KOREAN ART AND THE CITY AFTER MINJUNG ART1
Introduction
Within the literature of Minjung art, the city has been far from a primary issue like Minjung (“common people”) or democracy, and Minjok (“ethnic nation”) or tradition. In fact, the issue of the city has largely been sidelined as secondary or insignificant. But urban lives and environments in fact served as the central subject matter in Minjung art. As figuration and narrative were restored to address the larger world that people inhabit, to expose the fundamental forces underlying the appearance of reality, and to engage with the political exigencies of the late 1970s and early 1980s, urban residents and their lives served as a source of inspiration for Korean artists. This painterly engagement with the city had not been matched in its scope and intensity since Korean artists had approached the city in the 1920s, when the building boom of Gyeongseong under Japanese colonial rule stimulated both envy and frustration (Fig. 1).
The low visibility of the issue of the city in the art historical literature on Minjung art is not inseparable from the fact that its significance appears to be too static to attract scholarly curiosity. Indeed, a mindset that could be deemed an “anti-urban approach” has dominated Minjung art, one in which the modern city is rendered as the site of exploitation and deception, anxiety and despair, and alienation and corruption. However, just as a diverse range of commitments and preoccupations made up the Minjung art movement, its practitioners’ views of the city were likewise historically contingent on and subject to subtle changes in circumstances. This essay seeks to provide a skeletal outline of the myriad strains of artistic engagement with the city in the wake of Minjung art, taking into account the central position of urban imaginaries in South Korean oppositional aesthetics.
Anti-urban Imaginaries in Minjung art
An anti-urban approach was evident in Minjung art production, reaching its climax in the mid-1980s, when the movement became an oppositional cultural practice against the unjust authority of the military regime. City life and the urban environment were addressed as morally degenerate, ideologically suspicious, and aesthetically debased. Members of the art collective Imsulnyeon, for instance, represented the city as an arena for ruthless competition, a garbage dump of Western culture, or a hotbed of hedonistic entertainment, where common people are pathetically defeated, sexually degenerate, or intoxicated with conspicuous consumption.2 Another type of anti-urban approach can be found in works by Dureong. The artist collective presented a folkloric orientation, as embodied in its name, which has the meaning of ridges in the rice field—a site for work, play, and rest in a traditional agrarian culture. Painting of All Things in Heaven and Earth (1982) features pastoral scenes of communal life in the upper part of the painting that sharply contrast with both the alienated everyday life of an industrial society in the painting’s middle section and the debased forms of mass culture in the lower section.
Such antipathy toward the city is understandable given that the state-led modernization of Korea was experienced as an abrupt event rather than a gradual process. The unusual swiftness of Korea’s postwar modernization often made the urban experience threatening, if only sometimes enchanting, thus arousing a heightened sense of nostalgia for the disappearing past. It comes as no surprise that in the second half of the 1970s, the literary critic Kim U-Chang lamented the waning of a “deep companionship” (or the decline of the Benjaminian aura) among people, or between men and objects. Literary critic Kim Hyun expressed as well his sense of loss when he moved to a newly built Banpo apartment in the mid-1970s, where he felt that space, objects, and experiences became deprived of their own inherent thickness and descended into the world of shallowness.3 Both critics revealed their yearning for authenticity—a sense of “distance,” “depth,” and “fullness”—that they believed had disappeared in the emergent world of the abstractions of contemporary industrial society.
