

collectivity composed of photographic edges, absences, and corners.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
233
Park Chan-kyong, “Yonghwa wa setu sai (Between Cinema and Movie Set).” (Unpublished
Manuscript) This script was written for a presentation given in 2005, and was provided to the
author by the artist himself.
234
Any outsider who visits North Korea today cannot help but feel a time slip. I have written
about this else where. See Sohl Lee, “Seung Woo Back’s Blow Up,” Korean Pop Culture Reader
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). The rise of popular online platforms like YouTube and
Tumblr where Internet users share with the world their own caricature of the North Korean
regime also contributed to an emergence of parodying the eccentricity and excess of North
Korean-style propaganda.
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Such a relationship may be possible only when the outsiders (including South

Koreans) come to realize that it is utterly impossible to completely know, identify, and

make judgments about North Koreans. Between the recognizable and the unrecognizable

lies a space where the ethical dilemma of representing the unrepresentable, lingers

beyond the “reality of division.” A ghostly photograph in the left center column

visualizes this ethical dilemma of representing the unknowable. [Fig. 4.9] Like a proto-

photograph on a glass pane, the silhouette of the North Korean subject fully exerts its

presence over there; but this semi-transparent, semi-opaque glass pane also blocks our

view, retaining details of the subject (such as gender and age) we cannot know. What we

do know is that we are brought closer to this abstract representation of a human subject, a

North Korean other, with whom we share photographic space. This sense of sharing is

not solely spatial; it is also temporal. Back’s post-production and the viewer’s activation

of photographs re-invigorate the strong sense of refusal to linear temporality that puts

North Korea into our past, as succinctly captured in such dictums as “the past is a foreign

country.”

Coda: Division is Democracy

This chapter argues against the claim that the process of democratization is not

yet over because the system of division is still presiding over the peninsula.235 First of all,

democracy in and of itself is not an entity to be achieved, which makes democratization a

process that is never over. And, if we slightly shift our perspective to the 1987 regime
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
235
Paik, “South Korea: Unification and the Democratic Challenge,” New Left Review (January-
February, 1993), 71.
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change, what South Korea achieved in 1987 is not “democratization” per se but the very

potential to reconceptualize what “democracy” means—and to this extent, what

“division” means in the peninsula. The democratic struggle then and now should be

against the totalizing system of opposition, whether the line of division is drawn

alongside territory, political ideology, economic power, gender, or ethnicity. As this

chapter outlines, this fight against the opposition should never place the pursuit of

consensus and sameness as its ultimate aim, especially when the consensus-building

efforts in the Sunshine Policy era have been written in explicitly neoliberal market-driven

terms. Democracy, I might argue, is about living with division, even if it means a

constant battle with the self as much as with the other and a constant questioning of the

self, as much as of the other. This lesson—that democracy can be only in its coexistence

with division—is what the visuality and performativity of Blow Up adds to the theory of

division system in crisis. The overcoming of the division system can only be about

overcoming what we once thought as “democracy” and “division.”

By putting art in conversation with the division system theory, this chapter also

brings to light the ways in which the political imagination of South Korean artists, in the

1980s or in the present day, have always reached beyond the national borders of South

Korea. What stands out as a shift in the aesthetics of such imagination is that the artistic

language of Blow Up, when contextualized within artistic practices of the 1980s like

National Longing for Unification and Rice Planting, demonstrates the heightened

awareness of the implication of the self and the subjectivity that South Korean artists

began to portray in art. The artist’s own subjectivity is always implicated in his/her
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making of art. There is no preset formula for being “politically engaged.” Only in

engaging in the present progressive tense does the artist become a political subject.

Here then we arrive at an important dilemma that this chapter faces: if this process

of political engagement is indeed about the process of self-effacement as much as self-

awakening for the artist, is it ever possible that an artwork, as a product of this process,

can effectively transfer its message to its audience members in plurality? In other words,

is this process of political engagement and the looking out on the self and the world only

possible in the individual? Even though the self—here, the artist Back or the viewers of

his photographs—might have learned the ethics of living with differences, the

understanding of this “democratic way of living with division” was not mutually agreed

upon with the ostensible other, that is, the North Koreans Back photographed. Perhaps

this question can only be addressed beyond the point of deadlock, when civilian

engagement, or more specifically civilian photo-taking activities, can be mutual—that is,

when millions of North Koreans travel outside its national boundaries and simultaneously

engage with South Koreans in the activities of democratic-and-divisional photo-taking

and photo-sharing.
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Epilogue

Toward a Democratic Art History

Over the past several years, I have had many occasions to say that I was writing a

dissertation on Korean contemporary art. This statement was often met with a question:

“Is it about Nam June Paik (b.1932-d.2006)?” This question implies: how could one

possibly write a history of Korean contemporary art without addressing the “father of

video art” and the twentieth century’s single most recognized Korean-born artist. And

yet, this dissertation does precisely that: it is a contemporary art history of Korea without

Nam June Paik. Its primary aim is attending to the artists and cultural practitioners active

in Korea (as opposed to New York, where Paik ultimately found his second home), and

weaving together their words, desires, ideals, cynical self-criticisms, and art production,

all of which comprise the field of contemporary art in that country. I place an equal

emphasis on analyzing how these practitioners engage with constantly shifting socio-

political, art historical, and material cultural contexts in order to mold a new aesthetic

language of democracy. In short, this dissertation investigates how Korean artists of the

last thirty years have transformed the hy!njang—a scene, a site in constant flux, or a

sphere of intersubjective activities—of contemporary art in Korea, and how such

aesthetic activities have advanced political discussions about democracy.

