KJC Korea
Journal Central

Nam June Paik(1932–2006), who earned a reputation for his ‘Action Music’ from the beginning of his career, called his music ‘Amusic’ while challenging himself to create unnamable music. He used everyday sounds(noises), actions, and audience participation, which have conventionally been regarded as ‘outside’ of music, his performances, and declared that he “exhibit[ed] music.” This study analyzes his early text score, SinfoNiE FoR 20 Rooms (1961), as a groundbreaking work reflecting his view of art. Paik emphasized variability and randomness, influenced by Cage’s chance operations and indeterminacy. This score, dominated by a recording tape collage, depicts 16 rooms, the synesthetic installation. ‘Space-music,’ a term Paik coined, nullifies the border between hearing and vision, and between audience, composer, and performer. It forms the intertwined chiasma of Parergon and Ergon. Naturally, this work, which attempts to be open form, requires an interdisciplinary reading. Although the work, a one-page text score, remained unperformed in Paik’s lifetime, it contains the concepts that predicted his future art. It is the turning point of Paik’s art itself, and the art of the threshold that contains the thought to come.

This paper primarily analyzes convergent art practices which actively unfolded in Korean art circles in the 1960s and 1970s. Artistic phenomena at the time, propelled by the mixture of art, science, and new technologies, not only influenced fine arts but also spread fast to various art forms such as plays, dance, happenings, novels and poetry. Electronic music and electronic art were introduced to Korean audiences through diverse events and inspired explorations of new formative consciousness by so-called avant-garde artists in the 1960s and 1970s. With the advent of digital media in the 1990s and 2000s, art utilizing computers, the internet, and network technologies had taken root in the art world in the forms of video art, media art, and new media art. This era of digital media, for the most part, enabled once again an opportunity for intricate and direct discourse on the intersection between art and science as well as art and technology. Moreover, moving beyond just the crossing of art and advanced science, it is now strikingly natural to see different art genres come together to drive pluralistic and convergent art phenomena in an art scene. It is common to encounter dancers and theater professionals, or socialize with media writers and novelists at an exhibition. In this paper, I focus on the activities of artists in the early 1960s through 1970s when convergent art emerged, in a bid to conduct a theoretical analysis on multi-layered art forms based on interdisciplinary research covering digital and science technology.

This study is an attempt to re-read Kim In-soon’s feminist work in line with the formation of Korean women’s academia and the Korean women’s movement from the perspective of modern feminism, which focuses on women’s differences. In the 1990s, when Korean feminist art history was debated in earnest with post-structuralist theory as an art criticism methodology, the socio-political situation in Korea and the development of Korean feminism in the 1980s were ignored. As a result, the works of Kim In-soon and group works of The Women’s Division of The Korean People’s Artists Association were translated as part of the flow of People’s Art (Minjung Art) in Korea, lacking femininity and feminine aesthetics. The interpretation of the work of Kim In-soon, who longed for the reality of the double oppression of women to be corrected, as merely ‘female art as a part of Minjung Art’ obscures the feminist perception it contains and reduces it to agitative art lacking feminine aesthetics. We will be able to restore a sense of balance in our thinking while borrowing various and equal theories of feminism and redraw the map of Korean feminist art history in away that breaks with the alienation-dominant ideology. So, to adjust the gap between ‘the difference between women’ and ‘the common point of Korean women,’ I will reread Kim In-soon’s work as a way to reconcile the two sides. Rereading it in a way that intersects sex, class, and ethnicity reveals that Kim’s work is about the life of women and the perception of feminism of Korean women located in the historical context of Korea and socio-economic class.

Within a globalized, Euro-American, and male-dominated context, a non-Western woman artist speaks in a familiar voice, while simultaneously challenging the art world in an unfamiliar voice. I shall reconsider the question posed by Gayatri Spivak, “Can the subaltern speak?” (which she answers negatively) through Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” in order to analyze how a Korean woman artist intervenes in the globalized art world through the way her art is articulated. Lee Bul, who is based in Korea, has taken an active part in the international art community. The first section examines the different voices of Lee and her art critics from Korea and abroad through a selection of interviews, articles, and catalogs. The following section addresses how the network of global art institutions and art markets, developed in the 1990s, has functioned as a filtering system to homogenize Lee’s art ever since she gained international fame. By referring to Homi Bhabha’s concept of “mimicry,” I respond to the question of how this Korean woman artist can bring heterogeneity to the art world, contending that Lee, while appealing to the Western art world, offers a challenge not on negation, but rather on a touch-and-go strategy.

