MMCA 리서치랩

Features

Contemporary art and Feminism

Essays

Study Group 1 │ The Roundtable for Contemporary Art and Feminism

To celebrate the launch of the MMCA Research Lab, an online platform in Korean and English dedicated to sharing knowledge and information about contemporary Korean art, a related forum called "Study Group 1. Timelines and Features of Korean Art" was held at MMCA Seoul on March 29, 2024.
At the Study Group, MMCA's in-house researchers and affiliated scholars regularly present the results of collaborative research on selected themes.

Part I, "Timelines and Features of Korean Art," the Korean Art Timelines produced by the MMCA Research Lab were the main topic, and the session also explored the potential of expanding art history research through chronology.
In Part II, participants shared their views on "Contemporary Art and Feminism," the first "Features (thematic study)" of the MMCA Research Lab, and current issues of feminist art in Korea.

Kim Hyeonjoo (Art Historian), Lee Jinshil (Art Critic), siren eun young jung (Artist), and Hur Hojeong (Curator) all participated in the "Features", explored new methods to research Korean Feminist Art from diverse perspectives and positions.

*moderated by Lee Jinshil (Art Critic)

* * *

Lee Jinsil: As Tiffany Yeon Chae introduced us, it's actually really interesting because we all have different positions. I'm a researcher and critic. siren eun young jung is an artist who also writes a lot, right? She also teaches students. Hur Hojeong is a researcher and a curator. So I think it was a good opportunity for us to talk about what we think is problematic from our respective perspectives and positions, and what we think should be verbalized. As I was listening to Kim Hyeonjoo's presentation…We were tasked with the "Features" research related to the timeline, and when we started this research, we contemplated what we should write. In addition, we contemplated what we should talk about today.

I guess in a way, we're kind of like an appendix. Part Two, of course, could be seen as more important, but I suppose it could be thought of as a supplementary position in the timeline. Actually, in terms of a feminist epistemology or in terms of a lot of the epistemologies that we have today, where the supplementary is actually the source of the primary as well as the real, more essential thing that the primary was trying to suppress and deny, I thought that there might be a really important point where our research intersected with this timeline.

The timeline is organized from 1945 to 1999. You can click and see various events, people, works, and exhibitions. Of course, we have to keep filling in those parts, but I think there's a gap in the parts that are related to feminist art.
As Kim Hyeonjoo presented, our section starts in the late 1980s. Another thing that I'm worried about is "Can the way the timeline is organized and the way that a sort of genealogy in art history is created be consistent with a feminist epistemology?" "Can they go together?" So being written into history is, in a way, getting into the Hall of Fame, but there are points in that process that are not in line with feminist performance. siren eun young jung has written about the value of failure.
In an epistemology of feminism that is forced to embrace the negativity of this failure, how do we talk about feminist art? I couldn't help but think about this as I observed the timeline work and the archiving work.

Of course, digging up buried histories is a good thing. But I think that the narrative, history, and method called feminist art is very important as a new methodology to reexamine the devalued parts or as a methodology to question the assumptions that were in traditional history.

I was thinking more about that while listening to Kim's presentation. If you look at Kim's research essays, the first is about the overview that she just presented. The second is about the diaspora artists. Of course, Kim Hong-hee did a big piece on diaspora artists once. But Kim Hyeonjoo focused more on Yong Soon Min and Hak Kyung Cha. The third is about artist Noh Wonhee. Noh Wonhee is actually mentioned as very important in the genealogy of Minjung Art.
Kim writes about the aspects of feminist art in her work that we have abandoned or that we need to reconsider. Kim did declare that the paper was an introduction, but about the big things that were left out, she is proposing that we study them together. But I'd like to hear what she has to say about this part expletively.

Contemporary Art and the Sensation of the Female Body

And I also wrote three essays. One is titled "Bone and Wrapper." It is about the works of Lee Mire, Yoon Jiyoung, and Hwang Sue Yon. I pondered a lot about what kind of research article to write. What I contemplated was… There are art historians here, and art theorists, artists, and critics, but I don't think I can say that we share all our interests and methodologies.

In my case, I write criticism, but I am oriented toward philosophical art criticism. I can have a dialogue within the academia, and I can also have a dialogue with artists about their work, not just to give them historical coordinates, but to see which parts of their work can be more transferable and which parts can be more radicalized in terms of sensory aspects, medium aspects, and methodology. So looking at it from that perspective, I think the thing that I'm most concerned about right now is physicality.

