This article was downloaded by: [J P Park]On: 01 August 2013, At: 21:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office:Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third TextPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscriptioninformation:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Koreans are White?J P Park

To cite this article: J P Park (2013) Koreans are White?, Third Text, 27:4, 510-524, DOI:10.1080/09528822.2013.816054

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816054

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”)contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and ourlicensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publicationare the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor &Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for anylosses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantialor systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Koreans are White?Art, Nation and Post-Globalization

J P Park

In 1956 Wladimir W Mitkewich, an American electrical engineer wholived and worked in Korea between 1947 and 1948, published a bookwith an intriguing title: Koreans are White. Based mostly on the linguisticsimilarities between certain Greek and Korean words, along with otherdistinctive qualities and characteristics of Korean people, including phys-ical features, a progressive spirit, athletic skill, musical talent and theirvisual arts, which he described as being as advanced as those of theGreeks and Europeans, he came to a definitive conclusion: ‘Koreans defi-nitely do not belong with the Asiatics. . . Koreans are “White” inwardly.So, let the Europeans and Americans accept Koreans as brothers andsisters, on equal terms.’1 This book, needless to say, contains many mis-guided observations, including the linguistic ‘similarities’ between Greekand Korean that he claims are the scientific, objective evidence leading tohis conclusion. The book lists 8000 Korean words, among which hefound twenty-nine that vaguely match Greek words in both theirmeaning and pronunciation.

While there is little chance that anyone would take his claim seriously,it is nonetheless interesting that Mitkewich even tried to reinterpret,re-define and re-archive longstanding perceptions about Koreans’ identitybased on their at best coincidental similarities to Caucasians. This surreal(and even humorous) argument, even so, suggests an unprecedented per-spective. While scholars tend to focus on the differences between cultures,Mitkewich’s admittedly naive approach instead tried to make meaningout of similarities, well before the idea of globalization was inventedand applied in the discussion of connections between cultures. Since thelate 1980s cultural critics have recognized and been thinking throughthe hybrid and thus indefinite nature of certain advanced Asian countries.Hong Kong and Singapore are two key examples; their societies are oftendefined as ahistorical and aspatial in that they supposedly feature aso-called East–West culture apparently lacking serious conflict betweenthese co-identities.2 Fredric Jameson discovered similar non-Asiaticfeatures in Korea during his visit in 1991. He described Korea as a

Third Text, 2013

Vol. 27, No. 4, 510–524, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2013.816054

# 2013 Third Text

1. Wladimir W Mitkewich,Koreans Are White,Meador, Boston, 1956,p 34

2. Lee Weng Choy, ‘Citingand Re-Siting’, Art Journal,vol 60, no 2, summer 2001,pp 24–26

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

state where the first, second and third worlds coexist and collide, makingit the acme of contradictions in world history.3

This hashing and confusion regarding Korean national identity havematerialized in a more distinguished form – that of post-2000 contem-porary Korean art. Obviously, Korea’s global visibility and inter-national networks now far exceed those of the 1980s and 1990s. Theglobalizing momentum in Korea has never slowed and the innovationsby its artists over the last few decades unequivocally point to mutualfeedback between globalization and the arts. Given the progress anddevelopments in Korean art and society, which have brought Koreanartistic presence and potential neck and neck with global standards,we cannot help but recognize a critical gap between Korean arts ofthe past and present in terms of their attributes and self-identification.As will be explained below, much of contemporary Korean art givesbarely any sign of being stereotypically ‘Asian’. By treating recentKorean art as the epitome of a universalized field in the utopiansense, my goal here is to expose the limitations of our current theoreti-cal apparatus and analytical measures, including multiculturalism andglobalization.

This methodology is of course not free from ambiguity. OfferingKorea as a case study for the deconstruction of current scholarly andcuratorial positions paradoxically reinstates, and thus promotes, theuniqueness of contemporary Korean art as distinct from art of otherregions. As Monica Amor insightfully pointed out more than a decadeago, globalization, which was supposed to problematize the binary oppo-sition of the national and the international, simultaneously re-institutesand perpetuates the nationality and ethnicity of artists and theirworks.4 Many curators, critics and art historians nowadays are well

Frontispiece to Koreans Are White by Wladimir W Mitkewich, 1956

511

3. Baek Nak-chung, ‘In anInterview with FredricJameson: Marxism,Postmodernism and theNationalistic CulturalMovement’, Changjak kwaBipyong, spring 1990, p291. Jameson’s commentechoes that of Trin T Minh-ha, a critic/film-maker,who questioned the fixedand definite nature ofcertain societies by noting,‘There is a Third World inevery First World and viceversa’. See Trin T Minh-ha,Woman, Native, Other,Indiana University Press,Bloomington, 1989, p 98.