It should be noted that in the late 1960s South Korean modernization had provided a source of inspiration and optimism for Korean artists. During his tenure as the mayor of Seoul (1966–1970), Kim Hyun-ok initiated the large-scale construction of modern infrastructures, transforming Seoul into the physical embodiment of “Modernization of the Homeland,” a major slogan of the Park Chunghee regime. Along with a series of urban projects by architect Kim Swoo-geun that included the Sewoon Mall complex, the Samil elevated motorway, and his innovative plan for Yeouido, the metamorphosis of Seoul into a modern metropolis offered a heightened sense of freedom for the young generation of artists, including the “Happening Hippies” associated with the city’s underground pop culture and geometric abstract artists who called their art the “art of the city,” among others. A concrete sense of the imminent arrival (if not already being in the midst) of a new social space generated a great deal of optimism before its ideological dimensions could be fully perceived.4
However, things changed significantly in the 1970s. Korea was transformed throughout the 1960s from a rural country into an industrialized and urban one. The abrupt transformation in the home and the city affected social relations mediated by objects and spaces, allowing the aforementioned literary critics, Kim U-Chang and Kim Hyun, to make critical comments about an increasing phenomenological incompatibility and existential anxiety. Yet a clearer understanding of the negative response to urbanization and industrialization among Korean intellectuals and artists in the 1970s would be provided through socio-historical accounts. Led by the state and state-sponsored conglomerates, the rapid process of urbanization and industrialization resulted in the decade’s unprecedented economic growth. Yet a majority of the common people were excluded from the distribution of increased national wealth and political power. Fueled by Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian revision of the constitution in 1972 and issuance of a series of emergency decrees in the mid-1970s, popular discontent spread throughout the nation, developing into the formation of Minjung discourse and activism.5
The increasing levels of social repression and policing seem to explain the surprising lack of urban visions in 1970s Korean art, even though the decade saw a series of monumental urban projects such as the construction of the Seoul–Busan Highway, the construction of the subway lines in Seoul, and the development of the area known as Gangnam. The threatening political climate triggered a conservative backlash against the experimental ethos prevalent in the late 1960s. The term avant-garde (jeonwi) came to mean being degenerate (toepye), and paintings returned with a vengeance to carry out a return to order. Little artistic response to the city’s recent metamorphosis was produced except for the genre of “national documentary painting,” which served as propaganda for President Park’s regime.
The second half of the 1970s witnessed the emergence of pictorial representations of the city. Hyperrealist paintings catalogued insignificant fragments of urban spaces, such as walls, corners, and voids, and a more sociologically charged and nationalist-motivated approach was proposed by Kim Jung-Heun, Oh Kyunghwan, and Lee Sang-Guk, who employed thick, jagged, and emphatic black contour lines to depict urban slums or factory areas in order to both rework traditional Korean visual culture and represent the living conditions of common people. These aformalist approaches were derived not only from a growing discontent with the dominance of abstractoriented art in the 1970s, but also from various, if limited, artistic tastes being created due to the emergent network of art distribution (galleries, museums, and art magazines). They were neither celebratory nor condemning of the transformation of the built environment and social space, delaying an immediate reaction prior to the emergence of Minjung art in the 1980s.
Indeed, the early 1980s saw the proliferation of outright protests against urbanization and industrialization in Korean art. For example, among members of Reality and Utterance (Hyeonsilgwa bareon), the artist collective recognized as the major force in initiating and establishing Minjung art, Lim Oksang raged against the city and its visual culture by stating, “I feel damaged while walking in the city, using a refrigerator, and watching TV. We are always forced to see contemporary urban spaces filled with plastic and cement, raunchy graphics and advertisements, and products copying Western ones.”6 In his City II (1981) Lim offered a devastating critique of a modern city as dark, dysfunctional, and paralyzed by media technologies and commodities. The view of the city as a perpetrator against the “common people” seems simplistic, naive, and lacking in insight. Yet this apocalyptic urban vision was a legitimate inflammatory rhetoric in the wake of the Gwangju democratization movement of May 1980.
Ambivalent Fascination with the City
Such an anti-urban vision, however, does not explain all the urban representations by Minjung art practitioners. One could draw attention to more nuanced approaches, in which artists seemed to be simultaneously both enthusiasts and enemies of modern life. I am highly cautious of accepting and imposing the “ambivalence” thesis of Western modernity onto the Korean context. Asserting that the experience of Gyeongseong was intertwined with both hatred and admiration would remain dangerously partial without commenting on the “fetishistic,” “magical,” or “spectacular” nature of colonial modernity;7 pointing to the liberatory potential of the late 1960s modernization would be too simplistic to understand its ideological and disciplinary power;8 and arguing for an ambivalent fascination with the city in the 1980s should go with the discussion of a widely shared sense of guilt over the victims of the Gwangju Uprising.
