Korean Art Today: An Essay

Here's a brief overview of Korean contemporary art I wrote for a publication by the Federation of Artistic and Cultural Organizations of Korea, an umbrella arts group.

Personal Concerns, International Scope: Korean Art Today

By Michael Anderson

While it is somewhat futile to characterize the whole of contemporary art in Korea, to encapsulate such a wide variety of practices in summary, one distinctive tendency, shared by many, if not all, Korean artists working today, is an approach that marks a personal response to aspects of the local culture, expressed in all the formats and mediums of art used globally now.

To explain this current state of the arts from a historical context, a brief overview of developments in the country’s recent past is needed. The first Korean modernists, struggling to make art during the tragedy of the Korean War, such as Kim Whan-ki, Chang Uc-chin, and Lee Joong-seop, introduced elements of Western modernism to Korea, and were of course rooted in the local culture; however, as the first generation to absorb the influence of modernism, which was spreading from Europe around the world, their works entailed a grafting of imagery, sometimes expressly “Korean” while in other instances more generic, onto these new stylistic approaches. In a sense, Western stylistic modes took precedence over local cultural expression with these artists.

It is generally accepted that artists more distinctly reflected local culture beginning in the 1970s with the rise of two quite different approaches: abstraction in the form of Art Informel, and monochrome, minimalist painting, and figuration in the Minjung Misul (“people’s art”) movement. In the former, the artist Park Seo-bo is best known. His use of “hanji” (paper made from Korean mulberry trees) is expressive of Korean culture, albeit in a formal, somewhat impersonal way. As for the latter, the artists depicted scenes from Korean society with the intention to address what they saw as social injustices or inequities, and the personal was subsumed by the political.

As Korea propelled itself into a global economic powerhouse and more artists studied abroad, along with the rise of art biennials and a burgeoning local gallery scene, Korean art turned more to the personal concerns of artists who were both secure in their cultural identity while at ease in their interactions with the international scope of contemporary art. 

In this brief essay, only two out of the many excellent artists working in Korea can be mentioned as examples of this tendency: the installation artist Oh Inhwan and painter Choi So-young. Oh’s floor installations of lines of burning incense (which spell out words in hangeul or a local language in shows overseas) make reference to gay bars and clubs in the cities where the work is presented. Choi creates paintings using pieces of denim to depict typical scenes of Seoul’s urban landscape, as well as those in other countries. With their idiosyncratic views of Korean society, conveyed through artistic practices that are a means rather than an end, as in the case of earlier artists, Oh and Choi, along with many of their peers, give a worldwide audience a glimpse into the unique characteristics of Korea’s cultural mosaic.