4. Monica Amor, ‘WhoseWorld? A Note on theParadoxes of GlobalAesthetics’, Art Journal, vol57, no 4, winter 1998, p 30

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

aware of this challenge; yet they remain trapped in a paradox that propelsthem ideologically toward a post-national universalism even as theyembrace holdouts who assert fierce allegiance to particularized notionsof identity and difference.

KOREAN ART BEFORE 2000

Art, even from the recent past, is often categorized or defined by themonolithic patterns and characteristics assigned to a particularperiod, or attitudes shared by artists of a certain cohort. Post-1950sKorean art has also suffered this type of framing by critics and arthistorians. During the late 1950s and 1960s, Informel art stood onthe front lines of progressive contemporary art. It manifested astrong affinity with American Abstract Expressionism and ActionPainting and was challenged by Monochrome Art of the 1970s and1980s, which is still practised by some in Korea’s mainstream artcircles. The extremely formalistic renderings of this movement,despite the denial of many of its participants, suggest links with Amer-ican Color Field Painting or Minimalism. Thus, Korean contemporaryart since the 1960s is often considered an example of self-colonizationand takes much criticism for being derivative of contemporaryEuropean and American Art.5 The irony, however, is that in the1970s there emerged growing consensus around the need to createsomething uniquely Korean, to establish a true Korean identity inart and culture.

This call was answered by the People’s Art Movement (Minjung misulundong) of the 1980s, which began as a participatory (or propagandist)art initiative. Its artists demanded the rectification of social injustice bycalling for political/electoral reform and changes to the unfairdistribution of wealth to benefit farmers and labourers. At the sametime it represented a revolt against Monochrome painting, which wasseen as over-institutionalized and a sort of meaningless decoration bythose within the People’s Art movement. To make art serve the Koreanpeople, participating artists selected motifs and forms from traditionaland folk art forms and infused them with contemporary socio-politicalcontent. The movement also aimed to establish an artistic idiom free ofany American or Western flavour. But Monochrome partisans counter-attacked and accused People’s Art of being merely political propagandawith no artistic merit. Thus the art world of 1980s Korea was severelydivided between politics and aesthetics.6

The 1990s were years of drastic change on the Korean art scene as wellas in society and the culture at large. The defining changes of the eraincluded, first, complete democratization and a fast-growing economy,which gave rise to a solid middle class increasingly interested in culturalleisure. In addition, due to the government’s liberal policy regarding inter-national travel, in the 1990s a large number of Koreans began travellingand studying abroad. Next, the state sponsored many cultural projects.The National Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1986 and theGwangju Biennale, Asia’s first international biennale for contemporaryart, held its inaugural exhibition in 1995. The Korean art world’s engage-ment in the international art scene had become a key and constant

512

5. Young Chul Lee, ‘Culturein the Periphery andIdentity in Korean Art’, inAcross the Pacific:Contemporary Korea andKorean-American Art,exhibition catalogue,Queens Museum of Art,Queens, New York, 1993,p 11

6. Youngna Kim, 20thCentury Korean Art,Laurence King, London,2005, pp 181–195

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

feature. The Whitney Biennial was held in Seoul in 1993, quicklyfollowed by the opening of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennalein 1995. Additionally, a number of Korean artists began to be featuredand celebrated at important international art functions in Kassel, SaoPaulo, Moscow and Istanbul. Artists in Korea were allowed instant andunfiltered access to the international art scene, and this marked the endof a long chapter in Korean art history dominated by a series of long-lasting monolithic artistic trends. As one critic observed, during the1990s ‘collective movements and trends were replaced by the individualefforts of artists and artist groups’.7 Things began to change fast andwide in the Korean art world.

It is difficult to define Korean artists of the 1990s, yet many of thosespotlighted on the global art scene seemed to follow (or were celebratedas examples of) one particular trend of the time, characterized by therhetoric of identity, diaspora and exile, and a sense of nostalgia. Forexample, early works by Kim Sooja and Kang Ikjoong addressed theirdisplacement and minority status in the United States. Do-ho Suh,now an international star, grew up in Seoul and moved to New Yorkwhen he was thirty years old. He is discussed in a number of writingson contemporary Korean art, and many of his works are inspired byhis personal memories and nostalgia for his early life in Seoul. Headmits that after living in New York for a few years he developed astrong longing for his childhood home and wished he could carry hishome with him like a snail. This idea took form in his work SeoulHome (1999). He prepared a diagram based on the actual dimensionsof his home in Korea and had patches of silk sewn together to createits duplicate. This piece can be rolled up, packed in a suitcase, andunfurled in new locations.8 It reinvents site-specificity as a nomadic prac-tice, which accommodates constant relocation.9 Similarly, the seriesFallen Star (2005) shows a traditional Korean house; in one piece it islifted by a white tornado and in another it crashes into a Western-style building, signifying his moment of arrival in the United States(and echoing the emotional effects of a similar scene in the Wizard ofOz, directed by Victor Fleming, 1939). More recent pieces in theseries show the aftermath of this collision, with signs of repair and thepossible attachment of his Korean home to the Western one. Likewise,Do-ho Suh’s body of works is built around his emigration andnomadic life.

