The 1960s and 1970s were tumultuous in South Korea, with a military dictatorship fueling rapid economic growth and suppressing civil rights. In the midst of this turmoil, young artists pursued radical projects.
They rejected the expressive abstract painting in vogue in the 1950s, embracing performance, video and photography, favoring unusual materials (neon, barbed wire, cigarettes). They had been born during the Japanese occupation and lived through the Korean War; some looked to the past and took inspiration from Korean folk forms. They formed collectives, held shows, translated art texts from abroad (travel was limited), and performed along rivers and in theatres. Kim Kulim captured fragments of everyday life in fast-moving Seoul in his frantic film “The Meaning of 1/24 Second” (1969). Their genre-defying efforts are categorized as ‘silheom misul’, experimental art.
“It was a period of, I would say, real transformation,” Kyung An, an associate curator at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, said in an interview, and “artists were trying to carve out their place within that world.” Her exhibition, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s-1970s,” which opens Friday at the Guggenheim, showcases the powerful responses more than 40 people have given during a difficult time. (The show, co-hosted with Kang Soojung, senior curator at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, or MMCA, travels Feb. 11 to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.)
“There was actually no market,” says An, “and that is why many works did not survive.” Some were later remade. Others only survive in photos or as a memory. A black and white image shows the trailblazing Jung Kangja dressed in underwear in a music hall in 1968 as people attached transparent balloons to her body and then popped them. Jung, who passed away in 2017, was one of the few women to feature prominently in the scene. “I think the still conservative values and expectations placed on the role of women in society must have made it difficult for many,” says An.
As the 1970s progressed, the atmosphere became increasingly tense. Martial law was imposed. The length of the skirts was regulated. Artists were watched, detained and beaten. They kept going. Some continue to create art to this day and were able to attend when “Only the Young” was shown at the MMCA earlier this year. This summer I met with four of the performers, with interpreters, to discuss their lives and the show.
Lee Kun Yong
When the government restricted avant-garde art in the mid-1970s, Lee Kun-Yong received a notice saying that the National Museum of Modern Art (now the MMCA) could no longer display his performance-based art. Enraged, he set it on fire in front of his fellow artists. “It was a mistake to burn that letter,” Lee said, sitting in his studio in a warehouse complex just outside of Seoul. Today it would be an important artifact.
The day before our meeting, Lee had been at the MMCA to perform one of his signature pieces, the beautiful titled “Snail’s Gallop,” which he first performed in 1979. Crouching on his haunches, he ran white chalk back and forth over rubber as he sauntered forward, his bare feet erasing parts of his stains. It was an amazing display of skill for anyone, but especially for an 81-year-old.
Born in North Korea, Lee came to Seoul in 1945 with his family. As a teenager after the Korean War, he attended lectures in foreign cultural centers. Ludwig Wittgenstein entranced him and he painted a portrait of the philosopher and hung it in his room. (“Jesus looks a little different,” he recalls his mother saying.) In his late twenties, Lee co-founded a group called Space and Time (ST). In a memorable work, from 1971, he showed an entire tree, uprooted during a highway construction program, in a museum. During a performance at an arts festival in Daegu city in 1979, he placed his personal belongings and clothing on the floor and lay face down—”a self-imposed comic quest,” as art historian Joan Kee put it.
Lee has spent his life mapping the possibilities and limitations of the body, often drawing and painting through simple actions. He stands with his back or side against a cloth or piece of wood, reaches as far as he can with a brush and makes markings. Cloths with traces of his movements fill his studio. They are lively and alive, yet he is humble about his practice. “My art is not special,” he said. “It’s not unique. It is about communicating with things that are close to us. So if the public takes a deep look at it, we can find things that relate to both of us.”
Sung Neung Kyung
In the mid-1970s, “My slogan to myself – my motto, if you will – was to be fair and honest in the light of history,” said Sung Neung Kyung at Seoul’s Lehmann Maupin Gallery. After completing his compulsory military service in 1973, he joined the ST group and the following year performed one of the defining works of art of the era.
Every day for a week, Sung hung the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper on the wall of a gallery, removed the articles with a razor blade and placed them in a box. He left only the advertisements. “The question I wanted to ask was: what is the underlying hidden meaning found in these clippings, in these newspapers, which are subject to so much editorial pressure and editorial censorship?” he said. Months later, in a bizarre case of life imitating art, that was President Park Chung Hee The government pressured companies to remove their ads from that newspaper, which printed blank spaces in protest, with public support.
