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Picturesque aesthetics aims at the realization of English landscape gardens. The main content is to try to combine art and nature based on the concept of beauty and the sublime. The English landscape garden, which reflects the Picturesque aesthetic, is free from artificial elements. It maintains its natural form and uses the wild side as it is. Ruins are one of the components of a landscape garden. Moss and creepers covering the surface of the ruins prove the passage of time. A ruin is a place where time is accumulated, and has a historically divided temporality. The heterogeneity experienced in the ruins becomes a heterotopic experience that is far from the realm of daily life.

Heinrich Heine, who is regarded as a representative of Vormärz, developed a new perspective from which to see art. According to his new understanding of aesthetics, art is neither something given for us, nor something past for us, but is in a totally historical spot, where a sort of reconceptualization is always required for art. Since then, art was no longer perceived as the traditional form of beauty that is judged on its disinterestedness, but as a living medium that attempts to apprehend its revolutionary foundations in the permanent state of its struggle for existence, where the new technique seeks its holy reconciliation with the new age. Although Christian spiritualism and the idea of art in Goethe’s epoch became unproductive, these exclusive ideas functioned as the Ancien Régime that obstructs the realization of technique for the new art and life. Heine’s defense of the oldest program of sensualism against its destroyer was the most significant attempt of the time to rescue the “signature of the word,” which means that art is being asked to regenerate the oldest liberating technique and the producing power of it.

The public display of nudity is appreciated only after a rigorous discourse and consensus that shifts social perception to see it as beautiful rather than shameful for its nakedness. In Northeast Asia, the phenomenon of differentiating paintings that simply represent the external world versus paintings that embody the internal consciousness of the artist’s gaze of the external world came about only after the emergence of a discourse that saw language as a cultural form and system to understand the truth of lives, as observed in the 17th century Western European art discourse. This text examines the expanding meaning of Xing (興) and Shen (神), which was the driving force that led to the Wen (文) self-awareness of the Wei-Jin period in Northeast Asia, which is evident in the emergence of the newfound discourse around poetry, painting, and writing.

This study investigates the ambivalence about scientific technology acceptance that appeared in Korea’s art field from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, focusing on the first to third Seoul Mediacity Biennale. In the 1990s, the urban government of Seoul envisioned its future vision as an information and communication technology city. The conception was realized by developing the ICT cluster Digital Media City (DMC) on the outskirts of the city. At the same time the urban government planned the Biennale as a kind of cultural contents industry in which art, scientific technology, and industry converge. This was an act of symbolic politics to receive support for the urban planning. Also, it was to focus on the act of making and promoting the project, in other words the symbolism of the instrumental action, rather than the feasibility of the project. Therefore, the Biennale became the sphere where two senses, an act of symbolic politics and an art exhibition competed, and then it was expressed as the artistic directors’ ambivalent attitudes towards scientific technology in the first three exhibitions. In order to resolve the contradiction of the ambivalence, they adopted mystical or romantic perspectives, emphasized nature and human qualities such as the body and healing, and then applied them in the exhibition themes or the display designs.

In trying to form the aesthetics of site-specific dance, this paper suggests that Merleau-Ponty should be supplemented with Husserl‘s and Heidegger’s theory of the time-world while acknowledging that the former has an affinity with dance theory. This paper takes the experience that Korean choreographer Song Joowon’s Pungjeong.Gak gives to the audience as a starting point. The “flow” experienced by the audience needs to be explained in terms of temporality. Husserl’s theory of time as a level of “passive synthesis” and the reinterpreted concept of his “reduction” can be the basis of dance theory to consider the pre-reflexive aspect of dance and not to neglect the role of choreography and training. However, since Husserl presupposes the primacy of “original impression” his theory is insufficient to explain site-specific dance. Heidegger’s concept of “the world” which is temporal rather than spatial, can explain the return to reality of site-specific dance in revealing the level of passive synthesis. By combining Heidegger, who is indifferent to perception and body, with Merleau-Ponty, this paper suggests that site-specific dance is a genre that reveals the interdependence of the world and the body while showing the level of passive synthesis that is hidden in everyday life.