Such themes are important drivers of artistic production shared bymany Asian artists since the 1990s. Many of the minority artists whohave accomplished celebrity status on the global art scene have beenrecognized not entirely for what they create; rather, the high evalu-ations of their creations are often conditioned by their ‘otherness’ or‘otherized’ difference. According to Rasheed Araeen, it is their ‘sup-posed’ otherness that creates interest and excitement.10 The marginalityof these artists in society is often translated as artistic originality forwhich the art world celebrates their ‘glamorized otherness’.11 Perhapsthe curatorial strategy of our times, favouring artworks that spotlightforeign or exotic characteristics, should be held accountable for nurtur-ing such bias.12 John Picton’s sarcastic observation delivers undeniablewisdom and insight about the current art world: He calls the situationthe ‘Jack-in-the-Box Syndrome’, where ‘the artist is thrust in a certain

513

7. Sunjung Kim, ‘Secretbeyond the Door’, in TheKorean Pavilion: the 51stVenice Biennale, exhibitioncatalogue, Korean Cultureand Arts Foundation,Seoul, 2005, p 15

8. Christine Starkman,‘Longing for PlacesElsewhere: Kim Sooja, DoHo Suh, and Bahc Yiso’, inYour Bright Future: 12Contemporary Artists fromKorea, exhibitioncatalogue, LACMA, LosAngeles, 2009, pp 56–60

9. Regarding the issue of site-specificity and nomadicpractice in contemporaryart, see Miwon Kwon, OnePlace After Another: Site-Specific Art and LocationalIdentity, MIT Press,Cambridge, Massachusetts,2002, p 43.

10. Rasheed Araeen, ‘A NewBeginning: BeyondPostcolonial CulturalTheory and IdentityPolitics’, Third Text 50,2000, pp 3–20

11. Russell Ferguson,‘Introduction: InvisibleCenter’, in Ferguson et al,eds, Out There:Marginalization andContemporary Culture,New Museum ofContemporary Art,New York, 1990, p 11; HalFoster, The Return of theReal: The Avant-Garde atthe End of the Century,MIT Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1996,p 179

12. Jean Fisher, ‘SyncreticTurn: Cross-CulturalPractices in the Age ofMulticulturalism’, in ZoyaKocur and Simon Leung,eds, Theory inContemporary Art since1985, Wiley-Blackwell,Malden, Massachusetts,2013, p 235

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

Nikki S Lee, Ohio Project 7, 1999, chromogenic print, 59.7 x 40.0 cm (23 12 x 15 3

4 in), courtesy the artist

514

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

category, ready to jump out and dance only when the art historiansprings the catch’.13

Still, I would be careful about labelling such works products of self-orientalization or self-marginalization, as many critics have contended.For example, overseas Chinese artists were criticized for manufacturing‘Chinatown cultures’ that bear little resemblance to any reality inChina yet satisfy the cultural fetishism and exoticism demanded by theWestern art market.14 However, such signs of difference did play a posi-tive role since they have been a key factor in Asian artists gaining recog-nition in the global art world. Self-orientalism, to a certain degree, is away to exploit a stereotypical group identity, a secret handshake togain acceptance and approval, and a successful application of ‘strategicessentialism’, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called it.15 This strategyserved the cause of mobilization and staging the independence of Asianidentity against Western domination, an approach that indirectlyacknowledges Asia’s newly acquired power in the global arena.16

It is hard to deny that many of the Korean and Korean-Americanartists who enjoyed international recognition during the 1990s andearly 2000s delivered a sense of otherness both in their personal storiesand in their art works. Whether they intended this effect may never beanswered definitively, but the way artists address the issue of identitydemonstrated a range of thinking. Some artists put forward their personaltrauma and subjectivity as the centrepiece of their artistic work, whileothers took a more objective approach, infusing little sentiment intotheir art but instead maintaining a critical distance from their personalexperience and the issue of identity. Nikki S Lee’s snapshots offer aninteresting example of the latter. Her photographic series shows herposing as a member of diverse ethnic, occupational and social groups inthe US, including Latinos, Japanese, African-Americans, exotic dancers,yuppie New Yorkers, lesbians and Southern rednecks. The seriesexposes how differences between people can be subsumed and erasedby taking on the identity of a given group. Thus, her witty theatricalphotos clearly articulate the illusory nature of boundaries and the indefi-nite disposition of culture.17 In this process, the unique feature of herworks is her refusal to wear her national background as a badge of orig-inality or authenticity. Neither does she illuminate her displacement oruse her expat status to alienate (thus celebrate) herself from the rest;instead, her role in these photographs is to be a bridge betweenpeople and objectify her experiences of the racial melting pot inNew York. Thus her identity as a Korean, though perhaps adding adash of nuance to the theme of the series, does not trump its overallquality and meanings.

