![]() ![]() Lee Bul’s sculptures and installations questioned male authority and the marginalisation of women. Park Young-sook's Imprisoned Body Wandering Spirit #1 (2002)Īrtists remaining in Korea and tackling female topics with experimental media like photography, installation and performance also gained prominence. Many émigré female artists such as Kim Soungui and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-82), who developed experimental practices abroad, finally became widely known. It provided Korea’s public with an introduction to female artists in Korean art history and the contemporary art scene. A major survey exhibition at Seoul Arts Center, Patjis on Parade-a reference to the archetypal “bad girl” of Korean mythology-was organised in 1999 by a group of women curators and art historians. It was not until the 1990s that women artists become more commonplace in the Korean art scene. “Experimental female artists were treated as marginal or mad women.” However, they resisted established notions through avant-garde experimental art and emerged as a new generation.” Jung’s work “revealed the subjective desires of women, Shim Seonhee showcased the pop culture and trends of the time”.īy the 1970s the experimental movement was “suppressed by the regime as disturbing and decadent, denounced as sensationalistic, and its activities and stature were long denigrated” in mainstream Korean art history, says Kang. “At the time, the patriarchal system forced women into the position of helpers in society and maintained the status quo in the family. Guggenheim Museum in New York (until 7 January 2024), then the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (11 February-)Īccording to Soojung Kang, a senior curator at MMCA and the co-organiser of Only the Young, artists like Jung were among the first Korean women to attend university. Many of these experimental artists featured in a recent exhibition at Seoul’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s, which is now showing at the Solomon R. In the case of Choi, she embraced Abstract Expressionism while working between the US and Korea, becoming an educator before dying at the age of 45. Kim likewise emigrated to France to study and work with more freedom. While Modernist female artists such as the painter Rhee Seundja (1918-2009) were able to establish themselves within the Korean art scene, paths were harder for experimental figures such as Jung (1942-2017), Kim Soungui (born 1946) and Choi Wookkyung (1940-85).Īfter Jung married, she was not able to maintain her provocative approach, and moved to Singapore where she juggled raising a family with work, shifting eventually from performance to painting. “It was not easy for women artists in Korean society of the 1970s,” says Eunju Choi, the director of the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA). The challenges faced by Jung and her contemporaries resonate for a young generation navigating #MeToo, the Korean opt-out feminist movement 4B, pressures on women to have children in a country with one of the world’s lowest birthrates, and a neo-conservative government with links to the Korean incel movement Ilbe. ![]() The movement was short-lived but paved the way for an explosion of female conceptual artists in the 1990s and set the stage for the rich diversity of Korean art today. Female artists like Jung defied the disdain of the patriarchal art establishment as much as scrutiny by the military police under the dictatorship of President Park Chung Hee. Performance art happenings like Jung’s-which also included Murder at the Han Riverside (1968), in which she, Kang and Chung were partially buried and drenched before burning slogans on banners-were part of a small but powerful emergence of experimental and feminist Korean art. Intended as a protest against the prohibition on nudity by the conservative art establishment of the time, Transparent Balloons and Nude triggered a broader social outcry. With collaborators Kang Kukjin and Chung Chanseung, she invited the audience to attach balloons to her body, then pop them. Non-conformity risked imprisonment or worse in the South Korea of 1968, when artist Jung Kangja took to the stage of music café C’est Si Bon clad only in her underwear. ![]()
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