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Enormous Eyes –
6 Leading Figures of Korean Contemporary Art
The exhibition of six Korean
artists that I am now viewing in India is the symbolic figures
launching a fleet of new artists in Korean contemporary art. I use
this description most importantly because these artists are a
warning to Western-centrism, and have long been separated from it.
However, they don’t follow logic or issues of post-colonialism.
They are evaluated as a symbol of Korea’s contemporary art because
they all catch the peculiar mood of various spots of Korean
society and build an inevitable narrative of sensibility made from
a clash of circumstances. Here, narrative is not the long-winded
account of a simple story but a story of inevitability that
completes an inner structure.
Secondly, these are artists whose
art coincides with their own lives. Such an art – on which the
artist stakes his or her life – is one that is most difficult and
weary, but great. This is particularly more so in the trait of
Korean society’s toadying toward the West. Keywords that can
summarize the nation of Korea are the US’s sphere of influence and
the development of a dictatorship. Korea’s military dictatorship
under the protection of the US dominated all other powers; as the
foundation of its existence, the military authority propagated the
strong pretext of developing economies or returning their economic
power in the level of Western nations to Korean people. A clash
with power that pursues freedom, human rights, and morality also
can be regarded as the history of Korea. The history of the two
powers has not yet ended, but is ongoing. The mission and holy
will of Korea is peaceful reunification between the South and
North, and the accomplishment of harmonic life between generations
and regions. Since this mission has not yet been completed, all
absurdities and evil flower endlessly appear. For this reason, the
series, ‘The Angel Soldiers’ by Lee Yongbaek and ‘Between Reds’ by
Lee Seahyun cannot help but be symbols of Korea’s current art - I
will describe this later. The following is my explanation
regarding the avant-garde spirit of these six artists. Korea’s
avant-garde spirit, that of these six artists in particular, is
more peculiar and bolder than that of the West. As everyone knows,
the avant-garde of the West is a position-centralized spirit that
seeks an exit from past values and existing powers and occupies
its own position. Its idea contains a revolutionary aspect that
happens within historic contexts, the art world, and artistic
locations. On the contrary, the avant-garde spirit of these six
artists does not deal with the context and range of Korean art but
with the history of Korea and the subject of attacking and
overthrow. To be more precise, it copes with the subject of
overcoming. As another important point, it is quite meaningful and
profound that they do not pursue a violent overthrow, but rather
adopt a peaceful gesture that suggests the reconsideration of
values. For example, in ‘The Angel Soldiers’ by Lee Yongbaek, the
soldiers who hold flowers instead of guns are a peaceful gesture
beyond a simple tautology, and is a suggestion for our awareness
of change that warns and surpasses beautiful fakery and
camouflage, and even sentimentalism. ‘Between Reds’ by Lee Seahyun
is not a simple red landscape. There is a peculiar landscape in
Korea, called the DMZ. Born in the 1960s, he experienced the hope
and despair of Korea’s pro-democracy movement, and has personal
memories of a painful scar caused by the division between the two
Koreas, which is carved deep into his heart. To him, the DMZ is
love and hatred toward his homeland and the source of his pure
artistic will. The beautiful and sad landscape that he looked at
through an infrared telescope is the start of his red landscape.
Furthermore, it is an homage toward landscape painting that has
developed within the bitter history of the Korean peninsula for
thousands of years, and is a declaration of the separation from
the dominance of Greek and Roman cultures that are the center of
Western culture and the core of ill-balanced, biased concepts -
that is, perspective drawing. At the same time, his red landscape
is a message to our society in which he claims a new, alternative,
and harmonic life from our point of view.
However, since the 1990s, Korea’s
society has faced an extreme polarization. A strange phenomenon
has happened in which one class possesses wealth and the other
does not. Accordingly, the spiritual values or pursuit of
personality have been thrown away, and a morbid syndrome in which
people put their all possessions onto only economic values has
been expanding. As the goal of Korean society lies in the
accumulation of wealth rather than loyalty and duty, Korean
society has become a giant mental asylum. At this time, the
warriors who fight again these trends in Korea are Moon Hyungmin,
Jeon Joonho, Ligyung, and Kim Kira.
Moon Hyungmin created ‘General
MacArthur in Sugar,’ that is, a sweet Toadyism to the US made from
Sugar, which contains his wish that Toadyism to the US will be
corroded and that Korea’s own independent perception and history
will be born. And his painting of statistic analysis looks
seemingly similar with minimalist painting, but it is a sarcastic
landscape in which he views an aspect of the nature of media
conquering Korea and the world through the prism of statistics.