Since 2016, we've had the #MeToo movement and all these different feminism reboot, but within this discourse of what we call feminist art, I've come to question the shift in the contemporary sensibility of that, and ask, "Have questions like, 'What more we can talk about?' and 'What is it like for us to be women?' become as radicalized as that?" I think I became more aware about these issues.
Is it feminist art if it's done by a woman? Is it a feminist exhibition if it consists of works only by women? Or if we bring together legendary artists and hold an exhibit, is that a great exhibition? I contemplated that. I thought about the concerns about corporeality that the most active female artists have now, and about what is beyond the biological notion of corporeality.

So how can we talk about physicality in art in terms of what we call the body, which is not just biological, but is actually about race, class, different environments, and especially sexuality, which is imprinted in us? I wanted to contemplate these things and do research on corporeality. I wanted to write about it. That's how I got started. That led to me narrowing my research to three themes. One was to focus on sculptures or works that pay attention to the body in a more socialized sense or in a more sensory sense, or in a way, you could say, in an affective sense, and I talked about that with the works of Lee Mire, Yoon Jiyoung, and Hwang Sue Yon.
Of course, they are artists that we see and talk about a lot, but I wanted to look at them from a different perspective. In particular, I wanted to do a reading that delves a little deeper into the very negative points that we don't usually talk about in feminist art, the points that we just say are "abjection" and dismiss. In that sense, I wrote "Bone and Wrapper."

In the second essay, I wrote with the theme "The Tentacular Sensibilities of Women Painters," where I organized some artists' works. I wrote a piece about the works of Jang Pa, Lee Eunsil, and Park Jahyun, and I kind of interpreted their work in terms of tentacular sensibility. Actually, the term "tentacularity" came from Donna Haraway. But to be tentacular is to have extremely sensitive senses. When we think of tentacles, we usually think of an octopus. It's something that sticks well and something that senses with its entire body.

So it's very sensitive to things like its environment and otherness. And what else? We talk about these multidirectional senses of connection, but I actually felt very strongly that the feminism of tentacularity or the sense of connection that Donna Haraway talks about, things like the feminism of connection, are just floating around very conceptually in terms of being ecological or very communal or symbiotic.

So the tentacular sensibility is the sensation of touch that we're very sensitive to, but something that we might find very unpleasant and slippery and very dirty. At the core of that is sexuality once again. So I wanted to touch on those things a little bit. I also wanted to talk about the language of painting as a way to speak more powerfully. So I ended up writing about the work of these three artists.

Lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about the issue of labor, the issue of labor that women's bodies have. The third essay was written in terms of multimedia work by connecting the works of artists who pay attention to the emerging problems of emotional labor, the problems of care work, and the problems of "illness" that women have that are connected to care work and physicality. I connected the works of Joo Hwang, Shin Min, and Jeamin Cha to this topic. You can go and read these contents.
Actually, as I was writing this, I kept coming up with more artists that I wanted to write about. It didn't end there. I kept thinking of another artist, then another, and another. Those who write criticism or write about art probably have similar concerns as me. I realized that there was a lack of a space where we could connect these things together, present them in a longer conversation, and share them together.

So I think it's great that the MMCA Research Lab chose feminism as their first "Features" research and I'm very appreciative of that. But could this be a little bit more like Wiki, like FemiWiki or our Wikipedia, where content is constantly being added? A platform that keeps getting updated and where other people get involved? I think it'll be great if more people, other than the first researchers, can contribute. Through that, I would like to see more conversations going on here.
That's all from me. siren eun young jung, please tell us about your research then pass the microphone over to the next person.

What Does Feminist Art/Artist Do?

siren eun young jung: Hello. Before I started writing, I thought 'Why did they put me in a meeting literally for researchers?' I can't do research as well as professional researchers can. Instead of showing something through a project or practice, what qualities would I need to write something that's like a research text? I guess it's about ‘how I do this feminist performance as a practice or as a work language performance on a very experiential level.
Also about how I survive in order to continue doing this work, how I bite and claw my way through this ecosystem of survival, ending up either in total destruction or growth.’ I thought that telling these stories from experience was what was demanded of me, so with that in mind, I started to write.

I realized that the three essays ended up being about me ‘as a person within this one big art field that we think of as the art community, me as a citizen, me as a member of a particular community, me as a surviving member of the academy that continues to feed this art community…’ As these very different aspects of "me" collide, how is our survival happening? Why is it, when a feminist epistemology comes in… How can I be more committed to this community? I thought about these things.

