The Emergence of “Image Producers” Who Perceive the Everyday and Interpret Reality: Apgujeong-dong: Utopia / Dystopia (1992) and Sub Document (1992)

Following the preceding discussion on “visual culture,” we now turn to another key term presented in the exhibition title: “everyday life.” Prior to organizing Everyday Life, Memory, and History, curator Kim Jin Song took part in organizing the 1992 exhibition Apgujeong-dong: Utopia / Dystopia (December 12–31, 1992, Galleria Art Museum) as a member of the Hyunsil Publishing group. In a text written in conjunction with the exhibition, Kim stated that Apgujeong-dong was selected as a subject of cultural analysis “in order to recover within art a perspective on the transformed social and cultural conditions of the present.”1 He argued that because “artworks and exhibitions rely on the mythical structure of art, they fail to express the contemporary cultural environment and social conditions, thereby overlooking the concrete reality in which everyday life exists.” As a result, “we are unable to recognize the conditions and environments that shape our lives,” and thus, art too must strive to understand and reflect the realities of everyday life. From this perspective, the longstanding modes of artistic expression are also subject to critique by the Hyunsil Publishing group. They argue for the need to move beyond outdated discourses bound by modern cultural ideologies—ideologies that have prompted the division between high and low culture and caused the rupture between pure art and socially engaged art. Rejecting the conventional perspective on art within the established institutional frameworks, they approached the exhibition planning and publication not as the production of “artworks,” but as the creation of “texts.”2 These “texts” were understood “not as acts of creation, but as acts of production, fabrication, and design”—not unique expressions of individual subjectivity, but cultural products generated within a web of socio-cultural relations. The unprecedented exhibition Apgujeong-dong: Utopia / Dystopia, which took contemporary social issues as its object of analysis, garnered attention not only within the art world but also across broader society. One daily newspaper even described it as “radical,” noting that although seven painters participated, not a single painting was on view. Instead, the exhibition space was filled with photographs, slides, and video works, presenting a strikingly unfamiliar sight in the Korean art scene of the early 1990s.3 One article went so far as to suggest that the exhibition merely displayed everyday images—signs, advertisements, street scenes, and people—that could easily be encountered in Apgujeong-dong.4 In this scene, where conventional expectations and perceptions of “artworks” intersected with an experimental practice that rejected them and treated art instead as “images”—a socio-cultural text—we witness yet another instance of “noise.” The monograph Apgujeong-dong: Utopia / Dystopia, published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title, can be described as a “visual field” where the radical expressive strategies of those seeking to dismantle the “existing language” of art. Disregarding conventional formats of handling text and plates, the book interweaves image-based works and critical essays in a hybrid layout, referring to the participating artists not as “artists” but as “image producers.” Rather than presenting images that convey a singular meaning, the pages were adorned with photomontages that instead disrupt the very coherence of meaning within the image system itself. In this context, Seo Sukjin’s A Question to 100 Young Artists, known as one of the exhibited works, clarifies the timely issues raised by the Hyunsil Publishing group with even greater precision. In this work, which presents the results of a survey asking, “What type of artist do you want to become?” overlaid in red diagrammatic form on a black-and-white photograph of a pile of paint, the term “visual image producer” stands in contrast to conventional notions of the artist as a “solitary genius” or “craftsman.” The expression “image producer” also appears in Kang Hong-goo’s essay “Rules of an Image Producer,” included in the exhibition catalog Bogoseo\Bogoseo-7 Sign. Language. Book. Art, published for the 1994 exhibition Sign. Language. Book. Art at Kumho Museum of Art. In this text, the artist critically describes terms commonly associated with so-called “fine art”—such as “originality” and “aura”—as a kind of “alibi.”5 The fact that artists began referring to themselves as “image producers” reflects a broader shift among younger artists to reframe the role of art as part of the realm of social production and communication. To quote Kim Jin Song once again, this reflects a commitment to “recover within art a perspective on the present.” To “see” the present, then, is to recognize the arbitrariness between signifier and signified—an awareness that seeing is itself an act of reading, situated within the framework of visuality. This signals a shift in perception, one that no longer regards art as an autonomous and self-contained system of meaning. Surely, the will to “see” reality in the 1990s was not something exclusive to a particular art group that led critical artistic practices—it was not confined to them alone. Formed with the goal of “exploring new artistic forms in response to a new era,” SUB CLUB is considered one of the representative groups of so-called “New Generation Art” in the 1990s.6 The group organized four exhibitions, each with a different lineup of members, and published a mook (magazine-book hybrid) in place of a traditional exhibition catalog for each show. The final exhibition of the four, Sub Document (Total Museum of Contemporary Art, May 22–31, 1992), was accompanied by the publication of a mook titled Sub Document, which was introduced as follows.7 This book was compiled with the intention of documenting the perspectives and sensibilities formed within them that artists develop in response to their living environments and times—by collecting and presenting various scenes that exist in the everyday surroundings of our lives, even before the point of creating a work of art. As the brief statement on the first page suggests, this mook does not showcase artworks from the exhibition or provide related documentation; instead, it presents images captured by the artists in their everyday lives. Included are snapshots of posters on the street, homeless individuals, a dead dog, the red-light district in Cheongnyangni-dong in Seoul, and the bombing range in Maehyang-ri—alongside ultrasound images, illustrated pages from monthly magazines, and TV screen captures. The titles of these images—often including the exact date and sometimes even the time, when the scene was encountered—highlight the artists’ focus on the immediate and intuitive act of “seeing” itself. The stated intention to “document the perspectives on the times” and “ the sensibilities formed within them” reveals a subtle recognition that seeing is not merely a physical act. Produced with an experimental and creative intent to break away from conventional catalog formats, this mook does not offer details about the exhibition itself. However, it is noteworthy in that it captures the distinctive sensibilities of Korean art during this period. Participating in Sub Document at the time, artist Yi Hyeok-Bal contributed photographs of weekly magazine covers—images seen regularly on newsstands, marked by their sensational headlines and provocative visuals. These photographs were published in the mook and also formed part of his installation, in which the collected covers were mounted in canvas-style frames and arranged across walls and floors. Through this work, the invisible boundary—or hierarchy—between mass-market magazines found in everyday life and artworks displayed in gallery settings becomes blurred. Here, the artist assumes the role of an image producer who observes and reflects on the everyday and the present. It is not possible to define the artistic tendencies of a given period based on a few selected exhibition cases. However, drawing connections between different exhibitions can offer the possibility of expanding existing modes of a narration. Apgujeong-dong: Utopia / Dystopia and Sub Document are rarely discussed together within existing narratives of 1990s Korean art. They were often confined to the invisible frames of categories: the former has largely been framed as part of the activities of a younger generation of progressive artists carrying forward the critical legacy of Minjung art, while the latter has typically been cited as a representative case of so-called “New Generation Art,” associated with small, experimental, and avant-garde groups. In contrast, these exhibitions, grounded in a critical will to challenge conventional art, brought everyday life into the realm of artistic practice and posed fundamental questions about the boundary between art and non-art. As such, they can be situated within a shared category, as key moments that disrupted established forms and perceptions of art. Within this category, artists can be redefined as agents of intervention in visual culture—those who, under the name of “art,” engage with the “all the social practices of human visuality.”8