Sunglim Kim is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Art History and Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages (ASCL) at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on artistic and cultural exchanges between East and West, modern Korean art, historical and contemporary Korean women artists, and the intersection of art and commercial culture in Asia. She has authored several journal articles and books. She recently curated two U.S. traveling exhibitions, The Power and Pleasure of Possessions in Korean Painted Screens (2016–2017) and Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined (2022–2023) and edited the accompanying catalogues. Currently, she is working on a monograph titled Korean Art “Herstory” and an edited volume, Seundja Rhee: Aesthetic Journey from Earth to Cosmos.

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In 1882, the “Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation” was signed between representatives of the Joseon Dynasty and the United States in Jemulpo, Korea. This marked the first treaty of protection and commerce between Korea and a Western nation, leading Korea to open its long-closed doors to the United States. As a result, American diplomats, military officers, missionaries, businessmen, merchants, artists, explorers, and travelers began arriving in Korea. They documented their experiences through photographs and written observations and collected Korean arts and crafts. This presentation explores a group of early American collectors who either visited Korea or interacted with Korean visitors to the United States from the late nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century. By examining their travel journals, letters, books, and photographs, we revisit Korea’s past and gain insight into the historical context and how the country was perceived by Westerners. Additionally, we explore the artifacts these individuals acquired, either through purchases or as gifts from Korean royalty and private citizens. The presentation also highlights how institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston acquired and displayed these Korean artifacts during the early twentieth century, shaping America’s early image of Korea.

Vicki Sung-yeon Kwon (PhD) is Associate Curator of Korean Art and Culture at Royal Ontario Museum and Assistant Professor (status-only) in the Department of Art History at University of Toronto. Kwon’s research focuses on Korean art and visual culture, in relation to global contemporary art, transnationalism, feminist activism and socially engaged art. Her recent and forthcoming publications explore feminist art activism in Korea, and she has published in journals including Korean Studies, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Asian Studies Review. Her curated exhibitions include Reimagining Places: Land, Store, Home (Korea Cultural Centre Canada, Ottawa, 2022) and Mass and Individual: The Archive of the Guyanese Mass Games (Arko Art Center, Seoul, 2016). She also coordinated transdisciplinary exhibitions in collaboration with artists, policymakers, and scholars of the humanities and the sciences, which resulted in exhibitions at 3 international venues, including Immune Nations at the UNAIDS headquarters in Geneva in 2017. 

[ABSTRACT]

Since “Feminism Reboot,” the new-wave feminism that emerged in 2015 in South Korea (hereafter Korea) as a countermovement to misogyny and sexual violence against women and minorities both online and off-line, a series of activities have led to calls for rebooting feminist art history. As an initiative of this call, this talk explores Korean artist projects created from the 2010s to the early 2020s that articulate critical discourses on distorted conceptions and layered meanings of female bodies in Korean society, in relation to patriarchal nationalism, labor issues, and gender norms. This talk presents the author’s three recent publications related to this topic.

Art works discussed here critically engage in current discourses rising from patriarchal and hierarchal social system and offer creative presentations of the women’s issues related to patriarchal nationalism, labor issues, and gender norms through feminist perspectives—which involve paying attention to the rights for the marginalized and underrepresented beings. The case studies include video works that creatively present the sexualized connotations and complicated memoryscapes surrounding the Korean “comfort women” of the Japanese military during the Pacific War; experimental documentary video addressing emotional labor in the gapjil society; sculptures visualizing the resistance and solidarity of the Millennial and GenZ female workers against improper social demands, including emotional labor and grooming labor; and performance and video work queering the gender norms from the tradition to the present. Weaving these artists’ practices into the social issues problematized during the Korea’s rebooted feminism from 2015 and global fourth-wave feminism, this talk highlights the cutting edge of contemporary critical discussions of feminist art in Korea.

Mina Kim is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Alabama and specializes in contemporary Korean art, Korean American art, East Asian art, transnational and global visual culture, and visual communication. She received her BA at the University of Michigan and her MA and PhD at the Ohio State University. Her book, Contemporary Korean Art: New Directions since the 1960s, will be published on November 1, 2024, in the UK and will be available in December worldwide. The book showcases a collection of the most visually captivating, intriguing, and often overlooked examples of Korean art. Mina Kim highlights the artistic output of the 1960s and ’70s through today, providing crucial aesthetic and political context for understanding the work and includes performance, gender, identity, internationalism, and the evolution of multimedia. She is also the author of Jung Yeondoo’s Media Art: Quantum Deformation through Coincidence of the Real and the Virtual (2018) and is currently working on another book project, No Boundaries on Boundaries: Transnational Communication and Consilience in Korean American Art and Visual Culture. Dr. Kim has published many articles on East Asian visual and material culture.

