Bahc Yiso
Bahc Yiso (Bahc Mo, 1957-2004) was a conceptual artist who played a crucial role in leading postmodernist discourse in Korean art in the 1990s. After studying Western painting in the College of Fine arts at Hongik University, Bahc enrolled in the Painting Department of the Pratt Institute Graduate School in the U.S. in 1982 and graduated from there in 1985. He used the name “Bahc Mo” in the U.S., and as a theorist, critic, and translator, he introduced contemporaneous art theories to the Korean art community. From 1985 through 1989, he ran Minor Injury, an alternative space in Brooklyn defying the mainstream art world and organized group exhibitions to promote Korean art abroad, including Minjung Art: New Cultural Movement of Korea (1988) and Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art (1993–1994). He returned to South Korea in 1995 and began using the name “Bahc Yiso” since 1998. He also strove to introduce alternative models of art education as an educator. In 2002, he became the winner of the third Hermés Foundation Missulsang, and in 2003 he participated in the 50th Venice Biennale as the representative artist of the Korean Pavilion. In 2004, he died suddenly of a heart attack. His major works include Exotic, Minority, Oriental (1990), UN Tower (1997), and We Are Happy (2004). Bahc received the Arts Council Korea’s Art of the Year Award in 2006. In the same year, an exhibition entitled Divine Comedy: A Retrospective of Bahc Yiso was held. Another exhibition Bahc Yiso: Lines of Flight was held in 2011. Bahc Yiso: Memos and Memories, a large-scale retrospective exhibition held in 2018 at the MMCA brought him to public attention.
Artists who defected to North Korea
Artists who defected to North Korea refer to artists who moved their spaces of artistic activities to north of the armistice line during the period immediately after Korea’s liberation from Japan on August 15, 1945 until the signing of the truce agreement. Prior to the lifting of the bans on artists who were abducted by or defected to North Korea in 1988, they were labeled traitors for “betraying the South Korean system and choosing the North Korean one” or “choosing communism.” Their works were deemed “detrimental to ideas,” so it was forbidden to mention them. However, contrary to the reasons for restrictions imposed by the government, recent studies have revealed that the defection of most artists to North Korea resulted not from ideological choices or alignment with political system of North Korea, but from unavoidable circumstances caused by the war and division of the country. Accordingly, the scope of research on artists who defected to North Korea can vary depending on researchers or research environments. It discusses the conflict and movement between the two spaces of Seoul and Pyongyang or South and North Korea and further includes those that the South Korean government defined as artists who chose the North Korean system. The number of artists who defected to North Korea amounts to roughly sixty to eighty. In recent years, there has been a view that the so-called consecutive lifting, which differentiates and selectively relieves artists who defected to North Korea voluntarily, those abducted to North Korea, those residing in North Korea, and those who returned to North Korea after defection to South Korea, is an act of high-level public security control. This is seen as a non-academic power tyranny and violence against intelligence that insults the particularity of art, leading to voices to dismantle and prospectively reconstruct the existing frame of the lifting of bans on abducted artists and artists who defected to North Korea.