Undeniably, however, Seoul, as the fruit of the “Miracle of the Han River,” stimulated the artistic imagination. Kim Yong-Ik has mentioned that massive infrastructures such as bridges over the Han river and the Seoul–Busan Highway impressed him, even though he was far from an advocate of the Park regime. Of course, it would have been difficult to indulge in the industrial sublime without noticing the presence of the state or the capital looming behind the industrial enterprise of the modern city. In his Wall Stories #1 (1981), a photo-text work on the newly built Art Center in Daehangno designed by Kim Swoo-geun in the late 1970s, Sung Wan-kyung drew attention to the company name Guk Young Glass (guk young means “state run”), whose logo was placed on a glass door at the Art Center, offering a sarcastic commentary on the ubiquity of the state in everyday settings (Fig. 2, 3). However, Sung has often mentioned that he found himself fascinated with the metropolitan masses pouring out of Seoul subway line 1 in the mid-1970s after returning back from his sojourn in Paris. His fascination with the accelerated rhythm of the urban masses could be attributed to various factors. He might have been impressed by the rapid development of Seoul, or by the development of the masses as potentially rebellious, as already shown in the late 1960s in 1960, Ka (1969), a work by his college friend Oh Yoon. But Sung’s fascination seems to have been discursively mediated. While attending the Paris L’École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (ENSAD) in the early 1970s, the artist was drawn to Fernand Léger, whose various media incorporated the vitality, energy, and rhythm of the modern metropolis.9 In particular, Léger’s fascination with the “spectacle on the street,” composed of shop windows and commercial signboards decorated by non-professional, anonymous owners, captivated Sung’s attention as an embrace of “the world of people’s slang.” This lesson was evident less in his works of art than in his critical support of a Reality and Utterance colleague, Min Joung-Ki, who faithfully copied kitsch paintings that were displayed and sold in the streets (Fig. 4). The mundane image-world was largely understood as alienating and ideological among the members of Reality and Utterance, but, at the same time, Sung and Min in particular were invested in embracing the image-world in order to make art more provocative, communicative, and liberatory, an anticipatory vision for a genuinely “popular art” against the hermetic and pedantic “aura” of mainstream modernism. Reality and Utterance operated in a spirit of productive tension in which its members were both troubled and intrigued by the urban visual culture.10
But such tension remains vital only as long as the political culture allows. During the mid- 1980s, when the political tension between the military government and Minjung sectors reached its climax, nuanced approaches gave way to outright protests. This shift should not be understood as a degradation; rather, a utopian or redemptive promise came to be less discernable in the profane world of the modern city than constructed from Minjung or workers’ culture, i.e., the Other of the dominant culture. As the focus of Minjung art shifted from addressing realities to transforming them, a dialectical approach toward the city seemed irrelevant, and even escapist.
Urbanization Without an Outside in the “Post-” Era
The 1990s witnessed a resurging interest in the city as a source of inspiration for critical art practice. Above all, this resurgence owed much to the decline of Minjung art. In fact, the artistic movement lost its political efficacy and affective power as the dissident movement in general ran out of steam against the background of the fall of communism, the tempering of domestic activism (after the establishment of the civil government in 1992), and the rapid transition to a full-blown consumer society (following the increase in income levels during the 1980s). Having been stripped of any semblance of historical legitimacy and moral superiority, Minjung art exposed its formulaic style and tedious slogans. This led to widespread criticism of the 1980s model of presentational political art, in which a simple representation of reality, history, and society was believed to have a direct political effect. There seemed to be no Archimedean point from which to transcend and transgress the status quo, a “postmodern” condition in which Korean intellectuals were largely confused and disoriented.