The issue of sexual assault in the art world unfolded around the 2016 "feminism reboot," and as it grew and grew, sexual assault in art schools came to light. It kept spreading across all cultural genres and I watched it happen with my own eyes. I realized that it was no longer possible to ignore the fact that sometimes, someone very close to me, a fellow artist, or a student of mine was involved in that. I felt I needed to look more critically at the clique culture that art schools have and the kind of intimacy that exists between professors and students, and what that creates.
From that perspective, when feminist epistemologies come into the art world, what are the things that we can break and what can I do as an artist to make the community a little bit better? I think those were some of the biggest questions for me.

When I looked into it, I saw that sexual assault at the universities that had come to the forefront where students were reaching out for help on a daily, urgent basis, crying every day, all of a sudden sealed up like it never happened. Even worse, professors who had been expelled had come back and started teaching again. People who had been on trial in the name of the law were exonerated in the name of the law, and were back in the art world as major figures, and it really hit me in the gut.
And it's not just me. It's something that a lot of people are feeling, but it's something that some people can't talk about because they don't have a voice or an opportunity, and some people can't talk about it because How did we get through those moments, especially in the academy, where you really have to be deaf, dumb, and blind for three years to continue to follow any authority? These were the thoughts that I had. Then I realized that we had to confront thoughts like "Just do your own thing," and criticisms like "Does art have to be part of a social movement or all this noise?"

In the process, I realized that even that time when there was a really dedicated group of women artists who were very active under the name of the Association of Women Artists, was almost erased as well. I felt that I needed to stipulate those things to leave behind a record. I also thought that feminism can always be a failed and wounded epistemology, but even if it doesn't have a triumphant experience, it can definitely contribute to making this community a little bit better, and since this is my workplace, I should naturally be very sensitive to that.

So if you look at my three articles, they're not really research. They don't have a theoretical or philosophical background. They were more of a proposal of how we can be more symbiotic with everyone as members of this community me as a surviving faculty member of the academy that continues to feed this art community… I still don't have a researcher's identity, so thank you for including me.

Feminist Art and Methodologies of Curating

Lee Jinsil: Hur Hojeong, you wrote within the larger theme of feminist curatorial methodology, so please tell us a little bit about how you came to write it and what it's about.

Hur Hojeong: I thought I had calmed down because the chair was comfortable, but now that I'm holding the microphone, I'm nervous again. I read the other speakers' texts with great appreciation. siren eun young jung said she just wrote about her struggles but there were clearly parts of the essays where she was able to bring a critical perspective to some of the controversies about the representation of the female body that hadn't been talked about and was left as a boiling-up voice.
I thought they were well-written essays that really summarized the position of the feminist artist as one who often performs failure and who affirms her own paradoxes, as she mentioned through various references. So I thought I'd comment on it one more time since I have the microphone anyway.

I am once again leaning on siren eun young jung's writing but in all three of her essays, she repeatedly mentions that she has a dual identity as an educator and an artist at the same time. In my case, in terms of my dual identity, I'm a curator and I'm still a student in school weirdly called ABD researcher. This dual identity is actually the position of|many people who are active in the art world. But the reason I'm strangely bringing this up about myself is because I never majored in curating and I'm not writing a dissertation about curating. It's not that there is no curatorial program in Korea.
I repeatedly realized that I have the impression that curating as a discipline is almost absent, and that the idea of looking at and writing about art history centered on the medium of curating and exhibition is very foreign to me. I think I became more aware of this when curator Helen Jungyeon Ku suggested that I create a segment on exhibition cases when she first started planning for the "Features" research. That led me to organize my three essays a bit more in terms of my curatorial identity.

So when I was preparing the first essay, I wanted to organize the three essays into a single piece, so I set up two main axes. One was to summarize the recent art history centered around curating and exhibiting, and the contemporary art scene. So I tried to structure my essay by putting another axis on the other side, which is how to talk about feminism as a form of curating and how the relationship between feminism and curating art should be set. In the process, as a reference point for my curatorial studies, I was helped a lot by the curator Kwon Hyukgue, who runs the space with me.

That's how I ended up referring to Kim Hong-hee in my first essay, mainly to her work as a first-generation curator. Even though the word curating is so familiar to the general public nowadays, it's only been about 30 years since curators have been recognized as a professional group and their curatorial practices have been given serious attention.
But it was very encouraging to me that in paving the way in those early years, Kim Hong-hee opened a door by trying to create a feminist genealogy of contemporary Korean art. So I thought that Kim Hong-hee's and curator Beck Jee-sook's articles written in the late 1990s and early 2000s were still relevant for conversation from the perspective of the present day.

