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Yiso Bahc’s pioneering activity is significantly important to Korean contemporary art during the 1990s. Despite antecedent studies on Bahc, an academic analysis of his installation drawings has not been a focus yet. This thesis seeks to elucidate the meaning of Bahc’s installation drawings and establish their status by considering the inherent subject of the works conceptualized as “informality.” So far, prior studies on Bahc made dichotomous categorizations such as the period of “Mo Bahc/Yiso Bahc,” Yiso Bahc as an artist/activities” and “art/non-art activities.” This thesis, however, adopts a holistic perspective embracing Bahc’s entire works to place the acts of resistance and “postcolonial resistance consciousness” in his artworks in a coherent continuum. By referring to the practice of “writing-back,” observed in postcolonial literature, “informality in installation drawing” is positioned to the realm of artistic postcolonial strategies, and are thereby given higher significance. By expanding the scope of the study on Yiso Bahc’s practice through his installation drawings, this thesis underscores its importance in adding a range and a layer of interpretations to his artistic output.

This article attempts to analyze archives, focusing on Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995). “Archive fever” is a desire to obsessively return to the source or origin of memory. However, for Derrida, origin does not exist from the beginning, it exists only as a trace. As with memory, the original memory does not exist. Therefore, the duality inherent in archives is revealed from the role of forgetting in memory. According to Derrida, the duality of the archive is inherent from the beginning as the power of arch-violence. This is the energy to destroy the archive at the beginning, just like Freud called the death drive. The death drive of the archive, or the power of arch-violence, is a kind of “ability” and becomes a condition for the establishment of the archive. This archive-ability is a movement toward destruction and division at the same time as the institutional establishment of the archive. Along with this, it is also the basis for the archive to remain in the future. This article basically deals with the archive itself based on Derrida’s ideas. We will see that archives and archivists, the place of archives, and the archives to come are all based on the arch-violence power of archives. Thus, it shows that the archive is open to the future as a possibility.

The Tamra Artists Association, established in 1993, has been organizing the Sasam Art Exhibition every year since 1994 to ensure that the Jeju Sasam is remembered and the truth around the historical event is known. Although many works of Sasam art have been produced and introduced through the thirty exhibitions held so far, Sasam art has not been dealt with as a subject of academic research until now. Therefore, this thesis takes Sasam art as a research topic in response to the need to study Sasam art, which has received little attention from researchers compared to the importance of its historical, social, and artistic values. In this thesis, I borrowed the concept of ‘montage image’ proposed by Georges Didi-Huberman in his analysis of photographic images related to Auschwitz-Birkenau. My analysis of the images of Sasam art based on the concept shows the images they help viewers to imagine and think and eventually reach at the truth around the Jeju Sasam. Due to the montage that juxtaposes images with images or text in one scene, the images of Sasam art propose a dialectical reading — that is, they collide with each other while revealing differences, all of which helps viewers to approach the real of the Jeju Sasam. Leading the knowledge into the truth and reserving people’s memory is a matter of ethics and politics. Thus, this thesis demonstrates that it is an ethical and political response that the images of Sasam art has continued the memory struggle for thirty years.

In Benjamin’s thought and writing, language is the “open centre and inexhaustible source” of a productive mental life. In this article, I focus on Benjamin’s philosophical thought on language in his early treatise “On Language in General and Human Language.” Not only does this treatise contain the essence of Benjamin’s “original philosophy of language”, but its key concepts also form the basis of Benjamin’s philosophical thought and historical philosophy of art in the 1920s and 30s. In the first part of the article, I outline the overall composition and argumentative structure of the Treatise on Language, and in the second part, I elucidate the central arguments and concepts of the Treatise on Language. Based on these analyses, the third part reconstructs Benjamin’s unique “figure of dialectical thought” around the concept of “mutual translatability.” The conclusion offers a brief outlook on the originality and relevance of Benjamin’s philosophy of language from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of art.

