Images of reality / ideals of democracy : contemporary Korean art, 1980s-2000s

Abstract

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Rochester. Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, 2014.This dissertation concerns the shifting notion of what I call “democratic aesthetics” in South Korea from the 1980s--a decade when the country’s pro-democracy social movement called “minjung undong” (lit. “people’s movement”) provided a political stage of postcolonial, anti-statist, and anti-authoritarian dissent until its nationwide spread effectively forced the dictator to step down by 1987. The heroic participation of artists as a propaganda unit during this successful march towards democracy in the 1980s is well noted in the country’s political history. Yet the history of art has yet to consider the exhibition values as well as the formal and aesthetic implications of the political art of this period--which, by 1985, obtained the moniker “minjung misul” (lit. “people’s art”). This dissertation begins by addressing this lack, and furthermore it asks the question about political art after the institution of parliamentary democracy. In other words, what happened to art when the political struggle was over? In the 1990s and the 2000s, how did South Korean artists constantly reactivate their political engagement with the shifting realities in the age of globalization and neoliberal urban development, as well as democracy? This inquiry has led me to concentrate on four specific moments of “democratic aesthetics”: the conceptualization of dissident reality by artist groups Reality and Utterance and Gwangju Freedom Artist Association in the early 1980s; Choi Jeong-hwa’s postcolonial mimesis of vernacular and commercial urban landscape in the late 1980s to the 1990s; art collectives Sungnam Project and FlyingCity’s pursuit of publicness in neoliberal urbanization in the late 1990s to the early 2000s; and the democratic understanding of division with North Korea in the art of Oh Yoon, Sin Hak-chul, and Seung Woo Back from the 1980s to mid-2000s. Establishing a genealogy of Korean contemporary art within the concurrent workings of political democratization and cultural globalization, this dissertation ultimately constitutes an epistemological inquiry into three implicated terms: “Korean (hankuk)”; “contemporary (hy!ndae)”; “art (misul).” As a visual and cultural studies inquiry into the history of political aesthetics in South Korea, a country still reconciling with its (post-)colonial dilemma and an antagonistic relationship with the “other” Korea in the North, this dissertation seeks to contribute to, and complicate, how art history has thus far envisioned the 20th-century history of political avant-garde art