KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study is intended to review contemporary ecological art practices through Levi Bryant’s “post-human media ecology.” Post-human media ecology can be considered 1) an objection to anthropocentrism, 2) an ontological approach to technology, and 3) a redefinition of ecology based on machine-oriented ontology. In particular, machine-oriented ontology spreads beyond the modern dichotomous thinking that has objectified the nonhuman, and examines alien phenomenology as a methodology to expand our understanding of nonhumans. Furthermore, the interaction between humans and nonhumans and its effects are examined centering on the concept of affect, which is common to both types of beings and has potential to ease the process of interaction. The above theoretical considerations are applied to examining works by Neri Oxman, the process of collaborating to overcome nonhuman objectification, Sam Easterson’s video project and National Geographic’s Crittercam, and Hong Lee Hyun-Sook’s affective performances as a relationship with the nonhuman beyond the senses.

This study is intended to elucidate the specific function of art in Niklas Luhmann’s theory of systems through the binary artistic codes of beauty and ugliness. According to Luhmann, art is a social system like others such as the legal, religious, economic, and academic systems. He urges that every system requires its own specific (binary) codes for its operation. His proposal of the artistic codes of beauty and ugliness seems anachronistic form the point of view of contemporary art, but he is obviously conscious of this situation as he proposes that beauty and ugliness function as codes under the art system independently of other systems.

This article examines the relationship between photography and history through the work of artist Duck Hyun Cho, who uses photography to produce ‘photo-drawing.’ He accepts photography as a material for his work, just as archaeologists excavate ruins and, on the other hand, historians use photography as historical document. However, as he is an artist, he has other aims than an archaeologist or historian, and it seems rather counter-historical despite treating ‘history’ as the main theme of his work in a similar way. As for the history, his use of photography goes in four impossible directions. First, the artist develops individual history into a common history through photo-drawing. Then, shows the transition from fictional history to real history. Ultimately, his photo-drawing combined with the exhumation transform dead history into a living history that can be re-discussed, re-examined, and reconsidered. Moreover, his new works shows that history could not be photographed but may be reflected, which makes us reconsider it. This way of working can be appeared to be counter-historical rather than historical. The concept of counter-history has been used equally by several theorists in various fields. First of all, it plays a supplementary, marginal, and secondary role. Next, counter-history is the incomplete part, that is, ignored, forgotten and lost. Finally, counter-history (because of it) has the potential power to rebuild a new history. In this article, we will deal with counter-history as a new methodology for history through Korean artist Duck Hyun Cho, and furthermore, we will be able to develop the aesthetics of counter-history.

This paper examines the dual strategy contained in Artist’s Choice, a collection exhibition series at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Artist’s Choice, which started in 1989, is a project that asks artists to plan an exhibition of their collection. Through this series, MoMA has secured an openness to view the collections from an individual point of view. It shows the choice of realizing the exhibition as an independent medium while competing. In particular, Amy Sillman’s Shape of Shape, which opened with MoMA’s reopening in 2019, is an artist’s unique installation with “shape” as the exhibition agenda, which has been less discussed than color and line in Western art history and art institutions. MoMA’s Artist’s Choice series should be understood as opening the possibility of viewing the museum’s collections from the perspective of an individual and through the artists’ own individual art practice and knowledge.

After the Korean War, many Korean art critics observed the history of Korean abstract art in the framework of historicism and devoted themselves to returning all unfamiliar things to what they already knew. This approach reflects the desire of critics to find the “law of art history.” They set up oppositional pairs to describe the history of Korean abstract art according to dialectical logic. They tried to make the history of Korean abstract art a smooth continuum with the so-called negative/positive, hot abstract/cold abstract, and figurative/abstract dialectics. However, the gap or disconnection of various dialectics presented by critics to observe the evolution and development of Korean abstract art suggests that it was actually impossible to describe as a smooth continuum.

Biwon-pa is the name of a painting group comprising Cheon Chilbong, Byun Siji, and Son Eungsung, who painted landscape paintings of Korean traditional palaces during the 1960s. Cheon persistently pursued landscape paintings through his artistic life, and his stylistic property lies on the painter’s voluntariness of perception. His use of exaggerated bright colors can be also thought to stem from the locality discourse which began during the Japanese colonial period. The significance of Cheon’s landscape paintings has parallels with eighteenth-century landscape painting in England. We might call his paintings “Korean picturesque” in that the artist sought to express the value of Korea in the process of modernization.