This paper deals with Theodor W. Adorno’s theory of art criticism. In his writings and lecture on aesthetics, including Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that truth is inherent in authentic works of art, and that recognizing it is art criticism. Adorno brings the concept of “higher criticism” from 19th century philology and history and applies it to art criticism in order to specify the problem of recognizing the truth of works of art. According to Adorno’s theory of criticism, a work of art is evaluated as being authentic when the truth hidden in it is explicitly revealed through immanent criticism and higher criticism. Adorno also accepts Friedrich Schlegel’s and Walter Benjamin’s theory of Romantic art criticism and reveals that criticism belongs to the work itself, which has a processual nature. A work of art is an object in which the truth contained within is infinitely unfolded through productive and creative reception. This paper concretely illustrates the social and historical truth content of works of art in Ludwig van Beethoven’s overture and Gustave Flaubert’s novel.

This study analyzes Deleuze’s “Bartleby, or The Formula” and considers its political implications. First, it situates Deleuze’s discussion within the politico-philosophical debates surrounding Bartleby, the Scrivener. Second, it argues that existing studies have not paid sufficient attention to two central issues in Deleuze’s text, and attempts a systematic analysis of them: the effects of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” and Deleuze’s critical assessment of the universal fraternity of nineteenth-century American literature. Third, it explains why the novel can have positive political impacts beyond its tragic conclusion. The goals of this paper are as follows. On the one hand, to provide a brief map of the politico-philosophical debates surrounding the novel, and to reveal the place and value of Deleuze’s discussion within them. On the other hand, to offer a more systematic reading of Deleuze’s text. This will allow us to better understand his later art theory, which focuses on the effects of artworks, and provide a multidimensional view of his position on American literature.

Critical realism, constructivist sociology of science, science and technology politics, and new materialism all strive to elucidate the continuity between science and technology and culture. These theoretical perspectives grapple with scientific knowledge itself as well as its existence distinct from anthropocentric knowledge. They argue that contemporary science and technology do not operate outside of capitalism and that their relationship with culture is similarly constructed. With this theoretical background, the article focuses on several events that occurred in late 1930s in the United States, a time when consumer capitalism was taking shape. The New York World’s Fair (1939-40), Westinghouse’s film The Middleton Family (1939), and the robot Elektro (1937) are the subjects of investigation. The New York World’s Fair combined an image of the future of consumption with science and technology. It served as a device to process consumption into a form of cultural capital and to reproduce science and technology as cultural capital. Westinghouse’s film and the robot were part of such devices operating as propaganda. In particular, the robot functioned as a spectacle that reproduced an image of cutting-edge products of the future and encoded the male-centeredness of technology and women as consumers. These can be referred to as the “theater of science and technology” of the 1930s.

This paper aims to examine the art world of Lee Ufan based on the thoughts of Zhuangzi (莊子). This paper focuses on “the body” and “the world” among the core concepts of Lee’s art world, and discusses Lee’s art based on Zhuangzi’s thoughts related to this. In Zhuangzi’s philosophy, the body is one [一] with the world or nature, and the relationship between the body and the world repeats and continues infinitely through life [生] and death [死]. For Lee, the body is the main medium to meet the world and becomes one with the world. Lee presents a work of art through minimal gestures and seeks to open up infinite artistic possibilities. Considering these points, this paper uses the thoughts on the body and the world of Zhuangzi as a basis for discussing Lee’s art world. I believe that this philosophical examination of Lee’s art world through Zhuangzi’s thoughts has an important value as a part of research in understanding contemporary culture and art, beyond art history and Western aesthetics.

Sun Choi and Lee Ufan both claim that their production starts from experienced facts and that their central aim is to communicate those facts. This common goal is described as “undissembled art” and “sincere epistemology” respectively. Presupposed here is the sincerity of their intention to communicate; their aim being to make manifest such intention via artwork. Simultaneously, the artwork merely indicates intention and cannot become their actual manifestations. If the intention to communicate can rightly be ascribed to every artistic process, it is necessary to reflect on the conditions by which intention can be cognized and its sincerity can be recognized. Since the spectator must attempt to understand such intention within experience, this article will turn to non-speculative, empirical aesthetics to establish the conditions under which sincere communication can be realized. Consequently, both artists fulfill the requirements of sincere communication by forming their intention from affective experience of a set of lived facts. Meanwhile, they differ regarding the compatibility with the conditions of sincere communication crystallized by evolutionary or neuro-biology, and regarding whether their claim of sincerity can be cognized in their works to allow a strict enough homology with their stated intention.