(1) The Curator’s Dilemma

Feminism, curating, and writing history : (1) The Curator’s Dilemma

A speck of dust on a very smooth surface. A crack hidden in an uneven surface. Of the two, which is more difficult to find? Regardless of the answer, the act of writing history requires the painstaking process of discovering the specks of dust and hidden cracks within the established discourses— accounting for the smooth and the uneven surfaces. As a process that always takes place after the fact while at the same time taking place in the present, the act of writing history also primes the particles of dust and cracks within the self. The act of writing (the history of) contemporary Korean feminism likewise takes place in the same context.

The reboot in the term “feminist reboot” refers to this circumstance, a circumstance that cannot be understood in the absence of a continuity with the past but at the same time has entered a completely new phase. That is to say contemporary feminism encompasses different time periods. Likewise, within contemporary artwork there exists a sense of familiarity in the accumulated dirt and layered context of the past eras, which coexists with a sense of novelty. The exposure to and the attempt to understand the two time periods that are evident within the artwork and the social phenomenon naturally brings the curator face to face with the issue of writing history.

In the three-part series that will follow, I intend to maintain a focus on the point of intersection between “curating,” “feminism,” and “writing history.” In the first article, I examine the historic circumstances surrounding the 1990s (to the early 2000s), which are considered to be the beginning of Korean “contemporary” art.¹ To this end, I briefly summarize prior research that attempts to describe feminism within the context of Korean contemporary art history. It is in this context that I define the relationship between visual art and feminism and also examine the curator’s dilemma that emerges in response.