[ABSTRACT]

Presenting fresh and thematic interpretations, this book showcases a collection of the most visually captivating, socially intriguing and often overlooked examples of Korean art. Set against the backdrop of a tumultuous history, artists in Korea embarked on explorations of themselves, society and the profound forces shaping their world. Mina Kim highlights the artistic output of the 1960s and ’70s, providing crucial context for understanding the work of later twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists. Key themes, including performance art, gender and identity, the interplay of local and global influences, and the evolution of contemporary multimedia practice structure Kim’s study of Korean art across the last sixty years. By placing artistic expression at the core of Korean culture and society, this book sheds new light on the expanded transnational role of Korean art in contributing to global visual culture. 

‘Mina Kim showcases the artistic themes and concepts inherent in Korean art, skilfully crafting a narrative that intertwines multiple threads. Her work serves as a comprehensive guide, leading readers through the avant-garde movements that emerged after the Korean War and illuminating Korean art’s present standing in the global art scene. This resource is a must-read for those interested in Korean contemporary art, art history and Korean studies.’

— J.P. Park, June and Simon Li Professor in the History of Art, University of Oxford

‘In this compelling and visually rich account, Mina Kim demonstrates how Korean art communicates concepts, thoughts, and feelings as it also reflects on cultural, social, and political contexts.’

— Sunglim Kim, Associate Professor of Art History, Dartmouth College

Yeonsoo Chee, a specialist in modern Korean painting, joined the Art Institute of Chicago as the first curator of Korean art in 2020. In her role at the Art Institute, she is working to grow the Korean art collection and programs to support the museum’s goal of representing the expanse of art across the Asian continent. Previously, she spent over nine years as a curatorial leader of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena and was the Curator and Director of Exhibitions at the National Palace Museum of Korea. Her publications include Selections from the Korean Art Collection at USC Pacific Asia Museum, National Palace Museum of Korea in Seven Themes, and Hyomyeong: Crown Prince and Patron of the Arts. She holds a BA in English Language and Literature from Ewha Womans University, Korea, and a BA and an MA in Art History from California State University Long Beach. She also teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

[ABSTRACT]

After the tumultuous years of the Japanese colonial period (1910–45) and the Korean War (1950–53) which resulted in the bifurcation of the country, South Korea has experienced accelerated modernization and economic growth. At the same time, the country’s cultural sector has followed a similar trajectory in modernizing and expanding its art scene to re-brand its national identity. Vibrant contemporary Korean art has reached the global stage and recently, there has been a rush of shows of contemporary Korean art in U.S. museums thanks to artists’ creativity and thoughtful practices. However, the selection of contemporary artists being spotlighted in the U.S. museum galleries does not always depend on the artist or art. Behind this, there has been a series of strategic policies, either of the U.S. or of South Korea, influencing such decisions.

The first contemporary Korean art exhibition in the U.S. opened at the University of Minnesota in 1957. Organized by the university and facilitated by the State Department’s International Cooperation Administration, this exhibition reflected the U.S. foreign policy to contain the threat of Communism through cultural exchanges. Fast forwarding, the current traveling exhibition Hallyu! The Korean Wave is partially sponsored by Korea’s Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism to promote Korean art and culture. This presentation will survey how contemporary Korean art has been featured in special exhibitions as well as in the permanent collection galleries in U.S. museums since the 1950s, addressing issues and challenges.

Kyunghee Pyun is professor of art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on history of collecting, reception of Asian art, and intersectionality of art and technology, and industrial history. She wrote Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation (Routledge, 2022); and Dress History of Korea: Critical Perspectives of Primary Sources (Bloomsbury, 2023). As an art critic, activist, and curator of contemporary art, she published American Art from Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge 2022) with Michelle Lim; and Expanding the Parameters of Feminist Artivism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) with Gillian Hannum.

[ABSTRACT]

In Korean Art since 1945: Challenges and Changes by Youngna Kim (E B Brill) and Contemporary Korean Art: New Directions since the 1960s by Mina Kim (Reaktion Books), published in 2024, two authors introduce new forms of art making like performance art, photography, video art, multimedia, installations, design, or conceptual art; and they discuss issues of gender, identity, internationalism, postmodernism, or transnationalism. My projects Interpreting Modernism in Korean Art: Fluidity and Fragmentation (Routledge 2021) and American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence (Routledge 2022) were based on this topic of "trajectivity" in art, as raised by Paul Virilio, to describe the transformation of art movements in a global context. My new book project is called "Coerced Exoticism" that forces diasporic artists to stay away from the centrality of a European style and to characterize them either exotic or ethnic. In the narrative of nation-based history, this attitude translates into finding the unique national or ethnic trait. The generation of artists and their audiences, born in the 1940s in the territories of the U.S. alliance, grew up consuming blue jeans, American popular music, and American-brand consumer products. Authors of survey books of Korean art and their readers are also aware of this influence from the West and struggled to define the characteristics of “Koreanness.” This paper explores efforts to challenge the center-periphery binary and analyzes how authors narrated ways in which “peripheral” artists in Korea can transmute, de-and re-territorialize, and re-invent styles through their local conventions by provincializing “centers.”