The renewed attention to the city in the 1990s was meant to seek a more nuanced, ambivalent approach to navigating the complicated circumstances, in which there seemed to be no line to confront in the classic political sense. Playing a crucial role in reformulating the model of political art in the 1990s was the Research Society for Art Criticism (RSAC, 1989–1993), a collective of young artists, critics, and art historians who had been engaged with the Minjung movement in the 1980s. Corresponding with the change in the dominant mode of social participation for intellectuals, from political activism to cultural guerrilla warfare, its members called for a radical rethinking of the city, the everyday, and mass culture by organizing exhibitions in the early 1990s such as City Mass Culture (by Park Chan-kyong and Baek Ji-sook) and Apgujeong-dong: Utopia/Dystopia (by Kim Jinsong, Kim Suki, et al.).11
These exhibitions featured several photo-text collages or photomontages in which public symbols and media images were reworked in order to interrogate the urban visual environment as an ideological battlefield (Fig. 5). The participating artists, including Park Buldong, Hwang Sejun, Cho Kyung-sook, and Suh Sukjin, served as sign-manipulators, embracing dominant languages as both targets and weapons, resulting in the production of composite pictures that were aesthetically subversive and psychically charged, and sometimes politically agitating. This maneuver echoes the tactic in de Certeau’s sense of an “art of the weak,” which “must play on and with a terrain imposed on it and organized by the law of a foreign power.”12 This stance seemed effective in the early 1990s, when belief in the truth-value of images gave way to the euphoric embrace of deconstruction. Play had more liberatory potential than protest, paradoxical nonsense had more profound meaning than reductive public opinion, and lightness functioned as a serious gesture. The manipulation of signs, however, did not last long enough. The “sensuous” rebellion seemed sophisticated yet cynical, and the immanent critique was self-reflexive but ambiguous.
A more viable model of aesthetic intervention in the changing circumstances seemed to be developed elsewhere, ironically, in the work of Choi Jeong Hwa, a key figure of “New Generation Art,” which was seen as weakening the very categories that had sustained Minjung art. Choi came under the spotlight with mixed-media installations and interior designs, showing his admiration or emulation of cheap and tacky images and materials, including plastic baskets, makeshift chairs, advertising flyers, and street signboards (Fig. 6). For the “left melancholics,” who were left disoriented and obsessively attached to the recent past, when the goal of struggle was clear and the strategy was simple, Choi’s “kitschy” works were viewed as self-enamored stylization and thus a nihilistic gesture.13 This suspicion or accusation seemed all the more legitimate since Choi had gained prominence in the field of interior design, brand identity, and corporate identity—in other words, the field of “commodity aesthetics” that the Korean intellectual left, informed by Wolfgang Haug’s formulation, saw as promoting “false consciousness” and insatiable desire in an advanced consumer society (Fig. 7).14
For some, however, Choi’s work harbored an unexpectedly critical edge. Like the French painters of modern life, who ventured to the outskirts of Paris in order to construe the secrets of the city as it was being drastically transformed, Choi was seen as rescuing from oblivion the ambiguous temporality divulged by the liminal space in and of the city.15 It was former members of the RSAC that strove to explore the critical and utopian dimensions in Choi’s work, including the referential quality of kitsch (i.e., Korea’s rushed modernization), the mnemonic potentials of the outmoded, and the collective expressivity registered in the urban vernacular, as well as the subversive nature of “low” materials.16 The former Minjung practitioners’ critical support for Choi seems to be an ideological “crossover.” This suggests an apparent resolution of the “cold war regime” in the field of Korean art, but at the same time it indicates the difficulty of achieving a viable model of critical art production in the post-Minjung period. One could say that the model shifted from “the artist as sign-manipulator” to “the artist as ethnographer,” to borrow Hal Foster’s expressions, during this decade.17 This shift seems to suggest that “the 1990s” began with the euphoria of globalization but ended with the apocalyptic gloom of the Asian financial crisis in 1997, an apparently backward step in national growth and yet a drastic shift forward to neoliberalism.
Art and the City in the Neoliberal Era
Following the short-lived euphoria of the 1990s, a growing demand for the reinvigoration of Minjung art’s oppositional legacy emerged. Critical art, which had fallen into lethargy in the ostensibly democratized 1990s, (re)gained traction in the “post-Minjung” period. Minjung art, simultaneously or dialectically, restored and undermined, or offered conditions of possibility and constraint for, a “post-Minjung turn” in Korean art production. Taking the lead in this turn, Seongnam Project began with Kim Tae-heon’s 1998 solo exhibition, The Destruction and Becoming of Space: Between Seongnam and Bundang. Organized by Kim Tae-heon, Park Chan-kyong, Park Yong-seok, Cho Jieun, Im Heung-soon, and others, the art project explored the city of Seongnam on the outskirts of Seoul as “a brutal synecdoche of South Korean modernization,” excavating the tumultuous history of an area that had begun as a makeshift shanty town for those evicted during a largescale slum clearance program in downtown Seoul in the late 1960s (Fig. 8). The forced displacement sparked the Gwangju Settlers’ Riot in August 1971, arguably the first urban riot in the Park Chung-hee regime. This new residential area came to be an “old town” in the 1990s, when “Bundang New Town” was built in the southern part of the city of Seongnam in order to accommodate middle-class residents from Seoul. Representing two distinct phases of urbanization and urbanism from the 1970s to the 1990s, Seongnam would serve for this group of artists of the new millennium as the site of several field trips and the subject of extensive research in libraries and archives.
