2024, Vol.73, No.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.81

pISSN : 1229-0246
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ksasa

This study focuses on the paintings that Kim Yong-chul has produced in Korea over the past 50 years from the 1970s to the present. The purpose of this paper is to interpret the creative methodology that he developed while reacting to the contemporary conditions of the Korean art world and the paradigm shifts of art. First, I discuss the situation in the art world of Korea around the 1970s, when abstract painting/Dansaekhwa became mainstream, and Kim’s early media-critical works from the time his career started as a young artist. Next, I analyze the situation in the 1980s and 1990s, when the art world paradigm shifted to Minjung art and postmodernism and the content Kim achieved in his paintings by composing speech bubbles, messages, and motifs from traditional-regional culture on the canvas. This is to reveal the characteristics of Kim’s paintings that he created in a situation where Korean art since the mid-20th century has formed opposing axes of Dansaekhwa and Minjung art, abstract painting and figurative painting, conceptual/intellectual art and craftsmanship/aestheticism. In conclusion, I argue that Kim used the condition of the Korean art world as a critical origin of his creation and responded to the flows of contemporary society and art.

This study on the reality of images is based on various ideas of realism. new Realism asserts the reality of objects independent of human ideas. Kant’s realism is based on the way that the subject includes the object, and the realm of cognition is limited to phenomena, while the pure object, the thing-in-itself, is excluded from the phenomena. However, the “thing-in-itself,” which was already given as an “object of sense” as Kant’s premise, became the object of phenomenological or ontological realism by Husserl and Heidegger. In established Modern Realism, Whitehead’s Realism becomes the cornerstone for developing “realistic dialectics.” However, in Whitehead’s Realism, eternal objects remain a Platonic metaphysical mechanism. After that, among recent Realisms, Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism claims “ancestrality” and “non-thinking” as solutions to resolve the contradictions in Correlationism and sever the relationship, and Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology with Speculative Realism is a modern and concrete theory in New Realism. However, the new subject form is omitted in New Realism. Therefore, in this study, I propose “realistic dialectics” that synthesizes the research on the reality of images and the new subject form (“body-subject”) and previous studies on dialectics from the perspective of New Realism.

This paper is a comparative study on the site-specific art of Richard Serra and Ufan Lee from the perspectives of Martin Heidegger and Laozi’s concept of Nothingness. Lee’s and Serra’s large-scale sculptures have the tendency to focus on “site-specificity” and minimal formative features in common. However, both Lee and Serra pursued different notions in minimal art, because they took an interest in phenomenology in the early stages of their artistic activities, and studied and used it as a foundation for building their artistic thoughts. Also, Lee and Serra pondered the concepts of Being, Nothingness and monism from Taoist and Zen philosophy, and then built their own view of art with phenomenology and Eastern philosophy. For the realization of their works, the most important common point is an “emphasis on the aspect of nothingness.” In this sense, the key word for this research is “nothingness.” In the site-specific art of Lee and Serra, nothingness can be regarded as “relative nothingness.” In order to understand their nothingness, this paper compares and examines their works based on the concepts of relative nothingness of Heidegger and Laozi.