In the case of the Women's Art Festival 99: "Patjis on Parade that Kim organized, Kim Hyeonjoo summarized it earlier, but in the 1980s, they took the current called "Yeoseong Misul" with quotation marks and put it at the forefront of the feminist genealogy of contemporary Korean art. After the 1990s, women's aesthetics was genealogized into the so-called new generation of art or postmodern art, which developed after that. In the process, there was a part of the historicization that portrayed women's art in the 1980s and thereafter as disconnected. At that point, there were evaluations that women's art was treated as labor-centered and class-conscious, so it showed a different aesthetic style and form compared to later generations.
There were about two academic studies published in 2020 that reflectively improved the flow of feminism in contemporary Korean art, which acted like that assessment was an official statement. These were texts that reflected on Kim Hong-hee's project. So I leaned on them to organize the first essay. I think I wrote a lot of the instructions as I was studying.

At the end of the essay, I quote a text by curator Beck Jee-sook. In Kim Hyeonjoo's presentation, she highlighted the artist Lee Bul, but the title of the text is "Why Lee Bul Rejects the Title of Feminist Artist." It is known by several researchers that Lee Bul refused to call herself a feminist artist, and I think that's where I came up with the recursive question that resonates with me now.
Another thing is that curator Beck Jee-sook uses the phrase "curator's dilemma," and I don't know if this is an issue that comes up especially in feminist topics, but it's about the curator making a judgment that separates the dichotomy of content and form: How much consciousness is there? How much content integrity, consciousness, and aesthetic formality? So the question of which artist to choose is something that curators face. I think that this could be connected to the undervaluation of women's art in the 1980s. Then I asked, "How do we move past this point and continue the conversation with artists?"

And I connected it in my second essay. I wanted to interview artists who could talk more closely about labor issues, class issues, and the feminist perceptions of identifying as a woman in their own context. I interviewed Critical Hit, Collective Yagwang consisting of Kim Terri and Jeon In, and DadBoyClub consisting of Lee Sangmin and Han Sunwoo. For more information, please read my second essay.

Finally, in my third essay, I talk about exhibitions. As I experienced the question of "Is it a feminist exhibition if there are only female artists?" in the art scene, I realized such exhibitions have increased, but I didn't develop a lot of talk about what meaning to take out of them. Then I thought, "Maybe I can take that question to a meta-critical level," and put together a list of exhibitions that I found quite interesting. There were definitely some things that were disappointing, so I tried to summarize some of the things that I was disappointed with from a subjective point of view, such as the choice of terms or the composition of the artists.
Yet again, the focus was on the curation and the exhibition, so rather than focusing on a particular artist or work, I tried to write a bit about what the intentions of the curator might have been, to what extent it was articulated accurately, and how it played out in accordance with the scene.
In conclusion, it's hard to answer the question, What do you think feminist curating is? There was a time when we pursued the model of the authoritarian curator as a model for finding the answer, But I closed with an open ending, saying that feminist curating is possible when it is pulverized.

* * *

Lee Jinsil: When I was reading Hur Hojeong's essay, I realized that although we need to analyze the artworks and discover and refine the critical language inherent in each artist's individual work, the most important thing for us to do is to have something that we can talk about in the form of an open exhibition and the different things that are practiced within it. So it could be a problem of feminist epistemology that we've been talking about, a problem of terminology, or a problem of different positions.

Actually, even Kim Hong-hee considered the term women's art itself problematic. So she used to say 1980s "women's art" in quotation marks. A lot of what we exhibit, work on, and write about starts So she used to say "women's art in 1980s" in quotation marks. When we adopt the term "women's art," even if the term is not intended that way, in a very essentialist way, it is limited to the biological female, of course, there is no such thing, but it is limited to just the sex, the perceptible and visible identity of the sex. It only focuses on "woman" and has limitations of only perceiving it that way, so how should we think about the term women's art, or feminist art and women's art, and the controversy or contradiction of these terms? I'd like to hear more about how Kim Hyeonjoo understands these things. Can you talk about that first?