KEEPING IT REAL!

Yang Haegue’s Storage Piece (2004) is tellingly symptomatic of recentchanges in Korean art because of the way it further neutralizes and depo-liticizes the identity politics of previous generations. Some time in 2003,Yang was scheduled to remove a load of her works from galleries andmuseums, but she had no space to store them. With another showcoming up and lacking new work to display – creating new work

515

13. John Picton, ‘In Vogue, orThe Flavour of the Month:The New Way to WearBlack’, in Olu Oguibe andOkwui Enwezor, eds,Reading theContemporary: African Artfrom Theory to the MarketPlace, Institute ofInternational Visual Arts(INIVA), London; MITPress, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 1999,p 119

14. Wang Nanming, ‘Why WeShould Criticize Xu Bing’s“New EnglishCalligraphy” andAcknowledge Liu Chao’s“Machine Calligraphy”’,Chinese-art.com, vol 4, no2, 2001, pp 1–5. Anotherrecent example is found inGao Shiming, ‘A Be-Coming Future: TheUnweaving and Rebuildingof the Local’, Yishu:Journal of ContemporaryChinese Art, vol 8, no 5,September/October 2009,pp 29–37.

15. See Diana Fuss, ‘InteriorColonies: Frantz Fanonand the Politics ofIdentification’, Diacritics,summer/autumn 1994,pp 20–42.

16. See Arif Dirlik, ‘ChineseHistory and the Questionof Orientalism’, Historyand Theory: Special Issue:Chinese Historiography inComparative Perspective,vol 35, no 4, 1996, pp 96–118 and J P Park, ‘The Cultof Origin: Identity Politicsand Cultural Capital inContemporary ChineseArt’, Yishu: Journal ofContemporary ChineseArt, vol 9, no 4, 2010,pp 63–72.

17. Derek Conrad Murray,‘Hip-Hop vs High Art:Notes on Race asSpectacle’, Art Journal, vol63, no 2, summer 2004,p 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

would have only exacerbated the problem of storage space – she decidedto exhibit the remnants of the former shows as they were, still wrappedand packaged. Thus the gallery space displayed a gigantic pile ofstacked crates, cardboard boxes and objects covered in bubble wrap.This solution directly addressed problems faced by many artists whowork on a global level: a demand for the speedy creation of a variety ofart works, the challenges of transportation, and the lack of storageoften caused by a failure to sell. If Do-ho Suh’s Fallen Star and SeoulHome highlight his personal memory and bill his art as based on the nos-talgia and romance of the struggling outsider, Yang’s work directlytackles the contradictions of the extremely mobile global art scene,without any nod to issues of identity politics. Both Suh and Yang leadnomadic lives as successful artists from Korea. Yet, if Suh is anchoredin Seoul as his artistic, emotional and creative origin, Yang hasde-localized her origins. She focuses on her current situation, not as aKorean artist or a female artist, but simply as an artist. Here we cansee their works in terms of their (un)intentional responses to their ownsituations and globalization: one excavates from his personal past, theother explores beyond personal and regional boundaries.

Unlike Chinese contemporary artists, Japanese artists of Superflat orthe British YBAs, contemporary Korean artists are reputed to work ona more individual basis.18 However, the absence of common character-istics among Korean artists is not unprecedented. For example, in earlyseventeenth-century China, a number of painters initiated quite differentpictorial strategies. Artists such as Chen Hongshou (1598–1652),Hongren (1610–1664), Kuncan (circa 1612–1674), Gong Xian (circa1619–1689), Zhu Da (1626–1705) and Shitao (1642–1707) producedpaintings completely different from any of a previous era. Their personalstyles were also distinctive and differed one from the next; thus, their artshared little in common. However, sinologists managed to group them bydubbing them ‘the individualists’. Evidently membership of a group –even if it offered honour or fame – was not something they would havebeen thrilled about.19 In a similar way, classifying ‘Korean’ contemporaryart, which is supposedly based in the cultural and social particularities ofmodern Korea as well as the collective memory and experience of itsartists, poses real challenges.