Kim Kira is a critical epic against
the mammon, spectacular society of Korea that comes to be
sharpened due to isolation and the conflict of polarization. His
works symbolize blindness, greed, arrogance, envy, impetuosity,
and so on. Jeon Joonho also offers an opportunity to develop
self-consciousness that loses its power before mammonism. The
message that he throws toward sins such as material blindness,
toadyism, and biased thinking system is the universal truth,
‘Memento Mori’. In this way, the language of Ligyung is also
similar. This artist, who is famous as an installation artist,
turns on the lights of a squid boat in the show hall and suggests
the loophole of our perception through a space-specific change
technique that utilizes the incompleteness of our space awareness.
This artist emphasizes that the blindness of human perception is
like a huge seawall, and is a dead end that can never be broken
even with a hammer; however, it is a subject that one day will be
and can be cured through a switch of perception.
Currently, Korea is the only
divided nation in the world and is still under sharp tension.
There are not many things that we can do within this tragic
valley. However, the visions for our lives that the six artists
suggest can be summarized as follows.
1) 1)
A subtraction of everything that
claims only future-biased values while discoloring current values.
2) 2)
The creation of a place fit to
live in, rather than the pursuit of a more enhanced place.
3) 3)
Replacing morals as a tool by
morals as a principle.
4) 4)
Behaviors that we endlessly
practice, and that are consistent with each other, that is, the
everlasting faith and loyalty
5) 5)
Making an agreed blindness a fool,
that is, approving those whose have developed a desire to
understand meaning.
6) 6)
Deleting one by one everything
that has made humankind miserable through history, such as
torture, martyrdom, and violent politics, that is, never breaking
an egg to make an omelette of politics again.
The small principles of these six
artists are small, but are great resources that can develop Korea
as a better nation. To remember them, I will now explain each
artist by listing their works.
Lee Yong-baek is acclaimed for his
original media installations. Until recently, media art in Korea,
as well as other installation arts were, at best, a mere imitation
of Western styles—with clever modifications, but without a deeper
understanding of their contents. On the contrary, Lee has
endeavored to develop a new Korean style. Based on his knowledge
and intuition on media art that he acquired while studying in
Germany, he incorporates Korean—or, more broadly, Asian—lifestyles
and values in his work, which is characterized by the distortion
of established symbolism and violation of conceptual stereotypes.
One of Lee’s exhibits, “Pieta,”
adopts the iconography of the Virgin Mary in the form of a
hermaphrodite cyborg and its mold. In this work, agents in virtual
space violate the sanctity of religion, revealing the reality of
today’s world in which actors of virtual reality replace humans
even in sacred rituals and symbolism. As an expressing of our
contemporary society, fraught with distrust, material pursuits and
self-centeredness, “Pieta” alludes to the reality of Korea, and of
Asia in general, by overturning symbolism and distorting an
accepted meaning system. This original approach is a novelty in
Korean art.
Kim Kira is more active, satirical,
challenging and profound. He refers to his work as “Super Mega
Factory,” but the term is a departure from Andy Warhol’s Factory,
as a venue of artistic reproduction and accumulation, nor is it a
repetition of the artistic evangelism, or the concept of
ubiquitous art, as reflected in Joseph Beuys’ statement, “Everyone
is an artist.” Kim’s Super Mega Factory represents his active
attempt to consume all the fragmented artistic concepts by melting
them in a furnace which is the artist himself.
Kim Kira’s creative consumption can
be summarized into four methods: First, he infiltrates himself
into the context of Western art history; second, he places his art
against the backdrop of mythology, of heroes and Pax Americana;
third, he attacks invisible forces expounded in The Society of the
Spectacle by Guy Debord; and fourth, he lands a critical blow to
the followers of ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics who entertain
secret fantasies of Orientalism (In fact, with its feminine,
emotional, anti-rational and mysterious metaphors, the term
Orientalism itself is an insult to Asian people.). Kim’s work,
which destroys the superfluous Western concepts in the furnace of
his Mega Factory, is not a display of a blind resistance to the
West. Rather, it is the product of his existential progressivism
deeply ingrained in his mind. It is a profound compound of his New
Leftist vision and meditative Buddhist ideas, which leads him to
liken all the systems of power and status, as well as capital and
the spectacle, to a “mirage palace.”
