1945–1999 Online Platform for Korean Modern and Contemporary Art

An Overview of South Korean Feminist Art (Study Group 1 Presentation)

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. An art historian Kim Hyeonjoo opened the Part II outlining emergence and boundaries of the Korean feminist art, from the 1980s to the contemporary era. * * * Emergence of Women's Art in the 1980s: Issues on Women's Labor and Motherhood Discourse Feminist art in South Korea consists of 40-old years of dynamic history. This history has been intertwined with South Korea's unique political, social, and cultural changes and has gained momentum from domestic and international feminist theory and discourse. Feminist art, however, is still considered a very distinctive and independent field in the South Korean art world. Under the influence of the second wave of the Western women's movement and feminist theory, and the influence of the labor movement, Koreans began to shift their perceptions of women as social agents in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, Women's Studies was established as an independent discipline within universities, and feminist research began to address the pervasive gender discrimination in Korean society in earnest. Around the same time, a number of privately led women's organizations were established, forming pan-women's coalitions to develop organized social movements to address women's issues. Civilian women's organizations fought a united front with the democracy and labor movements against the military regime of Chun Doohwan, arguing that women's liberation would bring about human liberation, and that by transforming the social structures that oppressed women, such as patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism, they would build a society where men and women were both equal. Under such historical circumstances, "From Half to Whole" by the October Gathering, which first declared women's liberation in 1986, heralded the beginning of Korean feminist art. Feminist art was developed in earnest in the late 1980s by a group of female artists who were concerned about their self-identity and the social role of art as social and creative agents. Women who had been exposed to the literature on social participation social structure theory, and women's studies of the 1970s, those who were active in anti-modernist social participatory art groups that raised real-life issues, played an important role in its formation. The October Gathering, which became the beginning of feminist art, was formed by middle-aged women artists Kim Insoon, Kim Djin-suk, and Yun Suknam, who entered the path of feminist art while preparing for the exhibition From Half to Whole. Although Kim Insoon and Yun Suknam had different styles, they played leading roles in feminist art in the 1980s and 1990s. In the exhibition, Kim Insoon's "Good Wife and Wise Mother" and Yun Suknam's "Mother" were important works that gave a glimpse of their feminist consciousness at the time. "Even I Had Ten Hands" is the work that corresponds to "Mother." Kim Insoon recalled painful memories of her parents by drawing scenes of humiliating and subordinate relationships between a wife and a husband who used to beat his wife. She described the work as a "challenge to gender inequality." Kim, who used autobiographical experiences as the subject of her art, harshly criticized the patriarchal social convention that considers a wife obeying her husband as a natural principle and virtue, while also challenging the tradition of art that has portrayed homes and families as an ideal community based on love. Yun Suknam's "Even I Had Ten Hands" is reminiscent of the Korean proverb that even having ten hands is not enough. It is a simple depiction of the hard life the artist's mother had to experience. This work is a tribute from a daughter to the artist's mother who endured all kinds of harsh labor such as factory work, field work, and peddling in a modernized family to raise her children while never losing her dignity. This work is an early example of breaking the customary tradition of maternal reproduction which had been framed as a representation of ideal motherhood or self-sacrifice in the grand discourse. Instead, Yun proposes a specific and practical maternal concept based on her autobiographical experience. In the late 1980s, feminist art activities were mainly pursued by the Women's Art Research Society which had been formerly known as the Women's Art Division prior to 1988. This was a women's group within the National Art Association a coalition of artists associated with Minjung Art. It was formed by artists of the October Gathering and female artists interested in Minjung Art. Some later formed a painting group, Dungji, to avoid government censorship and produce large-scale banner paintings in support of the women's movement. The individual and collaborative works of emale artists in this group were exhibited through the annual exhibition "Women and Reality" over eight times. The artists of the Women's Art Research Association did not indiscriminately accept Western feminist theories or art practices. They called their artistic activities, which address women's issues in Korea "Yeoseong Misul (women's art)." In this regard, "Yeoseong Misul" was a historical term for South Korean feminist art that reflected the local Korean context in the 1980s. It referred to art that raised women's issues by embodying the contents of the oppressed women's lives and daily experiences. "Yeoseong Misul" is political in nature because it challenges the long tradition and norms of Korean art, which has treated women as aesthetic objects. It is oriented toward a realist style because it emphasizes artistic practice for social change. In that sense, "Yeoseong Misul" in the 1980s can be seen as paving the way for activist art or activist feminist art. Kim Insoon, who served as a representative of Minjung Art organizations including the Women's Art Research Association and Dungji, was an important figure in promoting "Yeoseong Misul" in the 1980s. Kim thought that women's liberation could not be achieved without the liberation of the working class. Thus, she linked women's issues to class issues and visited various labor sites of female workers who suffered from discrimination and realistically