Sung, 79, exudes mischief and equanimity, but he admitted he was scared while creating this piece. Entering the venue with his razor blade, he recalled, “I looked around to see if there were any strange men in sunglasses around.” One day a journalist turned up and asked for an interview, which he declined, hoping to avoid notoriety.
That was successful. Sung has often operated under the radar, always experimenting, seeking power and convention. “Art is easy and life is hard,” he once wrote. His various endeavors include annotating news photos to emphasize how they shape the truth, and performing while dressed in outrageous outfits, such as a bathing suit and shower cap. “I’ve always stayed a bit off the main track,” he said. No longer.
Seung Taek Lee
Seductive artwork and objects fill every inch of Seung-taek Lee’s home near Hongik University in Seoul, where he studied in the 1950s. There are hourglass-shaped stones tied with rope, tree branches, mischievous self-portraits and clumps of hair. “There was a wig factory near this area,” Lee said, “and one day they threw all this hair away.”
Lee, 91, has spent his life making art from unexpected and discarded materials. When he started, he thought, “I have to do something that no one else has done,” he said. “Perhaps I can find a form in our own cultural heritage.” He piled pottery used for fermentation into sculptures and, inspired by Godret stones (weights used in weaving), chiseled slits in stones and wrapped them with rope to give the illusion that the rocks were being compressed. He worked outdoors, letting the wind move through long streams of dust, and in one of his well-known projects set his canvases on fire on the Han River – “seriously illegal behavior,” he said.
These were not lucrative ventures. Growing up in the Communist North, however, Lee had learned to make large-scale sculptures (of Kim Il-sung and Joseph Stalin), and after the Korean War, he took on commissions in the South for very different subjects, including General Douglas. MacArthur. He also made portraits for soldiers, and in 1967 found himself at a military base near the DMZ, where he saw a huge mass of human hair cut from new recruits. With the permission of the authorities, he rearranged that hair into an astonishing installation, placing it in pockets or rows: an abstract, anonymous group portrait.
Lee himself had been a soldier with the South and had fled the North after the fighting started. During our interview, he showed where he had been shot in the knee at the age of twenty. “I hope I have opened new windows for generations to come — not just my own,” he said. His goal was to show “that art can be something completely different.”
Lee Kang So
At the age of 80, Lee Kang-So lives in a sprawling complex in Anseong, about 90 minutes south of Seoul, where he has several studios dedicated to sculptures, installations, and the minimal paintings that made him a giant. But fifty years ago, he was still finding his way while drinking makgeolli (a rice wine) with a friend in a tavern in Daegu, his hometown. It was noon, the room was empty, but as he looked at the burns and scuffs left by cigarettes and pots on the tables, he felt he could hear the people who had been there. He reflected on the transience of life and how he and his friend experienced the same room differently. “It was a really special moment,” he said.
Lee bought the restaurant’s chairs and tables, and when he was offered a show at Seoul’s Myongdong Gallery in 1973, he dragged the furniture into the venue and served makgeolli for six days. His idea was that instead of expressing something, he could give people “a forum to experience something together.” Friends and local residents came along for this fleeting participatory project, which had political significance during martial law when large gatherings were suspect. “After a week, the white-cube room smelled like a bar,” he said, “so they had to do a massive cleaning job.” He called the piece ‘Disappearance – Bar in the Gallery’. Sadly (but appropriately, in a way) a janitor later burned the furniture, mistaking it for junk.
Other elements from everyday life seeped into his art. Walking through a market one day in the mid-1970s, Lee saw “an old lady selling deer bones,” used in traditional medicine, “and then, right behind her, they were slaughtering chickens,” he said. “I thought: can this be art?” He incorporated deer bones into an installation and made a kind of random drawing by placing a chicken next to a floor covered with white chalk, leaving footprints as he strolled around.
It was a turbulent time, but after experimenting with outré media, Lee gradually turned to age-old materials, such as paint and canvas. These images are airy, loose and ghostly, often just a few black calligraphic marks floating over white fields. They suggest ideas or images in transitional states – here and not here, arising the moment they fade away.
Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s and 1970s
September 1-Jan. August 7, 2024 at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; (212) 423-3500; guggenheim.org.