In taking the form of video, photography, diagrams, text, and installations, the project’s artworks addressed issues that included uneven development, the traumatic process of modernization, and eviction, with less an accusatory or polemical tone than a fact-finding and poetic gesture. The project also presented a series of snapshots titled Inhabitants’ Art (1998). Vernacular buildings were elevated into objects for aesthetic judgement in spite of, or rather because of, the fact that they were anonymously designed and remodeled out of necessity. In contrast, photographic and textual works offered information on officially commissioned “public art” in the city, showing that these works are aesthetically formulaic and that all of the commissions were received by only a few local artists. In this way, two types of public art were brought into stark confrontation: “public art” taking generic forms that served only private interests and vital artifacts of anonymous origin for daily use (Fig. 9).18
The Seongnam Project gave rise to the organization of various artist collectives conducting fieldwork at particular urban sites (for example, flyingCity and Mixrice) and several project-based exhibitions, including Gasman-Flâneur: The City and Reportage Art (2000), Text Tower: Insa-dong Fantasies (2000), Jongro, Public Dream: Several Episodes about Strange Streets (2002), and Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, a Walk to Envision (2007), among others.19 This development should be understood as inseparable from the institutional support of Alternative Space Pool (1999–, later renamed Art Space Pool) and the tabloid journal Forum A (1998–2005), both of which served as hotbeds of the “post-Minjung turn.” Largely propelled by a grave deterioration of the public sector in the wake of the IMF-led neoliberal reform at the turn of the new millennium, these spatial practices were partly derived from sentiments or memories regarding the economic shock, the threat of displacement, and a sense of uprootedness. However, informed by neo-avant-garde practices and discourses (e.g., of pop, minimalism, conceptualism, institutional critique, and site-specificity) and critical urban theories (by David Harvey, Edward W. Soja, and others), they assumed the opposite of an accusatory or emotional tone, instead taking various forms that included ethnographic, archival research on the local sites; a melancholic collection of abandoned objects; an exhaustive cataloging of products from anonymous design culture; a panoramic rendering of a delirious mode of urban production; and a ludic appropriation of urban sites (Fig. 10).
The locally oriented, critical practice of art should be understood within a larger context: the proliferation of artistic investments in the city or at specific urban sites under the rubric of “site-specific art” or “public art.” Korean art’s foray into the city in the new millennium was motivated not merely by the desire to intervene into the current production of space, but more broadly by the calculated use of art by the business sector or by local governments to create an experience economy or to market administrative achievements. The fact that Seongnam city housed in its city hall lobby Seongnam and Environmental Art (1998), one of the exhibitions by Seongnam Project, conveyed more than an amusing anecdote. Instead, it prefigured the complex nature of the artcity nexus in the new millennium, occupying an ambiguous moral ground by oscillating between critical intervention and soft promotion, deconstruction and consolidation of local identity, and public concern and publicity. The complexity is further multiplied since we can identify the complicit role of art in gentrification and in the restructuring of the urban economy against an impoverished and isolated local population in Seoul. This had been merely secondhand knowledge from the arthistorical literature of the complex status of alternative art centers in New York City’s neighborhoods from the late 1970s onward.20
Socially engaged, spatial practices can also be understood in conjunction with the emergence of a global biennale circuit in the twenty-first century. Indeed, as Korean art entered the global matrix of international biennales, critical art and spatial practice, which tended to focus on a site’s cultural identity, sociopolitics, and so forth, reflected structural demands as much as critical intent, insofar as it served as a strategy to gain international visibility or have access to biennales grounded on locality.21 Last but not least, the “social turn” in the global contemporary art scene created the tendency, or pressure, to anchor one’s artistic practice in collaboration with local communities.22 In this regard, we can understand that the emergence of the spatial practice of the post-Minjung period in the new millennium took place within a decidedly complex interplay of forces, encompassing the local and the global, spontaneous motives and structural demands, and post-Minjung endeavors and post-modern conditions. This complexity reflects a world that has become so incomprehensible that it demands new approaches for grasping global and social totality; as well, it constitutes a serious challenge to the existing socially engaged spatial practice and its conventional approach toward the city.
