KJCKorea
Journal Central

This article is the aesthetic analysis of interrelationship between image and death in contemporary art. I consider some situations that contemporary art images on death correspond to our community from the start. Furthermore, my analysis critically reconsider that those situations represent the inner mechanism of contemporary art world. Especially, I investigate a particular context which present or evoke tendency of the art works and/or exhibitions associated with death, and create a situation where we imagine the circumstances of our own deaths since the late 1990s. In the first chapter of the main body of this text, what I concern is the paradigm shift that human consciousness and image presentation have been dealt with life and death, presence and absence, and mortality and immortality from the very beginning of image to contemporary art now. In the second chapter, I shall concentrate on the meaning of death in contemporary society by interpreting some cases of contemporary art works. Using examples, such as Damien Hirst’s solo show ≪New Religion≫(2005), Omer Fast’s video work <Looking Pretty for God(After G. W)>(2008), and Christian Boltanski’s installation project ≪No Man's Land≫(2010), I argue that images of death in contemporary art scene have the potentiality of reflection on our life which become more and more liquid, unstable, uncertain, and unpredictable. But as long as they do not cause critical thought to the living, as in a TV survival program or a art market, I doubt contemporary art on death is a kind of endgame for art itself.

death, images of death, contemporary art, liquid modernity, endgame, Damien Hirst, Omer Fast, Christian Boltanski, Philippe Ariès, Régis Debray, Zygmunt Bauman, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jacques Rancière, memento mori, new religion