Kim Hyeonjoo: I started thinking a lot about this term when I started writing. As you all know, "women [yeoryu]," "female" "Feminism," "Feminist art [yeoseong juui]," these complex terms are mixed together. so I think a lot about how to organize them. I wouldn't say I've come to a conclusion, but it's hard for us to pronounce the word "feminism" because it starts with an "F." Nevertheless, I analyzed the data to see when the word feminism was used.
Then I noticed that the difference between saying Feminism and "yeoseongjuui" is that when we say feminism, it's when there's a strong sense of action, when there's a bit of activism. That's when I found that people use the term feminism a little bit more. It's not that I discovered this. If you look at the research, exhibitions, or critical texts since the 1980s that are being done from the perspective of feminism or talking about artists, there was a trend.

Then, in the 1990s, we didn't use the word feminism or "yeoseongjuui." We just called it women's cultural and artistic projects. It would be a very feminism-oriented activity. Then, "yeoseongjuui" was very much a cultural thing. So it looked like people were constantly applying the word "yeoseongjuui" when discussing aesthetics or developing issues.

To be honest, my essay was very abstract because I had to present the overall flow. So I left out the context of exhibitions. I wasn't able to talk about curating. I couldn't include any of the things that artists experience in the field. I couldn't deal with epistemological changes. There was also a page limit. You can't write 20 pages, so that was a bit of a challenge. Also, I didn't know if I was writing for professionals or for the general public.
Trying to find the line of who the readers will be was the hardest part of writing. So I thought, "I'll just do what I can do." Then the others will fill in the gaps since we have a critic, artist, and curator. They will supplement what's lacking. And they really did supplement it well. They presented things that I didn't know in their respective areas, and things that I agonized over a lot but couldn't bring out.

Especially in the case of siren eun young jung. If I were an artist, I would have wanted to show off my work a little bit. I think I would have allotted one segment to talk about what I'm doing as an artist. But she didn't do any of that. The contemplations she has about feminism as an artist... The things she went through in the field dealing with students… In other words, the many issues that she had to face as an educator and an artist, she wrote about that in an honest but also slightly difficult way. So I think it'll be really helpful if you read her essay. I thought everybody did a really good job of staying true to the stories that they had to tell in their area. But the most important thing is art history. That's the conclusion that I thought.
I thought that if art history doesn't hold it all together it will be scattered everywhere and float around in the air. Although I was not able to talk about it comprehensively I truly realized that there is a role for art historians to play. In that respect, if you're an art historian but don't know the field even if it's contemporary, and you think that the field is moving too fast for you to follow, I want to tell you that these people will make up for it, so please work hard on doing your research from your own perspective as an art historian.

Lee Jinsil: Kim talked about art history being very important. I think art history is very important because the term art history itself is not just a methodology, but it records and shares all the different performative dimensions that can be verbalized. In fact, the parts I wanted to write and should have written were really better expressed by what siren eun young jung wrote. siren eun young jung talked about "netfemi," which is the disconnection and problems of this generation that cannot be easily understood in a simple way. I think she summarized very well what kind of affects we've been experiencing since 2016 and what kind of discord, conflicts, contradictions, and dilemmas we've been in.

Particularly around Jung Yoonsuk's "Real Doll" issue, and the discussions that it sparked: What is right and what is wrong with representing women? Is it feminism to talk about what is right and what is wrong? Like this, there were a lot of questions that were being asked of us, but I don't think there was a space to talk about those things.

The feminism that emerged after 2016 was a feminism that emerged not in academia, but from young people, from the Internet space, so there was a tremendous spontaneity and a great dynamic, but there was also a very neoliberal aspect to it. A lot of things have happened in the name of success and ambition, and we've been very hurtful to each other using language of hostility, hate, and ridicule. I think siren eun young jung did a really good job of summarizing how these things work, how they impact the art world, and how we should perceive them. That's why I was grateful for her essay. If there was something that you had wanted to write, but couldn't, please tell us.

siren eun young jung: I'm really calm now. Because that's been an issue for a very long time, since 2016… The truth is that the division, misunderstanding, and misreading within feminism are being so frustratingly flattened and polarized. It's like, I heard there's a feminism exhibit, so I went, but they really just gathered women. For example, a bunch of young emerging female artists in their 30s hold an exhibit together, and on the floor right above them, there's a solo exhibit of a contemporary male artist. Like this, it looked like it was just for show. It felt like it was actually exposing a very visible structure of where the real power is. So I had this sense that these women were being used a lot for tokenism. Instead of being outraged by it, these young female artists were going back to that structure of trying to get one more token, to take one more chair.

It felt like such a tragedy to me. I felt like I should have pointed that out then. I understood the injustice that was going on, but at the same time, I felt that throwing a wet blanket on the women was not what a senior artist should do. So I was only able to write about it after two or three years passed, only after I got my head around it and gathered my thoughts.

