Oh Chiho, Autumnal Beam, 1960, Oil on canvas, 54×61cm. MMCA
Semi-abstract
* Source: Multilingual Glossary of Korean Art by Korea Arts Management Service
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Figurative art
Figurative art refers to a style that depicts objects, both real and imaginary, in a realistic manner. It became popularized within Western Art in parallel with the emergence of Modernist abstract art during the early 20th century. In the Korean art community, discourses on figurative art began when the Western Art division of National Art Exhibition (Gukjeon) was separated into the figurative, semi-abstract, and abstract categories in 1961. In 1969 the Western Art division of the Grand Art Exhibition was reorganized into the figurative and non-figurative categories. At this point the idea of figurative art was established within the Korean art community to primarily refer to painting and sculpture created in an Academic realist style.
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Abstract art
A term which can be used to describe any non-figurative painting or sculpture. Abstract art is also called non-representational art or non-objective art, and throughout the 20th century has constituted an important current in the development of Modernist art. In Korea, Abstract art was first introduced by Kim Whanki and Yoo Youngkuk, students in Japan who had participated in the Free Artists Association and the Avant-Garde Group Exhibition during the late 1930s. These artists, however, had little influence in Korea, and abstract art flourished only after the Korean War. In the 1950s so called “Cubist images,” which separated the object into numerous overlapping shapes, were often described as Abstractionist, but only with the emergence of Informel painting in the late 1950s could the term “abstract” be strictly used to describe the creation of works that did not reference any exterior subject matter. The abstract movements of geometric abstractionism and dansaekhwa dominated the art establishment in Korea in the late-1970s. By the 1980s, however, with the rising interest in the politically focused figurative art of Minjung, abstraction was often criticized as aestheticist, elitist, and Western-centric.
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