2025, Vol.75, No.

The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art 2024 KCI Impact Factor : 0.62

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

Since the 2010s, contemporary art museums have evolved into dynamic platforms where various discourses intersect and social interventions unfold. This study proposes “polyphony” as a key concept to analyze this transformation, focusing on how museums embrace multiple voices and memories. Drawing on debates around the ICOM museum definition, the post-museum concept, and theories of contemporaneity, it examines how contemporary museums operate as spaces of social practice and discourse. With a focus on the case of *c-lab, an ongoing project initiated by the Coreana Museum of Art in 2017, the research analyzes how thematic and formal experimentation fosters curatorial multiplicity and engagement with broader sociocultural issues. Ultimately, it discusses potential trajectories for museums to function as open, dynamic, and polyphonic spaces in the future.

The scope of this thesis covers the changes and characteristics of contemporary Korean sculpture from the 1990s to the 2020s. The concept of the “sculptural” is questioned in the context of the internationalization of new media and installation art, and is based on contemporary proposals and examinations of “reinventing the medium” as a counterpoint to the “de-medium” phenomenon of the 1990s. Therefore, this paper examines the situation in which “sculptural” attempts were made through the dialectic of sculpture and non-sculpture in the new media environment with a little time gap in the 1980s and 1990s, when the concept of contemporary sculpture was experimented with in earnest in the Korean art scene.

This paper traces the early history of video art to demonstrate how it shaped the development of Korean video art in the 1990s. Originating in the early 1960s with the pioneering works of artists such as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell, video art was intrinsically linked to the logic of television from its inception. A pivotal moment came in 1965 with the introduction of the Portapak ― a portable video recorder that not only gave artists greater autonomy but also facilitated deeper engagement with the television industry. The paper outlines two divergent trajectories in video art - medium-specific video rooted in modernist aesthetics, and medium-generic television aligned with postmodernist sensibilities ― through the theoretical frameworks of Rosalind Krauss and David Joselit. This paper also argues that the video art’s divergent trajectories were deeply embedded in the evolution of Korean video art. The exhibition series Seoul in Media, held in three iterations beginning in 1996, marked key moments when the medium-specificity of video art was subsumed into the postmodern, medium-generic practices of television. By the time of its final exhibition in 1999, video art in Korea had largely given way to the broader field of media art. This paper focuses on the initial phase of Korean media art’s genealogy, particularly the interplay between video and television, while a follow-up essay will explore the emergence of cinematic media in the 2000s.