But now that the MMCA Research Lab has opened almost two years after I wrote the essay, I realized that I don't want to go back and talk about that because I have become duller to the sense that I had then, and now there's something of a regime problem and an attempt to erase women altogether. But in terms of how we view the images of women, a point that you praised me earlier, we have to question that category of women. But the truth is, I feel that we don't really think about it that much because we're already given the idea of a woman, and we're so naturally passed off as women in society. So I'm kind of pushing the idea that we need to look at that category differently now. I wrote with the goal of making the image of a woman a little bit more controversial because I felt like society was looking at the image of women in a very lazy and benign way, with the woman just appearing.

But what I really wanted to do was assert that female representation has to be more complex. I think complexity is often underestimated, even though it's a really easy word. Continuing to keep these victimized female subjects in the victim narrative and just protecting them does not complete feminism. Our job is not done with that. We need to move that victim narrative to a place where we can make things a little bit better in some way. And beyond ensuring a safe space where victims can cry, there must also be a space that is far more contentious and dangerous. That's the stance I wanted to hold in my essay.

Lee Jinsil: Lastly, I would like to give the microphone to Hur Hojeong. In your essay, I really liked the attitude and methodology of asking the question, "If there has been a feminist shift in curating, what is it?" While observing various exhibits and holding exhibits yourself, especially curating the exhibit The Taming of the Shrew, you revealed the process of how you prepared and thought about the exhibition with other artists and how to place it in a feminist context. Reading that, I felt once again that it is very important to keep asking questions like What is being feminine? What is feminism? The attitude of asking questions is important. I would like to know if there are any parts that you feel are more of a dilemma when you're planning and thinking about exhibitions again after your essay. Or if you see a little bit more of a way to do this now that you've written about it, please tell us. If you have anything to add, please do.

Hur Hojeong: While listening to your question, I thought of a lot of things. I don't know if I can convey it well, but I'll answer it. First, I'll talk about what changed in me since I wrote it. There were some points that I forgot for a while because I wrote it a long time ago, but after it was published, my close colleagues gave me feedback right away, which is actually a rare experience. Just because you write an essay after you're matched with a writer, an exhibition, or a monthly magazine… Even if it goes public, it's very rare to get feedback immediately. However, after it was published in the MMCA Research Lab, I received feedback from a few people, even if it was brief, and that gave me hope. In that context, I felt like I had to take responsibility for what I said. I have come to reflect frequently on whether the methodology of questioning that I was talking about is also manifested in the exhibition that I am showing now.

Another thing is that I talked about the exhibitions that I curated, and just now, siren eun young jung pointed out that asking questions about what a woman is and how that is constructed is very important and we need to keep doing that. I want to say that my exhibition started from that point. Likewise, I asked myself a lot about whether it's a feminist exhibition if it only shows women artists. So I was determined to show a different story with that exhibition.

One of the things that I left out when I was giving you a summary of my essay just now, and I think it's a dated question, is that I was asking myself a lot around that time whether I was a feminist or not. Earlier, Kim showed us a booklet from "NoNewWork." I read through it once and saw that so many artists, curators, and researchers questioned themselves, "Can I call my work a feminist work?" or "Can I say that I am|a feminist?" They doubted themselves so much. It could be an old question now, but at that time, it felt so urgent.

I even remember when celebrities wore T-shirts that said "I'm a feminist," it caused an uproar. If they carried around Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, they were criticized for being a feminist. I remember it being a very real and urgent issue at that time. Also, like the text "Why Lee Bul Rejects the Title of Feminist Artist" mentioned earlier, I wanted to talk about that, and these things are imbued in my essay.

Lee Jinsil: At this point in time, the question, "Am I a feminist?" although, of course, started with Lee Bul's attitude, but I think at that time, it was kind of a qualification. It was a question of "Am I qualified to tell this story?" Actually, in 2017 and 2018, feminism had become a very valid and sellable narrative, so I think people were questioning themselves, asking, "Do I have the right?" But now that we're back in the backlash, I think feminism is a stigma. I think people who say, "I'm a feminist," get stigmatized now. So I think it's really necessary now. Feminism needs to be more visible and talked about in exhibitions now. I'd like to see it become a research meeting and a platform where we can continue to think about these dynamics over time.

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Contemporary art and Feminism

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Study Group 1 │ The Roundtable for Contemporary Art and Feminism

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