I do not, however, simply evade the question of the global. My position as an art

historian based in North America writing a doctoral dissertation about Korean artists in

the English language forces me to consider two different audiences speaking two

different languages, requiring translation or even a “double-consciousness.” My

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fieldwork in Korea has also taught me that most artists consider, or even “internalize,”

the expectations and desires from outside Korea, thereby sometimes producing what a

Seoul-based art historian Tae-hi Kang has called certain “bilingual” art. When invited to

write a catalogue essay on Korean artists included in an exhibition of contemporary East

Asian art at the San Diego Museum of Art in 2004, Kang was acutely conscious of the

double frameworks that her reader was also exposed to: “the artists handpicked by the

Western gaze that has exercised such influence on the formation of contemporary art in

East Asia are introduced from the position of an author who shares their nationality and

cultural references. The hope is that the reader, then, will gain information about and

interpretations of this exhibition through a kind of ‘dual lens’ that combines an American

curator’s perspective and my own, providing a more diverse and refracted overview.”236

“Refracted” or fraught with intellectual and discursive tensions, my own position has

always been that of an “outsider” and that of a “native informant”—possessing, on one

hand, knowledge of contemporary art discourses in English (including the recent

establishment of “global contemporary art” and “Asian contemporary art”) and having a

command of the Korean language, well as a connection with its art system, on the other.

This dual position has made my thinking acutely self-reflexive during both my fieldwork

in Seoul and at my desk in Rochester. More importantly, it compelled this dissertation to

locate the nuanced and intertwined workings of the local and of the global in the

hy!njang of Korean contemporary art. This is a hy!njang-driven art history.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
236
Kang Tae-hi, “Contemporary Artists of South Korea: A Refracted View,” Past in Reverse. ex.
cat., text by Betti-Sue Hertz and others (San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art), 44-5.
 213
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And of course, in a way, Nam June Paik is featured in this dissertation. Due to

this hy!njang-driven agenda, however, Paik is not “the” subject but one of many forces in

the field. Or to be more precise, Paik is featured as a “cultural diplomat” who contributed

to shaping the new Korean art hy!njang in the 1990s. In 1993, he initiated the travelling

of the 1993 Whitney Biennale to Korea at a cost offset with his own money. (The

influence of this traveling exhibition on the Korean art scene is noted in Chapter 2.) Also

that same year, after receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his TV

installations in the German Pavilion, he persuaded the City of Venice to give Korea a plot

of land in the Giardini to build a national pavilion that his home country had lacked.

When Venice refused, citing the over-crowded nature of the Giardini, Paik argued that

this pavilion would be for both Koreas, and that Venice should recognize its diplomatic

potential of preparing inter-Korean reunification, and, to a larger extent, contributing to

world peace. Indeed, it was a diplomatically astute and artistically creative claim. By

1994, South Korea was granted the last national pavilion to enter the Giardini. Even

though no North Korean artist has yet exhibited in the Korean Pavilion, this pavilion

became an important stage for many South Korean artists and curators. Through this

effort, Paik was consciously creating a hy!njang that makes an imaginative leap beyond

the present reality of divided Korea and of politics in the space of art. If not world peace,

this proposition also imagined a different world for contemporary art that increasingly

leaves behind art works produced in countries like North Korea by relegating them into

invisibility. Considering the divisional-democratic world theorized in Chapter 4, in

Venice, Paik gestured toward a democratic future for global contemporary art that would
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recognize the ethics of imagining a connection, an alliance, and a being-in-common with

what or whom we consider to be occupying a different hy!njang elsewhere.

Like Paik’s gesture, this dissertation motions towards different manifestations of

hy!njang elsewhere, by faithfully attending to the hy!njang of Korean contemporary art.

My contention is that the hy!njang-driven art works in South Korea have so far failed to

connect with other worlds of contemporary art due to its lack of a hy!njang-driven art

history. By a hy!njang-driven art history here, I mean an art history that aspires to engage

with the locally specific socio-cultural conditions and that also reaches out to hy!njang

elsewhere. Much of Some Korean art criticism has conspicuously imposed theories,

mainly from Germany, France, and the U.S., onto the art objects of the Korean hy!njang

without articulating the necessary translation and the location/position of the critic. Such

criticisms have created an unethical gap that obscures the political and creative potential

of the works, and perpetuated a discursively unequal, center-periphery relationship

between and across different hy!njang (e.g. between New York and Seoul). These are

examples of art history-making that I work against. Only hy!njang-driven art historical

studies, I argue, can form what Chantal Moufe and Ernest Laclau theorize as “a chain of

equivalences” across multiple struggles in multiple locations that together aspire a real-

izing of a democratic future, for art and for politics. Thus, this conceptualization of global

art history consciously refutes the expansionist model that has been put in place since the

late 1980s and that has followed the logic of global capitalist expansion. With this

hy!njang-driven art history on Korea, I hope to connect with other art histories beyond

Korea, toward a democratic art history of our time.

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