depicted their harsh reality. Among Kim's works depicting female labor sites, "Twenty-Two Daughters Died in Green Hill Fire" was based on a real incident in which 22 young female workers sleeping in their dormitories were burned to death due to a fire at a sewing factory in Anyang. Also, Kim produced several large-size banner paintings with the Dungji painting group members for various women's organizations' events. The "Pico Series" or "Mother Laborer" was a large-size banner painting consisting of ten pieces produced by Dungji. It is one of a few works that remain in relatively good condition. The painting depicts the 200-day struggle and settlement of married female workers who did not receive salaries from an American company that went out of business under false pretenses. It began with the poem "Mother Laborer" by Hong Seongae the financial secretary of the Korean union of Pico Products Inc. These banner paintings were circulated nationwide at the request of women's organizations, local universities, and farmers' organizations for their events. In the process, many of them became lost due to poor management. In South Korean feminist art in the 1980s, the main topics included women's work, fixed gender roles, the oppressive reality of women, the discovery of self-consciousness, and sisterhood. Unlike the West, South Korean feminist art developed a realistic expressive method in paintings and discovered topics and materials highlighting strong local elements. However, it shared something with Western feminism in that it challenged existing artistic norms by questioning the attitude of artistic creation and the social role of art, and opened a new chapter of activist art. With the replacement of the government and the hosting of the Seoul Olympics in 1988, South Korean society gradually began to enter the global era. Partial achievement of democratization, the influx of postmodern cultural theories, and the consumption culture that penetrated daily life, resulted in multi-faceted changes in public consciousness and art creation in Korea. As Minjung Art was absorbed into the institutional system in 1994, its cohesion as a collective movement for social transformation collapsed. As a result, the Women's Art Research Association also disbanded in response to the changing times. Development of Feminist Art in the 1990s: The Women's Culture and Arts Movement and the New Generation Feminist Artists Meanwhile, the women's culture and arts movement had been actively developing since the early 1990s and the era of popular feminism opened for the first time in South Korea. Feminist cultural organizations such as Alternative Culture and Feminist Artist Network and the first feminist magazine IF led feminist culture and art at the time as an alternative to patriarchal culture. Yun Suknam, a member of the Womens Art Research Association, served as the president of the Feminist Artist Network and the publisher and editor of IF for ten years since 1997. She was active at the forefront of the women's culture and arts movement. She was able to deepen her feminist consciousness and gain momentum to continue her creative work through continuous communication, learning, and building solidarity with feminist artists and intellectuals in various fields. Park Youngsook and Jung Jungyeob also actively participated in the feminist network and firmly established their identity as feminist artists. Meanwhile, a new generation of artists emerged, influenced by postmodern culture, with a new sensitivity, distanced from ideology and familiar with popular culture and new media. In the 1990s, the shift from traditional media such as painting and sculpture to new media such as installation, performance, video, and photography was rapid. Lee Bul drew attention as an artist of the new generation and spearheaded feminist art that responded to contemporary media. In the 1990s, South Korean feminist art focused on gender discrimination, the discovery of women's history, and gender identity in everyday lives along with individual narratives. Since then, women's bodies and sexuality have become important issues in feminist art. Yun Suknam had to give up her dream of being an artist because of poverty. She finally became a full-time artist at 39. She has created many representative works by expanding her themes from experiential motherhood in her "Mother" series to her later self-narrative as a middle-class housewife who lived a psychologically unstable life in material abundance in her "Pink Room" series, and to the discovery of historic Korean women figures such as Lee Maechang, Heo Nanseolheon, Rha Hyeseok, and Choi Seunghui. In 2008, she surprised the public by holding a solo exhibition of a large-scale wooden installation featuring 1,025 abandoned dogs. Through this series, Yun deplored the loss of humanity in capitalist society and urged an awakening of ecological life and ethical practices that coexist with other creatures. Since 2010, she has been presenting the "Room" series introducing paper-cutting works inspired by the Korean shamanistic ritual Gut. Since 2016, Yun has been working in color painting, and without being bound by the concepts or methodological framework of Eastern painting, she has been pioneering a new field of female portraiture which has been historically marginalized by freely using traditional materials such as hanji Korean paper, ink, and color paints. The series "Portraits of My Friends" depicts her friends who had fostered Korea's feminist culture. It shows that emotional and intellectual exchanges and friendships are not just exclusive to men, but also exist in women's social networks. In her recent series "A Portrait of a Woman Independence Activist," she rediscovers Korean female figures erased from the official history and sheds light on their achievements and challenges to show what the nation is to such women who have historically been considered as second-class citizens. On my right is one set of portraits. With two face portraits and one full-length portrait, three paintings are one set. She has completed about 70 works so far. Since the 1990s, Park Youngsook and Jung Jungyeob have occupied important positions in the developmental process of South Korean feminist art. Park's "Mad Women Projects" is a series of photographs, consisting of