One positive aspect of seeing the identity of the artist in his or herwork is (or was) that this exercise provides viewers with certain par-ameters for understanding that work. The art world has adopted theunderlying assumption that artworks from a certain nation somehow rep-resent that nation’s unchangeable essence. In this scenario, nation (or eth-nicity) functions to advance an author’s uniqueness in art and culture;thus it both cancels and encompasses individual differences, whether ofreligion, race, language, class, gender or education, via a kind of collecti-vized agency. This gives rise to the ‘myth of consanguity’.20

In this regard, the exhibition ‘Keeping it Real: Korean Artists in theAge of Multi-Media Representation’, held at the University of ColoradoArt Museum in 2012 (2 February–12 May) was an interesting exper-iment, since it tried to expose the ironic duality in globalized curatorship.First, regarding its thematic narratives, the eight artists in this exhibitionled us into a mysterious, ironic and hybrid reality, a reality that comple-tely challenged our perceptions of optical truth as we are conditioned to

516

18. Lee Jiyoon, ‘KoreanContemporary Art in theEra of Globalization’, inSerenella Ciclitira, ed,Contemporary Korean Art,Skira, Milan, 2010, p 23.Regarding the thematic andrepresentational pattern ofcontemporary Chinese Art,see Park, op cit.

19. Richard Vinograd, ‘PrivateArt and Public Knowledgein Later Chinese Painting’,in Susanne Kuchler andWalter Melion, eds, Imagesof Memory: onRemembering andRepresentation,Smithsonian InstitutionPress, Washington DC,1991, p 192

20. Rey Chow, WritingDiaspora: Tactics ofIntervention inContemporary CulturalStudies, Indiana UniversityPress, Bloomington, 1993,p 24

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

Lee Hyungkoo, Felis Catus Animatus and Mus Animatus, 2006–2007, resin, aluminum, sticks, stainless steel wires, springs,oil paint, artist’s proof 2/2, edition of 3, Felis: 32 x 39 1

2 x 21 14 inches; Mus: 13 1

4 x 7 x 3 inches, courtesy the artist, photo: Jeff

Wells/CU Art Museum, 2012 # Hyungkoo Lee

517

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

think about it. Their works are a series of dialogues that illuminate con-junctures between real life and fantasy; they present objects and humanbehaviours as a creative and conceptual kaleidoscope. The virtualreality in their art – a hyper-reality materialized in scientific, technologi-cal and global idioms – unerringly subverts our intellectual, experientialand intuitive knowledge about art and society.

One of the featured artists, Lee Hyungkoo, installed two skeletons,one in mid-air. Placed in a dark room and dramatically lit from above,the piece had the feel of a display we might encounter in a naturalhistory museum. Its title, Felis Catus Animatus and Mus Animatus(2006–2007), further plays on the academic gravity of a museumsetting. It presents what appears to be the reassembly of a hidden narra-tive behind two creatures: the frozen bones suggest a predator chasing itsprey. Then, as viewers continue to read the label, they are surprised tolearn that the figures are Tom and Jerry! These famous characters fromearly-to-mid-century cartoons, a genre built upon wit, imagination andentertainment, are rendered with the techniques and forms of taxidermyand anatomy, which carry their own distinct palpability and culturalweight. The artist has converted two-dimensional imaginative realityinto the three-dimensional rubric of biological archaeology, in theprocess posing questions about the assumed realism of scientific modesof representation.

Other artists in this show also worked through familiar idioms to pro-blematize the reality/fantasy dichotomy. Using controlled and limitedimages filtered through surveillance cameras, Han Kyungwoo exper-iments with the complex oscillations among reality, illusion, speculationand realization. At first glance, to our naked eyes, his installation appearsto entail simple and ordinary arrangements of different daily-use objects.

Han Kyungwoo, Star Pattern Shirt, 2012, mixed media site specific installation, photo: JeffWells/CU Art Museum, 2012 # Han Kyungwoo

518

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

However, the images of these objects projected via a camera soon betraythe viewer’s original impression. As the viewer steps into the space andwalks among objects placed seemingly at random on a table and acrossthe floor, a projector connected to a small CCTV camera on the floor dis-plays him/her moving in and out of the abstract pattern of the Stars andStripes. It does not take long to realize that various objects scatteredabout the room – coffee tables, cabinet, shirt, books, CD cases andboxes – re-create the familiar image of the American flag. Han’singenious works manipulate human perceptive and cognitive faculties,and eventually transform our visual confusion into conceptual conun-drums. He has created a digital illusion in an analogue way. He givesus a strange setting, where we become Alice in Wonderland in our ownneighbourhood.

Jung Yeondoo’s new series Adolescence, which debuted in this exhibi-tion, was a project initiated in Boulder in 2010 with the help of a group ofgraduate students. Jung, a mountain buff who has spent years hiking andclimbing all over the world, displays photographs that might be his ownnostalgic recollection of days spent in nature. However, the imagesbridging that personal memory to us are, in reality, not simple orrandom portrayals of the past. Each view is carefully staged and re-man-ufactured under the artist’s specific direction, with special attention tobackground setting and lighting – Jung tried to re-create Caravaggio’scandle effect in this series. The outcome contradicts what we expectfrom snapshots of personal memory with their amateurism, immediacyand prosaic quality. Here, what Jung Yeondoo has created is a pro-fessional meta-picture monument that penetrates different times, spacesand media. Such a betrayal of our expectations is also accomplished by

Yeondoo Jung, Adolescence #10, 2011, inkjet on custom paper, 158 x 211 cm, edition 1/5,

courtesy the artist

519

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

another group project. Jaye Rhee, a New York-based artist, just a fewmonths ago created an extremely intriguing piece titled Cherry Blossoms.A sequel to an earlier work of the same title, this new work presentsvideo footage of hundreds of cherry blossoms landing softly on theground, apparently a lovely spring day in a Zen temple somewhere inAsia. But the flowers turn out to be wads of half-chewed bubble gumspat out by dozens of people standing around the target zone. Thepicturesque moment we expect is ruined by the marks of human teethand saliva. The work strips away our nostalgic longing for purity andinnocence.

This exhibition comments on the state of South Korean contemporaryart by offering a unique opportunity to experience new forms being pio-neered by emerging artists working in Seoul, New York and Europe. Thesecond goal of this show, which is organized around academic and cura-torial myths, is more subtle and nuanced. Featured works challenge exist-ing stereotypes about Korean and Asian art and break new ground byintroducing the diversity in Korea, as well as pointing to new experiencesthat are being shared around the world. In our attempts to understanddifferent cultures, the similarities and social common denominatorsEast and West have often been overlooked, and they are often completelydisregarded in artistic discourse. The artists featured in this show belongto a new generation; most were born after the tumultuous social andpolitical phase of modern Korean history – post-Cold War, with noexperience of riot police, yet possessing access to the larger world viathe internet, opportunities to travel abroad and consuming productspromoted locally by global corporations. Not surprisingly, the works ofthese artists address more universal issues in art, history and even per-sonal life; they do so in idiosyncratic (rather than exotic) and original

Jaye Rhee, Cherry Blossoms, 2012, archival inkjet print, 42 12 x 55 in, courtesy the artist

520

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

ways. This exhibit thus enables American viewers to see how much theyshare with these artists in their experiences of global culture.

Put another way, the works in this exhibition display a level of post-modern hybridity. Hybridity as a concept has a unique status in the artworld due to its conceptual complication, which can be applied to mostforeign-born artists. As Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn have insight-fully pointed out, ‘Hybridity, as we have practiced it, is. . . not just avisible or known difference, but a difference that appears to matter – adifference that, in fact, seems to have made a difference’.21 A corollaryto this position holds that when the traces of colonial character becomeinvisible, the hybridity of a work will also disappear. In this regard,recent Korean art shows an ironic twist on hybridity. Like the artists in‘Keeping it Real’, many young Koreans do not manifest any ‘visible’hybridity in their works; they neither address their minority status nordo they reference artistic cliches from other Asian art, such as Buddha,Mao, pandas, temples, porcelains or ink paintings. However, this verylack of hybridity ironically becomes another identity marker, becauseonce it is accepted into the curatorial and academic knowledge systemit can function as their signifier, making them distinct from other contem-porary Korean or Asian artists. Thus, their art becomes an un-AsiaticAsian Art.

This suggests the impossibility of a truly ‘pure’ hybridity, upon whichmuch of our current discussion of art is built. The very categoricalinstability of ‘pure’ and ‘hybrid’ or ‘real’ and ‘fake’ Korean art poses aparadox. The contemporary Korean art in this exhibition is offered as avehicle that can help destabilize our expectations and de-particularizethe notion of ‘Korean’. The title of the show, ‘Keeping It Real’,becomes a metaphor meant to challenge the truthfulness of ‘Korean-ness’ in the contemporary art world, an attribution that can no longerbe completely real.

In the catalogue of the 2007 exhibition ‘Elastic Taboos within theKorean World of Contemporary Art’, the curators of the show, FranckGautherot and Kim Seung-duk of Le Consortium art centre in Dijon,France, expressed similar goals. They claimed that no more nation-based exhibitions should be organized because the individuality ofartists cannot be illuminated under one collectivized viewpoint, and thespecificity of the artists’ circumstances and experiences trumps the ideol-ogy and context conferred by national identity.22 This contention wasquickly countered by the critic Moon Young-min, who noted:

Given the complexities of the compounding spatial and temporal dimen-sions of Korean society, in which the aftermaths of Japanese and Americanimperialism and the ideological divisions are far from resolved, I am com-pelled to ask them how it would be possible to consider the specificities ofKorean artists ‘entirely’ independent of their socio-historical contexts. . . Irespect the curators’ call for individualism freed from the confines ofideology and national borders, which may predictably hinder free will,wit, and spontaneity, but I am inclined to think that conceiving of creativeindividual genius without any strictures of nation-state would be a kind ofutopia. Rather, as an aspiration toward such a utopia, I would arguethat organizing a nation-based exhibition would be worthwhileprovided that it sufficiently acknowledges its own limitations and seeksto circumvent them.23

521

21. Carolyn Dean and DanaLeibsohn, ‘Hybridity andIts Discontents:Considering Visual Culturein Colonial SpanishAmerica’, Colonial LatinAmerican Review 12, no 1,2003, p 19

22. Kim Seung-duk and FranckGautherot, ‘Our OwnPrivate Korea’, in Seung-duk and Gautherot et al,eds, Elastic Taboos: Withinthe Korean World ofContemporary Art,Kunsthalle, Vienna, 2007,pp 46–60

23. Moon Youngmin, ‘ThePolitics of Curating“Contemporary KoreanArt” for Audience Abroad’,reprinted in Melissa Chiuand Benjamin Genocchio,eds, Contemporary Art inAsia: A Critical Reader,MIT Press, Cambridge,Massachusetts, 2011,pp 227–228

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

This sounds like a balanced evaluation by a person with knowledge ofKorea’s history, culture, and society at large.

But this position is a double-edged sword. First, academicians andcritics who specialize in Asian or non-Western societies tend to over-read history and tradition, looking for something to differentiate eachsociety from the rest. Of course, Korea’s colonization by Japan until1945, the Korean War of 1950–1953 followed by North/South division,and its putative subordination to the United States in matters economic,military and political, have all made Korean society distinct. However,defining contemporary Korea solely in terms of its historical traumamakes it out to be a state that can never recover or move ahead on itsown trajectory. The flip side of this scenario is that Korea’s younger gen-erations are less interested in, if not entirely indifferent to, such historicalnarrative. Artistic creation and independent practice have become formsof resistance to the homogeneity represented by predecessors and peers.

So the ‘cult of origin’ for artists, and also for critics and even art his-torians, plays a role in camouflaging territorialization under the globali-zation rubric. Furthermore, art historians and curators, especially thosewho specialize in non-Western areas, are often considered the best quali-fied if they are from the very regions they study. This does not pose animmediate problem since they are in fact more likely better equipped interms of necessary research languages, networks and personal experience.Indeed, many such scholars who research and publish internationallyhave taken an active role in linking local to global. Still, this does notmean that this arena is free of the potential for a sort of feudal systemin which each curator and researcher establishes his or her authorityover certain regions, thus claiming an exclusive right and ownership ofresearch turf.

Recent developments in the Korean art field should alert us to analternative channel for seeking/discussing artistic geography, whereinartists need not confirm their origin and nationality, but can instead chal-lenge the expectations the art world has developed over the last fewdecades. Thus the geographic location and political contexts of Koreado not entirely ‘dictate’ the social and cultural particularities of Koreaand its artists. Cultural identification in terms of nation boundaries,according to Julia Kristeva, is a powerful repository of cultural knowl-edge that erases the other rationalist logics. This excess of force maybring eventual loss of all the other characteristics, thus leading to whatFrantz Fanon describes as a profound cultural ‘undecidability’.24 WhatI am suggesting is not to de-differentiate art from contemporary Korea,but to look at it with a de-differentiated gaze.

POST-GLOBALIZATION

Jacques Derrida, Stuart Hall and Judith Butler have all agreed that iden-tity is constructed by difference. But we must now also consider the possi-bility that our current paradigms of identification may not be universallyvalid. Many arguments have already been made for de-exoticizing (orproblematizing) the novelty status of Asian art, but the deconstructivemode of analysis has only been partially successful as a critical tool inthe hands of art historians. It has by no means achieved widespread

522

24. Homi K Bhabha, TheLocation of Culture,Routledge, London andNew York, 1994, p 220

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

acceptance. I do not mean to say that this reflects an uninformed field;instead, it is more or less linked to challenges that have clusteredaround the idea of ‘globalization’.

The term ‘globalism’, one of the dominant paradigms in culturalstudies since the late 1980s, has dangled before the art world thepromise (or perhaps the illusion) of a forward-looking, progressivelogic. Yet its gravitational pull on a number of other critical ideas –including diaspora, post-national, local/global, displacement, exile,artistic nomadism and hybridity – has created an accelerating orbit andgenerated a force that engulfs and homogenizes all these componentsinto one mass. Simultaneously, for the last two decades, as we havebeen using the term ‘globalization’, we have also (un)intentionally beensignalling a continued and deeply embedded obsession with the bound-ary, difference and geography. We tend to disregard the possibility thatglobalization can be much more than a global level of ‘standardization’(‘Americanization’ or ‘Westernization’ as others have put it) that destroysor devalues local differences.25 The term ‘global’ is evidently self-referen-tial and self-reproductive in its constant rejuvenation. As such,globalization has become the new imperialism, and artists, critics andart historians, by being silent bystanders, somehow became its supportersand accomplices. We cannot deny that the idea of globalism is one of themost abused terms in contemporary cultural discourse.26 Neither global-ism as ideology nor globalization as phenomenon, quite contrary to theimmediate sense of utopianism they may inspire, have been verysuccessful in creating universal equality or even more equitable powerdistributions. Globalism was supposed to de-centre world centres (theso-called West), but it is not at all evident that it can lead us anywhereclose to that goal.

Still, in terms of Asia’s relationship to the rest of the world, interestingmovement may be found in recent discussions in the field of architecture.The concept of ‘criticality’ in architecture signifies the values of modern-ism, including such elements as autonomy, resistance and innovation.Criticality has been firmly claimed as an invention of the West, an idealthat confirms the ideological superiority of Western architecture.However such a West-centric perspective was recently challenged byinternational star architect and theoretician Rem Koolhaas, whoobserved that modernization in architecture is nowadays more evidentin Asia. The same Asia that has been counted as periphery in terms of cul-tural productivity and creativity, compared with the West, has nowbecome the true origin of artistic inspiration and advancement. Pointingout the fact that most major architectural projects are being undertaken inAsia, and that only there can Western architects realize their designs,Koolhaas proposes that the world now has to admit the economic andcultural importance of Asia as a positive catalyst transforming theWest.27

Our time and society is inundated with terms capped with the prefix‘post’: postcolonial, post-history, postmodern, postfeminist, post-Black,post-identity, post-mo (postmodern-homo), and even post-postmodern-ism. These terms, indicative of changing norms and paradigms in the cul-tural sphere throughout history, reconfirm the historical validity of thevarious labels they precede. However, despite the compelling notion ofprogress implied in the term ‘post’, its overuse can reduce it to something

523

25. Fredric Jameson, ‘Notes onGlobalization as aPhilosophical Issue’, inFredric Jameson andMasao Miyoshi, eds, TheCultures of Globalization,Duke University Press,Durham, 1998, pp 57–59

26. Masao Miyoshi,‘“Globalization”, Culture,and the University’, inMiyoshi and Jameson, opcit, pp 248–261

27. Rem Koolhaas, ‘HarvardProject on the City’, inKoolhaas et al, eds,Mutations, ACTAR,Barcelona, 2000, p 308

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3

merely trendy or customary, or even to a cliche, especially in cultural dis-course.28 Amelia Jones, in her review of the exhibition ‘Freestyle’, held atthe Studio Museum in Harlem in 2001, criticized the show’s theme andgoal of illuminating a ‘post-Black’ identity in art. To her, this curatorialvision was simply a ‘marketing tool rather than a term that stimulatesuseful debate’.29 Whether one agrees with her position or not, her obser-vation aptly points to the confusing nature of identity-based productionand interpretation in contemporary art. In this regard, KobenaMercer’s appreciation of Robert Mapplethorpe’s controversial photo-graphic works also suggests the possibilities of multiple channels of analy-sis. He stated, ‘Photographs [of Black male bodies] can confirm a racistreading as easily as they can produce an antiracist one; the images canelicit a homophobic reading as much as a homoerotic one’.30

Like the terms used in discussions of history, art and literature –classic, medieval, Renaissance, early modern and contemporary – weshould remember that the term ‘global’ was coined to address a phenom-enon and a new era. Of course, our world will stay global in terms of theinterconnection between cultures, and as differences between cultures arebridged and understood, the world’s power structures will be rearrangedand redefined. Perhaps the foreclosure of the terms globalism and globa-lization will arrive before they move much further toward trivializationand cliche. Does this suggest that globalization will also lead to its‘post’ status as in the pairs colonial/postcolonial, structuralism/post-structuralism, and modernism/postmodernism? This would furthersuggest that without the idea of the ‘post-global’, globalism can neverattain its presence in history. Therefore with the idea of the ‘post-global’ my goal is not to add another art historical term to the long listof post-isms; instead, I hope to work out a new way of thinking, speakingand writing about the ‘global’. While the complexity of global artcreation and exchange is ever-increasing, our use of the termsglobalism/globalization has not much changed over the past half-century. Too often we get lost between the idealized dream of globalismand its unrealizable reality, between its rigid definition in theory and looseapplication in practice, and between academic pursuits and curatorialambitions. In this sense, Mitkewich turns out after all to not have beenentirely wrong. At least some Koreans are and will be white in theirart. . . if that means anything at all.

524

28. Amelia Jones, SeeingDifferently: A History andTheory of Identificationand the Visual Arts,Routledge, New York,2012, pp 141–142

29. Amelia Jones, ‘The “Post-Black” Bomb’, TemaCeleste, March/April2002, p 52

30. Kobena Mercer, ‘ReadingRacial Fetishism: ThePhotographs of RobertMapplethorpe’, Welcometo the Jungle: NewPositions in Black CulturalStudies, Routledge,New York, 1994,pp 171–219

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

J P

Park

] at

21:

46 0

1 A

ugus

t 201

3