The Global Village: Experimental Art in South Korea, 1960s and 1970s | Public Lecture by Dr. Kyung An

• Art/Photo
• Free

This lecture considers how the notion of “experiment” emerged and transformed vis-à-vis rapidly changing socio-political and material conditions in Korea during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period of unprecedented modernization and urbanization conditioned by an authoritarian regime, anti-communism, and state-driven nationalism, new form of artistic practice like performance, film, installation and photography proliferated alongside painting and sculpture. These experiments centered on several core artist groups that actively organized publications and public seminars in addition to exhibitions, exploring a diverse range of issues including death and rebirth; the tension between the rural and the urban; the breakdown of traditional socio-cultural hierarchies and subjectivities; and the relationship between the body and space, and the individual and the state.

This presentation also introduces the practices of these seminal South Korean artists who were not only pioneers in their experimental spirit but engaged with the flourishing international contemporary art community in the decades following the Second World War. Famously coined the “global village” by Marshall McLuhan, this was an age of commercial flights, television sets, and man’s walk on the moon, marked by the geopolitics of the Cold War. This talk reimagines the art historical landscape of this important period, studies of which are often dominated by artists working in the U.S., Europe, and to an extent Japan and Latin America. In doing so, it seeks to bring focus to the artists’ individual experiences and responses to both local and international socio-political conditions of the 1960s and the 1970s.