nine projects, that illustrated the reality of women who cannot survive without losing their identity in a patriarchal society and going insane due to humiliation. It is a work in which each person among her feminist friends in South Korea and Japan acts out her own image as a "crazy woman." Jung Jungyeob believed that women's housework is an ethical practice that saves ecosystems and lives. She found the subversive power to save lives in small legumes such as red beans and green beans. Small legumes, filled with vitality, that spill out from every corner of the house expand into nature, the universe, and candlelight revolutions, evoking an effect as a driving force for social change. Lee Bul pioneered a new genre called feminist performance through her unconventional performances from 1987 to 1996. In her early performances, she subverted conventional meanings by transforming the female body, charged with sociocultural connotations into a platform for political speech. In 1989, she did a performance called "Abortion." In her 1990 performance called "Sorry for Suffering: You Think I'm a Puppy on a Picnic?" she walked from Gimpo Airport to Narita Airport and downtown Tokyo for 12 days in a grotesque costume. She problematized the social suffering of a woman who constantly receives gazes toward her incomplete and monstrous body located within ambiguous boundaries between humans and non-humans, nature and artificiality. In her "Cyborg" and "Monster" series, Lee Bul created a different idea of monstrous form, namely a mixture of human bodies, animals, plants, and machines, showing how technology has become more involved in notions of form in the post-human era. Hers was, and is, an artistic strategy of subverting the center from the margin, by leaving traces of the othered woman's body, and based on the notion of the bizarre and abnormal body that deviates from the normative body. Her 12-meter-high large balloon work featured a combination of images of mothers, shamans, monsters, and Asian women. It aimed to challenge the stereotypes of passive" Asian women perpetuated by Orientalist perspectives. Diversification of Feminist Art in the 2000s: Deconstruction of Gender Norms Feminist art in the 2000s is led by a number of female artists who were baptized into the women's cultural art movement of the 1990s and have grown up in a global art environment of alternative spaces and residency programs first established in the late 1990s. They were armed with feminist theory and a consciousness that intersected with multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and queer theory, in addition to digital technology skills. They were familiar with "nomad thought" in their everyday lives where border-crossing became a norm. They are currently the most active generation in the global art scene. Their works involve various methods such as archiving and collaboration based on alternative artistic imagination. Deconstructing existing power structures and gender norms, revealing differences between women in different conditions, and challenging the definition of "women," constitute the main agendas of feminist art raised by this generation. siren eun young jung, an important artist of this generation, embodies gender performativity through various visual devices in her decade-long work, "Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project." Using a variety of aesthetic forms, including archival materials of actresses who took on the male roles in Yeoseong Gukgeuk, footage of the preparation process and actual performances and interviews with the performers and their current lives, her work revives specific and concrete women's lives and ultimately problematizes the definition of who a woman is. Feminism Reboot since 2015 Since 2015, South Korean feminist art has shared in the global fourth wave of feminism triggered by the #MeToo movement worldwide. Having witnessed the spread of misogynistic sentiment in 2015, the Gangnam Station misogynistic murders in 2016, and sexual assault cases in the art world, the social media-based "netfemi" generation is quick to respond to issues faced by young women, including sexual assault, dating violence, and abortion. In this context, it is encouraging that many visual arts collectives advocating feminism are newly organized by South Korean women artists in their 20s and 30s. They are becoming a new driving force for the expansion of feminist art. However, as the stances of Millenial and Gen Z artists who advocate feminism are extremely diversified, and communication with fandom supporters is becoming common through social media, it is difficult to grasp the authenticity or direction of each activity, and the lack of communication between generations seems to be a serious problem. Above all, I hope that many new women artists pay attention to the concerns about the lack of awareness of previous South Korean feminism and feminist art, the excessive partiality, and a tendency to instrumentalize feminism within their careers. I truly hope this young generation will open up a new dimension of feminist art in South Korea and beyond. In conclusion, from the 1980s to the 2000s, South Korean feminist art had been moving away from the homogeneous definition of women as a social category and rather taking the direction of revealing, investigating, and researching specific narratives of women's lives under certain conditions. Korean feminist art consists of the diverse and complex utterances of many women artists who challenged the existing paradigm of art and opened up the horizon of consciousness by confronting women's narratives and realities that were thought to be incapable of being art. And that history is still ongoing. This concludes my presentation. I'd like to use this opportunity to share an obituary. While doing the "Features" research, I posted two essays in the artist studies section. One of them was looking at the diaspora through Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Yong Soon Min. But it was announced on social media that Yong Soon Min passed away a few days ago. Since all of you here are in the art world, I hope you can share this obituary. She wasn't that old. She was born in 1953, so it's very sad. A generation of artists is coming to an end, and the younger generation has to be the next voice.