This paper critically examines the iconological activity of Raphael’s skull cast in the Goethe era. The skull of a secular saint was reproduced in plaster as part of the long tradition of worshiping relics and casting death masks, contributing to the memorial culture. The imprinted and cast skull model was regarded as a true image made without hands and it became a popular collection item in phrenological and anatomical laboratories. Thanks to its realistic representation, the skull cast became the subject of scientific research in which objectivity is emphasized. However, in the blind belief of researchers that the skull bears the marks of artistic genius, the plaster model remained an object of unconditional admiration and mixed the ideology of objectivity with the culture of the artist cult. The skull model followed the tradition of the artist cult in the Goethe era and provided material for modern or premodern hagiography. The skull model transformed the artist's bone, which was nothing, into an organ of difference. It played the role of an active agent in the culture that worshipped artists in the Goethe era.

According to McLuhan, the advent of electronic media was expected to have the effect of breaking down the barrier of the “empire of signifiers” or the monopoly of writing, which has been going on for about 5,000 years or five centuries since Gutenberg. However, as we can see, the attitude of the narcissistic “fixed single point of view” that print media still seems to have built up is repeating itself. Therefore, this paper begins with the idea that it is a problem unless the relationship between the media effect and the subject is dealt with. The problem of the “subject” then emerges as a problem of narcissism. Our hypothesis is that the narcissistic concept of the subject that has persisted in print media continues to exist despite the environment of electronic media. However, the problems caused by the narcissistic subject and its correlation, the visual-centric space, can be resolved through the construction of a new acoustic space or the return of a new Echo accompanied by gaze-free robotism, as various arts show.

In the midst of the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a long-lasting pandemic, our society is seeking a rapid digital transformation (DX). The most notable technology in this transition is artificial intelligence, because of its ability to process massive amounts of data and set its own goals and read meaningful information. As with digital art, many artistic attempts using artificial intelligence are being made, and this can be viewed as a new media art of our time. This article attempts to analyze the contemporary meaning of artificial intelligence art by comparing its differences with digital art. As digital art showed the changes brought about by the digital revolution of the 20th century with artistic characteristics such as the “interaction between audience and work” “immateriality and virtuality” and “multimedia” artificial intelligence art shows characteristics such as “human-machine interaction” “utilization of machine learning and big data” and “extended perception and aesthetic experience through machine imagination”. This can be seen as a product of the new imagination of our time, which is realized by grafting with artificial intelligence technology.

This paper seeks to find the concept of self-organization of human-actors as described in Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) in the practice of ecological art. The reason for this anayisis is that ecological art shows a new organization of human subjectivity in which the asymmetric relationship between humans and nature is transformed into a symmetrical relationship characterized by both of their balance and healing. This paper intends to cite of Aviva Rahmani’s trigger point theory as an example. Rahmani uses the trigger point; metaphor which is interpreted as a pain-inducing point, to compare her art with the acupuncture that she used to treat her chronic fatigue syndrome. Rahmani’s ecological art makes visible the entanglement of nature and society inherent in environmental problems, which is an example of what Latour calls the politics of nature and ecologicalization. In the “Ghost Nets” project, a representative work of her activist art, Rahmani ultimately redefines her own body and spirit, improving the polluted environment through artistic intervention as a human-actor. As a result, her art shows the possibility of human-actors redefining their subjectivity through the relational ontology of ANT, where all actors are symmetrically connected beyond human-centeredness.

This article analyzes Maya Lin’s “last memorial” project entitled Ghost Forest (2021), through which to explore how one can make relationships and “stay” with the climate crisis without supposing smooth and immediate resolutions of the Anthropocene. As the most recent work in the What is Missing? project, Ghost Forest consists of 49 dead cedars moved from New Jersey to Madison Square Park in Manhattan for around six months. Lin installed the trees in a busy public park, and thus generated an irony that people come across so-called ‘corpses’ as part of daily life, whether they are conscious of it or not. Meanwhile, Lin also conceives her project in terms of a linear temporality and causal relationship regarding climate change, which is conflicted with her speculative approach toward trees. The fact that Ghost Forest is rationally driven but also deeply affective is not easily resolved in her work. In order to rethink such a conflict, this article takes Donna Haraway’s claim of “staying with the trouble” as a threshold, thereby highlighting the instances of partial recovery and speculative practices with trees that are inherent in the work but not further articulated by the artist.