This essay aims to address how the paintings and drawings of MeeNa Park (b. 1973) deepen and expand the practices of contemporary Korean painting as methodology. Park’s paintings redefine the meaning of colors as the outcome of pigment industry and manufacture. For example, Orange Paintings (2002–2003) consists of stipes of different colors from different pigments, the names of which include ‘orange.’ In the series Color Landscape (2003–2020), the artist collects and investigates different colors of public space and completes a stripe-patterned painting through industrial paints available in regional supply stores. Her Scream series (2001–2010) collects, appropriates, and transforms popular ready-made images, produced and circulated in contemporary visual culture. Her Drawings (1998–2020) series forms an enormous archive of children’s coloring books in which the artist transforms and transgress the imposed rules of coloring, lining, and shaping. All in all, Park’s paintings and drawings contemplate the material, technical, and cultural conditions of the medium of painting with regard to contemporary social norms and cultural conventions; and in doing so, her works provide us a crucial opportunity to rethink the critical potential of painting as methodology that has been rarely addressed in the history of Korean painting.

Many groups and communities, including modern nation-states, strive to cherish and protect traditions that embody their identities. In line with this, many schemes and projects in the Chinese cultural industry set their agenda around the main issue of Chinese tradition. However, the status of tradition has constantly changed in the course of recent history. This paper seeks to examine the process of shifting national importance regarding tradition, focusing on contemporary Chinese Art history. In particular, it analyses how Chinese tradition is evaluated and perceived in two separate areas: government policies and the art market. This is because Chinese art is in general divided into two main sectors: government-led official art, and private art. The change in cultural policy from the Cultural Revolution to the restoration of tradition demonstrates the process in which tradition was once denied and then utilized according to political needs. It also studies the shift of capital flow from the foreign market to the domestic market, and its implications for contemporary art. Since the 2000s, the boundary between official and private has become less distinct, with the result that each influences the other.

Contemporary art, which reflects the reality of the present time, requires a new way of perception that transcends time and an understanding of complex temporal, spatial, and regional perspectives. Along with a strengthened global economy, contemporary art has also advanced by interacting with a market centered on capitalism. In the twenty first century, Asian contemporary art has actively grown together with other contemporary art through various distribution processes mainly led by auctions, collection by public institutions, biennales, and art journalism. This paper examines the development of the Asian contemporary art market centered on China, and discusses whether the contemporary values and “globalization” connoted in the Asian contemporary artworks can be applied to the art market itself by studying contemporary Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi, who has a strong reputation in the auction market. Regarding the phenomenon that the artistry of the artwork itself is undervalued due to the fact that works always attract attention in the auction market in conjunction with the economic power of the nation as well as the fame of the artist, it cannot be concluded that the artistry of market-leading artworks is lacking. Rather, these works contain contemporary values that conform to the capitalistic system where artistic and market value converge.

This paper examines the role of artificial intelligence(AI) as an artistic agent through its creative logic, and looks into the AI-facilitated paradigm shift in the relation between medium and artist from the perspective of art history. It analyzes the basic structure of neural networks such as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which have often been used to generate creative images. It also notes that the training and evaluation of neural networks with proper sample datasets is a crucial step in selecting the aesthetic features that will compose the generated images. The comparison of deep neural networks with video synthesizers reveals that the creative logic of AI runs on digitally encoded linguistic instructions rather than functioning as a physical apparatus. This means that the paradigm of postmedium art, which has been supported by technological advances, would have to shift further to cover artificial agents. Through an attempt to locate AI in Rosalind Krauss’ diagram of the expanded medium, this paper shed light on the potential linkage of AI to the concepts of medium and installation, and brings AI into the realm of the discourse on art medium.

This paper examines the aspects of Pierre Huyghe’s appropriation of technoorientalism based on Untitled, Human Mask (2014) from a posthuman subject’s perspective. After watching a YouTube clip in which two macaques wearing clown-like masks and wigs deliver drinks and wet towels in a traditional sake house in the north of Tokyo, Pierre Huyghe made a film that combines images of a post-apocalyptic world with a monkey wearing a traditional ‘Onna-men’ Noh mask. As such his film appropriated the techno-orientalism which devalues the high-tech of Japan. In cyberpunk fictions or SF films of the 1980s, Japanese cities are depicted as dystopian and the Japanese as unfeeling aliens. So is Huyghe’s film a critical look at Japan that led to post-apocalypse? Or is it a critical look at techno-orientalism which has portrayed the West as a bystander at the end of mankind? This paper analyzes how Pierre Huyghe’s film creates the moment of emergence of a post-human subject that can cross beyond the racist gaze of techno-orientalism established by white, Western men.