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From Seoul to the World: Minjung Art and Global Space During the 1988 Olympics

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2017, (41), pp.187-212
  • DOI : 10.17057/kahoma.2017..41.008
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History
  • Received : April 26, 2017
  • Accepted : May 30, 2017
  • Published : June 30, 2017

Douglas Gabriel 1

1Northwestern University

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This essay is about the first major international exhibition of South Korean minjung art, which was held at New York’s Artists Space gallery in 1988, overlapping with the timeframe of the Seoul Olympics. In their supplementary texts for the exhibition, the South Korean curators emphasized the artists’ ostensible preoccupation with national identity. However, the artworks in the exhibition demonstrated the elasticity of minjung as a category of artistic practice, as the artists asked critical questions about the ability of minjung art to speak to audiences beyond the local South Korean context. Placing the works in the Artists Space exhibition within the context of contemporaneous exhibitions and artworks that focused on representations of global space, I demonstrate that minjung artists questioned how space was represented and experienced during the late Cold War period. I argue that artists such as Kim Dong-won and Kim Yong-tae challenged prominent tropes of spatial flattening and the notion that the Seoul Olympics would facilitate the dissolution of Cold War divisions. In contrast, minjung artists underscored how spectacles of the global at this historical moment were contingent on violent spatial transformations at localized sites.

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