CURATOR LIM DAE-GEUN wasn't happy with the original subtitle for the exhibition 100 Years of Korean Art (Part 2), at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. He didn't think that 'Identity: the Unfulfilled Project' quite told the whole story.
'I changed it to 'Tradition, Human, Art, Reality' because I wanted to make viewers aware of the continuity and multiplexity of the contemporary period from the end of the Korean war to the present day,' he says.
Running until September 10, the follow-up to last year's 100 Years of Korean Art (Part 1) aims to comprehensively examine the development of contemporary South Korean art during the past five decades. Does it possess cultural remnants of Japanese colonialism that dilute the country's tradition and identity? Is it merely an imitation of western art?
The exhibition sets out to prove that South Korean modern and contemporary art is anything but dreary, having broken out of a context that had been limited to East Asia and become connected to international trends.
Since 1988, the year of the Seoul Olympics, the South Korean government has adopted more open policies and deregulated foreign travel. Kim Young-sam, who became president in 1993, further pursued this and declared an age of segyehwa, or globalisation. South Korean society started to manifest post-industrialist symptoms and became increasingly consumption-oriented.
Feminist art, video art and photography attracted great attention, while installation art became fashionable. South Korean artists were no longer suffering from a sense of inferiority from being peripheral to the international art scene.