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The Fourth World Theory in Wonil Rhee's Curating : Focusing on ‘Post-colonialism’

  • The Journal of Aesthetics and Science of Art
  • Abbr : JASA
  • 2014, 40(), pp.249-292
  • Publisher : 한국미학예술학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Other Arts and Kinesiology
  • Published : February 28, 2014

KIM, Sung-Ho 1

1성신여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study is the follow-up of my dissertation A Study on Wonil Rhee's Curating: Focusing on Creative Paradox. This study is an investigation into his ‘perception and thematic consciousness’ of the discourse on post-colonialism and “practical curating methodology” the late curator Wonil Rhee inevitably faced when curating overseas international exhibitions as an Asian curator with an Asian identity. The researcher of this study sees the point his post-colonialist curating reached as the ‘fourth world theory’. Encompassing ‘Asia-centered international exhibitions’ and ‘Asian themes in international art shows’ to arrive at this conclusion, the researcher has closely examined international exhibitions Rhee curated, and looked through his exhibition catalog essays, interviews, and other documents. His post-colonialist perspective triggered by the ‘logic of resistance against the West and its practice’ that is represented as ‘Asian networking’ denoted in his early curating, concentrates on breaking down the line between the West and the non-West, cultural colonialists and non-colonialists, and the shift from resistance to conciliation and equilibrium. That is, his post-colonialist curating was to practice ‘hybridity’ as a way of resisting ‘globalization trying to accomplish homogeneity’. This is to elucidate that aspects of post-colonialism and neo-colonialism derived from the West's strategy of homogeneity in the name of ‘tolerance of pluralism’, and to employ the ‘hybridity’ Homi K. Bhabha presented as a way of resisting this. The concept of ‘hybridity’ emerged among numerous concepts such as ‘multiculturality, Post Geopolitics, mixed topo map, mixed culture, ground connection and Integration’. As a practical strategy for concrete curating anchored to this notion of ‘hybridity’ he defined it with ‘addictive mixture’, a productive hybridity of light. The researcher comments on this with ‘appropriation’, the concept of a post-colonialist practice by Bill Ashcroft and his fellow scholars. That is to say, the researcher understands that Rhee adopted ‘appropriation’ that uses the language of colonial ruling countries but deconstructs and reconstructs this as a strategy for post-colonial practice to deconstruct colonial rulers' dominant ideologies. Moreover, the researcher asserts that Rhee's global curating strategy is by nature nothing but an act of translation to ‘introduce the non-West to the West in the language of the West’. The researcher also takes note of a shift in Rhee's concern for ‘nonsensical time and space’ through the numerous possibilities of space-time or multi-contextual space-time on the border of the confrontation between the West and the non-West, cultural colonialists and non-cultural colonialists. The researcher coins the term ‘the fourth world’ as a wedding of sociological ‘poly-contextuality’ and physical ‘extra dimension’, departing from the notion of ‘the developing country’ from a socio-economical perspective, and explores its post-colonialist meaning as the ‘space-time of utopian conflation’. ‘The fourth world theory’ is to reinterpret Rhee's ‘absurd space-time’ conceived in the context of his curating shifting from the matter of the exterior to the matter of the interior, from the matter of the ideal to the matter of the experience. This theory is of great significance in that this may continue to his imaginary curating of ‘an exhibition in cosmic space’. This refers to a point where an ideal theory on post-colonialism was deformed and mysticized in Rhee's late curating. This change of direction serves as momentum to define him as a practitioner of post-colonialist curating who championed conciliation and equality with a new Asian thematic consciousness beyond the logic of resistance and subjugation, and simultaneously as a liberal pluralist of postmodernism and an upholder of elemental humanism.

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