Ephemeral but Unforgettable: Korean Experimental Art Is Having a Star Turn
By Andrew Russeth
The 1960s and 1970s were tumultuous in South Korea, with a military dictatorship pushing breakneck economic growth and suppressing civil rights. In the midst of this upheaval, young artists pursued radical projects.
Rejecting the expressive abstract painting in vogue in the 1950s, they embraced performance, video and photography, and favored unusual materials (neon, barbed wire, cigarettes). They had been born during the Japanese occupation and lived through the Korean War; some looked to the past, taking inspiration from Korean folk forms. They forged collectives, holding shows, translating art texts from abroad (travel was restricted) and staging performances along rivers and in theaters. Kim Kulim recorded snippets of daily life in a fast-changing Seoul in his frenetic film “The Meaning of 1/24 Second” (1969). Their genre-defying efforts have come to be categorized as “silheom misul,” experimental art.
“It was a period of, I would say, true transformation,” Kyung An, an associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, said in an interview, and “artists were trying to negotiate their place within that world.” Her exhibition “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” opening at the Guggenheim on Friday, shows the potent responses that more than 40 made during a fraught time. (Organized with Kang Soojung, a senior curator at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, or MMCA, the show travels to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles on Feb. 11.)
“There was really no market,” An said, “and that’s why a lot of the works did not survive.” Some were later remade. Others endure only in photographs or as memories. A black-and-white image shows the trailblazing Jung Kangja, clad in underwear in a music hall in 1968, as people attached transparent balloons to her body, then popped them. Jung, who died in 2017, was one of the few women prominent in the scene. “I think the still-conservative values and expectations placed on women’s role in society must have made it difficult for many,” An said.
As the 1970s progressed, the atmosphere became more tense. Martial law was imposed. The length of skirts was regulated. Artists were surveilled, detained and beaten. They kept going. Some are making art to this day, and were able to attend when “Only the Young” ran at the MMCA earlier this year. This summer, I met four of the artists, with interpreters, to discuss their lives and the show.
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Lee Kang-So
At 80, Lee Kang-So lives in an expansive compound in Anseong, about 90 minutes south of Seoul, where he has various studios devoted to sculptures, installations and the minimal paintings that have made him a giant. But 50 years ago, he was still finding his way as he sat in a tavern in Daegu, his hometown, drinking makgeolli (a rice wine) with a friend. It was afternoon, the room was empty, but as he looked at the burns and scuffs left on the tables by cigarettes and pots, he felt he could hear the people who had been there. He pondered the transient nature of life and how he and his friend were experiencing the same room differently. “It was really a special moment,” he said.
Lee bought the chairs and tables from the restaurant, and when he was offered a show at the Myongdong Gallery in Seoul in 1973, he hauled the furniture into the venue and served makgeolli for six days. His idea was that, rather than expressing something, he could give people “a forum to experience something together.” Friends and local residents came by for this fleeting participatory project, which had a political valence during martial law, when large gatherings were suspect. “After a week, the white-cube space smelled like a bar,” he said, “so they had to do a huge cleaning job.” He titled the piece “Disappearance — Bar in the Gallery.” Sadly (but, in some sense, fittingly), a caretaker later burned the furniture, mistaking it for junk.
Other elements of daily life seeped into his art. Passing through a market one day in the mid-1970s, Lee saw “an old lady selling deer bone,” used in traditional medicine, “and then, right behind her, they were slaughtering hens,” he said. “I was thinking, Can this be art?” He incorporated deer bones into an installation and made a kind of random drawing by placing a chicken near a floor covered with white chalk, which left footprints as it strolled about.
It was a heady time, but after experimenting with outré mediums, Lee would turn to age-old materials, like paint and canvas, as he moved forward. These pictures are airy, loose and spectral, often just a few black calligraphic marks floating across white fields. They suggest ideas or images in transitional states — here and not here, coming into being just as they fade away.