In this context, a question emerges: Why did Seongnam capture the attention of Korean artists two decades ago? This issue cannot be resolved by saying that most of the participating artists had resided in and attended a college in the city, or that the city stood for the problematic urbanization of Korea. The question should thus be rephrased: Why is it that at the turn of the new millennium, Seongnam came to be viewed as problematic for or attractive to these artists? It would be productive to assume that the satellite city on the outskirts of Seoul remained comprehensible, that the traces of the violence and destruction of stateled urbanization with promises of modernity had not yet been erased or were even still palpable in Seongnam. In other words, was Seoul not becoming increasingly incomprehensible at that point? Alternatively, was Seoul not in the midst of an accelerated process of spatial abstraction such that one lost a cognitive road map for how to read it?
In retrospect, there was a high degree of transparency or clarity with regard to Seongnam Project. Its approach was based on a dualism by contrasting two urban sites and empowering the “less-developed” one. Although the project’s art marked the beginning of so-called “post- Minjung art,” it had to do with restoring, rather than overcoming, Minjung art, echoing Kim Jung-Heun’s Lucky Monoleum: Creating an Affluent Life (1981), which registered the juxtaposition of opposing qualities and values (i.e., the country versus the city, the poor versus the rich, and production versus consumption) as if to create an image of social totality. In the new millennium, such a familiar approach might have helped to reinvigorate the critical lineage of Minjung art, yet it is doubtful that such an approach would have been useful to comprehend and intervene in the dominant production of space, which is so multifaceted, heterogeneous, and networked as to defy any dogmatic or dualistic categorization.
These days, urban lives are reconfigured by the worldwide neoliberal wave of deregulation, microelectronics, and globalization that has reshaped urban systems and urban space at the global, national, and local levels. The production of space in a city is subject to forces that do not reside in that city. The city is a node in a much larger, more dispersed network that can be apprehended only from above. It is not enough to take the traditional, or humanist, approach towards the city, the approach that Reinhold Martin described as “the inside-out, bottom-up view of the city and of modernity in general.”23 This view seems to be a quaint vantage point from which to approach the complex rhizome of global/local interrelationships. The aerial, multi-screened, or planetary view is better equipped to achieve the “cognitive mapping” of what individuals are unable to identify within. In addition to the great thinkers of the modern metropolitan experience—from Walter Benjamin to the Situationists—Korean artists should refer to Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. Moving away from the street, they need to find themselves in multi-screened control rooms or geographic information systems.
Figure 1. Kim Yong-Jun, Dongsipjagak (The East Watchtower, original title: Construction or Demolition?), 1925, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown.
Figure 2. Sung Wan-kyung, Wall Stories #1, 1981, black-and-white photograph and pencil, dimensions unknown. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 3. Detail of Wall Stories #1. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 4. Min Joung-Ki, Dialogue [1], 1980, oil on canvas, 145 × 112 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 5. Hwang Sejun, from a photomontage for the catalogue of City Mass Culture (Dukwon Gallery, Seoul, 1992). Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 6. A found image from a flyer for a cabaret show in Yeongdeungpo. Courtesy of Choi Jeong Hwa.
Figure 7. Choi Jeong Hwa, Made in Korea, 1991, mixed-media installation (a cabaret advertisement flyer and plastic chairs), 120 × 60 × 60 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 8. Installation view of Seongnam Modernism at the main lobby of Seongnam City Hall. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 9. Seongnam Project, from the series Inhabitants’ Art, 1999, color photograph. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 10. flyingCity, Looking Down #4: Redeveloped Site at Bongcheon-dong, 2003, digital print, 90 × 300 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Source: Shin Chunghoon, “Korean Art and the City After Minjung Art,” What Do Museums Change? Art and Democracy (MMCA, 2020), 245-263.