Lee Seahyun is the initiator and
leader of the DAZ movement. Coined from the military term DMZ
(demilitarized zone), DAZ stands for “de-artized” zone. Lee
interprets such terms as modernism, postmodernism, pluralistic art
and altermodern as a sign that Western paradigms are afflicted
with serious ailments. Even familiar terms like modernism and
postmodernism are, in fact, indefinable, but exist as a vague set
of ideas and concepts. DAZ tries to break away from the obscure
discourses and concepts of the West to develop original forms of
art. A de-artized zone, or a zone free of art in a conventional
sense of the word, serves this purpose.
Lee Seahyun paints the mountains
and rivers of Korea in red. The law of perspective, one of the
most important achievements of the ancient Greek and Roman
artistic tradition, is ignored in his paintings. In addition, he
does not describe the landscape as viewed in reality but as
imagined in a dream, as the 15th-century Korean painter An Gyeon
did in his masterpiece, “Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land.”
His technique is also traced back to the tradition of the
18th-century Korean painter Jeong Seon, who employed three
different viewpoints in a single landscape painting. The red Lee
uses in his landscapes expresses the unresolved sorrows from
Korea’s early-modern history. It echoes the collective memory of
Korea’s recent past, when the beautiful land was soaked in blood,
shed by its people as they engaged in massacre, caught up in
hatred and ideological conflicts. This historic tragedy, marked by
its dreamlike cruelty, did not arise from within the country, but
from the clash of ideologies imposed upon them by the outside
world. The innocent people were sacrificed for the interest of
small groups of people who share political ideas and privilege.
Lee Seahyun’s paintings are a requiem for the perished souls, and
its poetics of healing soothes the pains inflicted by the sad
history of suffering.
Jeon Joonho is willing to attempt
to make people who are ruled by today’s media realize the truth.
Western images and values have inundated mass media, eroding our
minds. We simply look at the unfinished war in a casual manner.
How can we be indifferent to our existence? How can we maintain a
dry and dull attitude? This artist has chosen North Korean
defectors, wars between siblings growing up in different
societies, media such as the New York Times conquering the world,
the specter of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, Nike, the Super
Bowl, and so on as subjects, and has suggested to us that we must
catch concrete historical truths to know the exact time and place
of where we are.
Due to globalism, as the
independence of a nation hands down its justification to mutual
reliance and nationalism, the value of contemporary man is
evaluated by his capital and competence. As an alternative to
globalism, in a social condition in which ethical values and the
base of esthetic life are shaken, Jeon Joonho presents an
avant-garde spirit and the importance of the expansion of
realization through art.
Li Gyung is considered a
representative figure in the art world of Korea and belongs to a
group of leading figures. She belongs in such a distinguished
group because she esthetically sublimates ethics on nature and the
absurdity of our society. The major premise of her art is “Seeing
is Believing? Or Believing is Seeing?” She talks about how
believing what is seen is imperfect. For example, she covered a
sculpture in the shape of a man with real and artificial ivy. A
viewer who sees the work first does not know what is under the
ivy. The flow of time itself is a truth that shows everything.
Everything in the world changes, but the only unchangeable truth
is that time flows. Li Gyung works under the dialectics of change
and constancy. Everyone can know that the object is covered with
ivy. Time flows. Real ivy withers. That is, it changes. Fake ivy
does not change. As the real ivy dies, the truth that a man is
under it is revealed. One nature of contemporary society is that
real and fake things are vaguely divided. Ceaselessly revealing
nature is the mission of Li Gyung who lives today as an artist.
Moon Hyungmin touches on the
varying nature of a ‘spectacular society.’ The most powerful media
may include the New York Times, Financial Times, Vogue, Playboy,
and so on. This artist actually scanned the New York Times with a
scanner and made it into a text file. Then, he selected the words
used most in the text, and rated them from 1 to 10 according to
their frequency. In first place was Obama, the second money, the
third Bernanke, the fourth politics, the sixth Microsoft, and so
on. He painted them onto a canvas in order, contrasting the colors
of the words. His work is visualizing the words used most in our
brains, and is an attempt to symbolize and abstracize our
‘spectacular society.’ His painting is a material journey that
moves the general concept of people on the outside world into the
canvas. A viewer who witnesses the process ends up taking part in
the attempt to create a spectacle on himself/herself in the simple
position of a spectator.
Lee Jinmyung, Critic |
