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Non-conformity risked imprisonment or worse within the South Korea of 1968, when artist Jung Kangja took to the stage of music café C’est Si Bon clad solely in her underwear. With collaborators Kang Kukjin and Chung Chanseung, she invited the viewers to connect balloons to her physique, then pop them. Meant as a protest towards the prohibition on nudity by the conservative artwork institution of the time, Clear Balloons and Nude triggered a broader social outcry.
Efficiency artwork happenings like Jung’s—which additionally included Homicide on the Han Riverside (1968), through which she, Kang and Chung have been partially buried and drenched earlier than burning slogans on banners—have been a part of a small however highly effective emergence of experimental and feminist Korean artwork. Feminine artists like Jung defied the disdain of the patriarchal artwork institution as a lot as scrutiny by the army police underneath the dictatorship of President Park Chung Hee.
Challenges resonate immediately
The motion was short-lived however paved the way in which for an explosion of feminine conceptual artists within the Nineteen Nineties and set the stage for the wealthy variety of Korean artwork immediately. The challenges confronted by Jung and her contemporaries resonate for a younger technology navigating #MeToo, the Korean opt-out feminist motion 4B, pressures on girls to have kids in a rustic with one of many world’s lowest birthrates, and a neo-conservative authorities with hyperlinks to the Korean incel motion Ilbe.
“It was not simple for ladies artists in Korean society of the Nineteen Seventies,” says Eunju Choi, the director of the Seoul Museum of Artwork (SeMA). Whereas Modernist feminine artists such because the painter Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) have been in a position to set up themselves throughout the Korean artwork scene, paths have been tougher for experimental figures resembling Jung (1942-2017), Kim Soungui (born 1946) and Choi Wookkyung (1940-85).
After Jung married, she was not in a position to preserve her provocative method, and moved to Singapore the place she juggled elevating a household with work, shifting ultimately from efficiency to portray. Kim likewise emigrated to France to review and work with extra freedom. Within the case of Choi, she embraced Summary Expressionism whereas working between the US and Korea, turning into an educator earlier than dying on the age of 45.
Many of those experimental artists featured in a latest exhibition at Seoul’s Nationwide Museum of Trendy and Up to date Artwork (MMCA), Solely the Younger: Experimental Artwork in Korea, Sixties-Nineteen Seventies, which is now exhibiting on the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (till 7 January 2024), then the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (11 February-12 Could 2024)
In accordance with Soojung Kang, a senior curator at MMCA and the co-organiser of Solely the Younger, artists like Jung have been among the many first Korean girls to attend college. “On the time, the patriarchal system compelled girls into the place of helpers in society and maintained the established order within the household. Nonetheless, they resisted established notions by avant-garde experimental artwork and emerged as a brand new technology.” Jung’s work “revealed the subjective wishes of ladies, [while her peer] Shim Seonhee showcased the popular culture and tendencies of the time”.
“Marginal or mad”
By the Nineteen Seventies the experimental motion was “suppressed by the regime as disturbing and decadent, denounced as sensationalistic, and its actions and stature have been lengthy denigrated” in mainstream Korean artwork historical past, says Kang. “Experimental feminine artists have been handled as marginal or mad girls.”
It was not till the Nineteen Nineties that girls artists grow to be extra commonplace within the Korean artwork scene. A significant survey exhibition at Seoul Arts Heart, Patjis on Parade—a reference to the archetypal “unhealthy woman” of Korean mythology—was organised in 1999 by a gaggle of ladies curators and artwork historians. It supplied Korea’s public with an introduction to feminine artists in Korean artwork historical past and the up to date artwork scene. Many émigré feminine artists resembling Kim Soungui and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82), who developed experimental practices overseas, lastly grew to become extensively recognized.
Park Younger-sook’s Imprisoned Physique Wandering Spirit #1 (2002)
© the artist and Arario Gallery
Artists remaining in Korea and tackling feminine matters with experimental media like pictures, set up and efficiency additionally gained prominence. Lee Bul’s sculptures and installations questioned male authority and the marginalisation of ladies. Yun Suknam offered experimental installations exploring themes of Korean femininity such because the pressures of motherhood, and photographers together with Park Youngsook documented tales of ladies who rejected conformity to a patriarchal society underneath the title Loopy Ladies.
The feminine artists who emerged within the Nineteen Nineties “established themselves as artists with out distinction between female and male”, says Eunju Choi. “They grew up seeing the truth that older feminine artists have been marginalised within the male-dominated Korean artwork scene, and so they realised that inventive achievement required pursuit as a singular purpose.”
In 2019 the MMCA held a solo exhibition of Kim Soungui’s work,Lazy Clouds, which toured to Germany’s ZKM Heart for Artwork and Media in Karlsruhe. It was the MMCA’s first main retrospective exhibition of an experimental feminine artist. As lately as a number of years in the past, it was uncommon to seek out such a showcase of a Korean feminine artist in Korean museums, however there’s a rising transfer to find and present lesser-known artists: feminine artists who have been beforehand written out of Korean artwork historical past are lastly beginning to get their due.
Ladies nonetheless undervalued
“The MMCA exhibition helped to highlight Korean experimental artwork within the Nineteen Seventies, however there’s nonetheless inadequate give attention to feminine artists. It’s excessive time to find and exhibit girls artists extra,” says Sojung Kang, the director of Arario Gallery, which represents Jung Kangja and Kim Soungui. “The principle collectors of those experimental girls artists have lengthy been Korea’s public museums, however in recent times the scope of collectors has expanded to incorporate non-public museums and people. The present value is about $50,000 to $100,000, which is far decrease than that of equal male artists. There’s plenty of room for his or her costs to go up,” Kang says, as has been the case for undervalued girls artists within the West.
At SeMA, says its director Choi, “the curatorial group has a standard dedication to find, exhibit and acquire main feminine artists in Korea”. She cites a preferred 2022 solo exhibition of sculptor Kim Yunshin, who “moved to Argentina within the Nineteen Eighties and by no means married, specializing in her artwork”, however was beforehand pretty unknown in her homeland. “I feel Korean girls have a singular energy and grit. And this energy and grit will also be present in Korean girls artists.”
Kim Soungui recollects how Artwork Press ran an extended article on her 1973 sea-based set up Scenario Plastique III, in Bordeaux, France. “After that, some essential Korean male artists invited me to a dinner and through the dinner, certainly one of them informed me, ‘As a girl, you would not have to do this sort of experimental work. Anyway, in a number of years, you’ll not proceed your work’”, implying she would abandon it for domesticity. “Fifty years have handed now and I’m nonetheless doing my work.”
• Choi Wookkyung: A Stranger to Strangers, Kukje Gallery, Busan, till 22 October
• Jung Kangja: Expensive Dream, Fantasy and Problem, Arario Museum in SPACE, Seoul, till 10 September
• Kim Soungui, Bihar Museum Biennale, Patna, India, till 31 December
• Rhee Seundja’s work is at Gallery Hyundai’s stand (M9), Frieze Seoul Masters
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