K-POWER IN RETROSPECT

A full view, at last, of modern art in South Korea

Many rich nations use art, music and movies to project an image to the world, but few take it as seriously as South Korea — today’s uncontested champion of cultural soft power.

In the past 20 years, the nation’s singers and actors have thumped to Asian and then worldwide superstardom, signalled in 2012 by the viral amusement

Gangnam Style (the first song to hit 1 billion views on YouTube); strengthened by the stadium-filling concerts of BTS, Loona and other K-pop bands; and capped recently by the unprecedented best picture Oscar for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.

It doesn’t seem an overstatement to say that, after the United States, no country on Earth now has the global cultural impact of this nation of only 51 million, buttressed by vogues for Korean cosmetics, food, fashion and consumer electronics, and helped along by government subsidy and various crimes and misdemeanours.

South Korean artists have also won new attention in museums and galleries: abstract painters of the dansaekhwa movement regularly fill New York’s blue-chip galleries, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave its most prominent space to a South Korean artist, Haegue Yang, when it reopened last October. But audiences have had almost no opportunity to come to grips with the full story of Korean contemporary art, overshadowed in the West by the Japanese and (more recently) Chinese scenes.

That’s enough to make an event out of

Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction, recently published by Phaidon. Lavish yet scholarly, this book is more than an important new chapter of an emerging world history of 20th-century art; it’s a vital artistic genealogy of our planet’s current cultural powerhouse.

Edited by art historian Yeon Shimchung, curator Sunjung Kim, literary specialist Kimberly Chung and media

scholar Keith B. Wagner, Korean Art

From 1953 is the most significant English-language overview yet of modern and contemporary art on the peninsula. It overflows with abstract painting, political printmaking, feminist performance and on-the-street photography, and for each South Korean artist you know (like video art pioneer Nam June Paik) there are a dozen to discover.

The book also stretches over the Demilitarised Zone and across the Pacific. Among its 13 chapters there’s one on North Korean painting of the 1950s and 1960s, and another touching on Korean-American artists like Do Ho Suh and Byron Kim.

Most of the book, though, plants itself in South Korea, where artists had to keep pace as the country transitioned from military dictatorship to raucous democracy and from a peasant backwater into the world’s 12th-largest economy. In 1953, when the Korean War ended in stalemate, painters in South Korea’s destroyed cities set out to forge a new art, breaking with the colonial tradition of Japan (which occupied Korea from 1910 to 1945) as well as new Western cultural influences.

What should a Korean vernacular modernism look like? Many artists of the “postwar generation”, like Park Sookeun or Lee Ungno, turned to national motifs — romanticised landscapes, female farmers. And yet the hunt for some authentic “Koreanness”, so familiar in post-colonial art scenes, immediately wound itself into global forms. Traditional ink and brush painting mixed with American abstract expressionism or French informal painting; a “national” school of art proved its modernity by looking inside and out.

In the 1960s, under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee, South Korea underwent a rocket-speed shift from poverty to industrialisation — what the book’s editors refer to as “compressed modernity”.

A new generation of Korean artists was growing suspicious of gestural painting, while others were embracing temporary urban interventions and visceral performances. The young artists of the Origin Group renounced the expressive gestures of the postwar painters; the exacting geometric abstractions of Lee Seung-jio offered a cool reflection of the breakneck growth of Seoul, its sprouting towers, its blaring neon signs. Lee Seung-taek pushed canvases out onto the Han River and set them on fire, while Lee Kang-so set up a bar in the capital’s leading gallery, offering a free space for rice wine and political chatter amid official censorship.

The book’s focus on Korean history, politics and economic development also offers a new illumination of the country’s most famous postwar art movement: dansaekhwa, or “single-colour painting”, whose compositions of repeated achromatic brush strokes now typify Korean modern art (and command million-dollar prices). Park

Seo-bo, Ha Chong-hyun, Yun Hyongkeun and others each aimed to “paint pictures that were not pictures”: staining the canvas with repeated blotches, or covering the surface with countless loops. Yet these perseverant, ascetic canvases, often making use of hanji paper and freighted with references to calligraphy and Buddhist philosophy, reflect an anxiety — and a pressure from local critics and institutions — to stick up for a national aesthetic.

In 1980, student demonstrations against the military government in the southern city of Gwangju culminated in a massacre that left hundreds dead. The tumultuous, radical period that followed in Korean politics found an artistic expression in minjung (people’s) art, a new strain of figurative painting and printmaking that drew from pop art, punk and pre-war kitsch. Minjung painters like Min Joung-ki, Hong Sung-dam and Kim Bong-jun took their activist art across South Korea and as far as New York, where Artists Space presented an exhibition of minjung painting in 1988 as a riposte to that summer’s Olympics in Seoul.

All this history helps to reframe the globally renowned artists who emerged after the re-establishment of democracy in 1987, like Lee Bul, whose fabled performance Abortion (1989) presented her hanging upside-down nude as she recounted her own (illegal) termination of a pregnancy. Lee has a key place in a critical chapter on feminist art in Korea, which looks past more internationally prominent artists like Kim Sooja or Koo Jeong-a to introduce a swathe of undersung local practitioners, among them photographer Park Young-sook, whose Mad Women Project (1999-2005) railed against traditional expectations of Korean womanhood via portraits of housewives looking sloppy, tired or just plain crazy. (One regrettable absence from this book is photographer Nikki S. Lee, whose drastic makeovers across races and ages appear shocking today but won wide acclaim in the early 2000s.)

Korean Art From 1953 cuts off too early to reckon fully with art of the last decade, and with the incredible people power movement that toppled Park Geun-hye, the country’s first female president, in the winter of 2017. But in the disinfected galleries of Seoul a new soft power is already on display. © 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY