Artists of the silheom misul movement in the 1960s and ‘70s wrestled with an increasingly globalizing, industrializing, and politically censorious Korean art world.
In many social relationships, whether personal or at work, power dynamics can create problematic imbalances. There are many words to describe them unjust, abusive, coercive, exploitative — but in Korean, there's a term that encapsulates them all: "gapjil." Originating from contractual terminology, the term came to be used for abuses of power in the workplace. Its use has expanded to other soci.
In December 1967, three experimental art groups, whose members were mostly graduates of Hongik University, held an exhibition at the Central Information Center gallery near Gwanghwamun in central Seoul.
Together, the concurrent exhibitions Only The Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s and The Shape of Time, Korean Art After 1989 offer a glimpse of the breathtakingly rapid achievement of a people, built on reservoirs of memory and imagination, optimism, extraordinary resilience, but also on tragedy.
The experimental art scene that struck post-war Korea in the 1960s and 1970s like a meteorite is a buried chapter of history that deserves to be revisited - or, for most of the wor.