Joan Kee

Some thoughts on the practice of oscillation

The discussion of contemporary Korean art, if such an unwieldy and inherently essentialising term can be used, is at an impasse. The paradigm of the nation and, in particular, the invocation of an implicit ‘Koreanness’ has long been prominent in discussions of Korean art produced from the 1980s to the mid–1990s, especially in discussions regarding the social realist-type Minjung paintings. The credibility of the paradigm of Koreanness, however, has eroded to a considerable degree, given the increasing need to contend with a confusing matrix of global contexts in which sharply defined borders are deceptively concealed within an appealing rhetoric of borderlessness.1 But Koreanness, even on its own, has never been a fully credible paradigm for part of its armature has always been embedded in a fictitious conception of purity. The purity upon which Koreanness is predicated is fictitious for the context to which it is purportedly applicable is wholly disrupted by the juxtaposition of Cold War polarisation denoted by the tragic division of the Korean nation-space and the euphoria of global spectacles like the 2002 World Cup and the 1988 Olympics. Although many a political regime has valorised Koreanness as a means of asserting national sovereignty, the paradigm of Koreanness operates more as a tool for the regime to manipulate. All too often, Koreanness is employed as a convenient and superficially persuasive device used to distinguish the nation-space of Korea from other geopolitical entities. I mention this paradigm of Koreanness to briefly introduce some of the ways in which critical discussion of works classified as contemporary Korean art have tended to take shape. Sometimes the discussion is plainly erroneous, riddled with the usual panoply of stereotypes concerning ‘Asian’ art, or in more benign instances, factually inaccurate, as was the case with New York Times critic Holland Cotter who mistakenly referred to Suh Do-Ho as ‘Ms. Suh Do-Ho’.2 More frequently, the discussion is nationalistic or even antagonistic in tone, rallying the notion of

Contemporaneity as Calculus: The View from Postwar Korea

How do we write a history of contemporary art? Globalisation is frequently identified as a major characteristic of contemporary art since the late 1980s, yet it remains wedded to notions of progress and innovation, as well as to a centre-versus-periphery world-view that presumes the belatedness of those living and working in the alleged margins. This article proposes rates of change as an alternative model through which to rethink contemporaneity, particularly when considering art from the so-called ‘margins’. Of special importance are issues pertaining to questions of medium and genre, both of which might be regarded as indices of the extent to which change took place. By way of a case study, this article focuses on the postwar Korean artworld from 1953 to 1975, a time and place distinguished by the confluence of two distinct, yet symbiotic, rates of change: acceleration and delay.

Connoisseurship and Its Potential in Matters of Copyright

Among the most persistent and difficult problems in the field of copyright law is determining whether copying has actually occurred. This article responds to this challenge by proposing that judges and juries consider practices used in disciplines revolving around the close and methodical viewing of visual objects. Of special interest is connoisseurship, long employed by art historians, curators, and collectors to adjudicate the origins, provenance, and authenticity of art. Mindful of law’s emphasis on the spoken and written word, this article focuses especially on the visual analyses of Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr, two art historians whose foundational status in the discipline of art history stems from the extent to which they attempted to systematically translate the experience of looking into words. The article concludes with a brief test case drawn from the high-profile 2005 dispute between architects Thomas Shine and David Childs over the latter’s alleged infringement of the former’s design.

Guest Editor's Introduction: Twenty Questions

Since the late 1980s there has been a steady rise in the visibility of documentation concerning the body of work referenced as “contemporaryAsian art.” It has taken place on an institutional level, with the construction ofmuseums such as the FukuokaAsianArtMuseum (which opened in 1999) concentrating entirely on modern and contemporary Asian art, and the proliferation of university or foundation-sponsored symposiums devoted to the subject. Examples of the latter include the Japan Foundation’s series of intra-Asian conferences and the “Our Modernities” conference hosted by the National University of Singapore in February 2004. Museums and private galleries in both Asia and Euro-America have likewise staged several exhibitions of contemporary Asian art, albeit with special emphasis on the visual art of mainlandChina and Japan.1 Perhapsmost significant, however, is the quantity ofwritten attention in the formof catalogs, books, andperiodicals.These include JohnClark’sModern Asian Art, GeetaKapur’sWhenWasModernism,

Free Art and a Planned Giveaway

In 1969 the Washington Color School painter Gene Davis, together with sculptor Ed McGowin and critic Douglas Davis, produced Giveaway, an unconventional event involving the free distribution of fifty Gene Davis paintings. This essay argues that Giveaway was a radical avant-garde gesture that questioned concepts traditionally used to indicate artistic and commercial value, including authorship and originality.

Orders of Law in the One Year Performances of Tehching Hsieh

In 1978, Tehching Hsieh began the first of his One Year Performances, in which he subjected himself to conditions of extreme deprivation or banality over the course of a single year. Accompanying each performance were voluntary written pledges to uphold various behavioral restrictions, the language and format of which strongly resembled that commonly used in legally binding contracts. The lengths that Hsieh took to fulfill his obligations recalled the doctrine of good faith, or the legal duty of parties in a contract to deal with each other fairly and honestly. The strong resonance between Hsieh’s performances and the law suggests a model of artistic agency that emphasizes the necessity of holding oneself accountable to higher standards of scrutiny. It also highlights art’s potential as a medium through which to consider what and how the law specifically means.

Lily Cox-Richard: On the Powers of Taking a Stand

What does it mean to take a stand for sculpture now? Such is the question Lily Cox-Richard asks in the appropriately titled series The Stand (Possessing Powers). Here she selects, edits, and then re-creates elements of the works of Hiram Powers (1805–1873), the presumptive “father of American sculpture” who helped establish and define the young countrys genre of Neoclassical sculpture for domestic and international audiences. In many respects, the reference is anachronistic to the point of disbelief, even for an artist of a generation to whom creation often means the promiscuous cutting and pasting of images without regard to their original contexts. The intensive, almost excessive amount of labor undertaken in the making of these sculptures is yet another indication that this is not appropriation as usual. In looking to Powers, Cox-Richard asks about the strange divide between geography and temporality. His works are widely exemplified as “American” sculpture, yet they are distinctly and even aggressively bracketed from any reflection on what it might mean to be American and modern. Yet Cox-Richard also makes clear that strip-mining the past is not her aim; in her case, it is more productive to consider how something so closely associated with a particular time can be recuperated as an active and dynamic referent, capable of proving its relevance to the present by illuminating the concerns that animate it.

Why Chinese Paintings Are So Large

Among the most outstanding characteristics of recent painting in China is its size, an aspect some view as a function of individual volition or of market forces. Yet the question raised by the matter of large size has less to do with the absolute physical dimensions of a work than about the kinds of relationships initiated by these dimensions as well as by the relativisation of size. In short, the question of why Chinese paintings are so large is a question of scale, which, as the works of numerous artists, including Yan Pei-Ming, Zhou Tiehai, and Yun-Fei Ji, demonstrates is further tied to questions of social function and social value. This article is an extended rumination on the significance of scale and its capacity to frame the artwork as itself a function of responses between meaning and materiality.

The Curious Case of Contemporary Ink Painting

Among contemporary arts blind spots, few are as apparent as contemporary ink painting. Despite accounting for a considerable proportion of art making in East and Southeast Asia as duly reflected by a large and enthusiastic collector base, ink painting rarely figures in chronicles of contemporary art. Critics periodically expound on what they see as the mediums state of crisis or rebirth, while historians increasingly recognize the mediums contributions to canonical modernist movements such as Abstract Expressionism.

Trouble in New Utopia

Exhibitions of contemporary art in Asia have proliferated in the major visual art centers of Europe, the United States, and Japan in the past ten years. Among the largest of these in terms of quantity of works and artists shown was the 1997 group exhibition “Cities on theMove,” cocurated by theMusee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and independent curator Hou Hanru.1 Its significance lay not so much in its size as in its optimistic conception of “Asia” summarized as New Utopia, a term borrowed from architect Arata Isozaki’s invocation of a New Utopia from his Haishi/Mirage City proposal to construct an artificial island near the southern coast of Hangqin Island and Macao in southern China. In “Cities on the Move,” New Utopia was built on works whose formal components or general physical appearance overly suggested physical movement and speed. The recurrence of such works implied a different and more specific definition of NewUtopia than Isozaki’s original proposal, which was based