Symposium: An Encounter with the Korean Avant-Garde

Watch on Hammer Channel

Presented in collaboration with GYOPO, an L.A.-based collective of Korean cultural producers and art professionals, this program features dialogues with artists and thinkers on the historical, political, and cultural contexts of Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s, with focus on the lasting impacts of this decisive moment within Korea’s local and diasporic creative histories, as well as the larger influence that these art histories have had within the global art world. The afternoon will culminate with a performance by Only the Young artist Sung Neung Kyung.

Korean language and ASL interpretation will be provided.

2:00pm Opening Remarks by Yoon Ju Ellie Lee and Pablo José Ramírez

2:10pm Keynote
Art historian Joan Kee delivers the keynote address on the Experimental Art movement.

3:15pm Panel Presentations and Discussion
Presentations by sociologist Jennifer Jihye Chun, art historian Mina Kim, and artist Young Joon Kwak will contextualize the experimental art movement and trace its legacies. Following the presentations, curator Harry C. H. Choi will moderate a conversation between the presenters and a Q + A with the audience.

4:45pm Break

5:00pm Performance by Sung Neung Kyung

Special thank you to GYOPO steering committee members Yoon Ju Ellie Lee and Alex Paik for their collaboration on the symposium, and Baik Art and Le Mieux Cosmetics for their generous support.

GYOPO is a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals generating and sharing progressive, critical, intersectional and intergenerational discourses, community alliances, and free educational programs in Los Angeles and beyond. https://gyopo.us/

Harry C. H. Choi is an art historian, curator, and writer based in Toronto and Seoul. He was Assistant Curator of the 14th Gwangju Biennale and held curatorial fellowships at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Museum of Modern Art, New York. A regular contributor to Artforum, ArtAsiaPacific, and Texte zur Kunst, he co-edited Suki Seokyeong Kang: Willow Drum Oriole published by Hatje Cantz and Leeum Museum of Art and published writings on such artists as Sung Hwan Kim, Tsai Ming Liang, Minouk Lim, among others. He received his BA from Harvard University and is completing his PhD at Stanford University with a dissertation on the emergence of avant-garde cinema in South Korea.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Labor Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. Her research and teaching focus on the politics of labor and community organizing, gender, culture, and migration, feminist and intersectional methodology, and social theory and global capitalism. She is the author of the award-winning book Organizing at the Margins: the Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States, published by Cornell University Press. Her second book, Against Abandonment: Refusal and Solidarity in South Korean Protest (co-authored with Ju Hui Judy Han) will be published by Stanford University Press. Her recent research articles appear in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Journal of Asian Studies, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Critical Sociology, Citizenship Studies, and Global Labor Journal. She received her B.A. in History at Dartmouth College, and her M.A. and PhD in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. She was formerly on the faculty at The University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. At UCLA, she is also currently Chair of the International Development Studies at the International Institute and Associate Director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

Widely credited for helping to spark global interest in Korean abstraction, Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The author of Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, she has written extensively on various aspects of Korean art from the 18th century to the present, including articles on scale in Joseon landscape painting, on self-portraiture in early 20th century colonial Korea, and on the issue of translation in Korean Surrealism. A contributing editor to Artforum, her most recent book is The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art beyond Solidarity. Kee is co-editing a critical anthology of key writings in 20th century Korea for MoMA's Primary Documents series and was honored to be part of the early planning for Only the Young.

Dr. 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, 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 forthcoming book, Contemporary Korean Art: New Directions since the 1960s, will be published in the fall of 2024. 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 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 in Boundaries: Identity, Diversity, and Communication in Korean American Art. Dr. Kim has published many articles on East Asian visual and material culture, Buddhism, and contemporary art, including “Visualizing Buddhism Today: The Works of Jeong Hwa Choi, Kimsooja, and Do Ho Suh,” “Reinscribing Tradition in Twentieth-century China: A Biographical Sketch of Pan Tianshou (1897-1971),” and “Debating Wang Meng’s (1308-1385) Undated Handscroll: The Continuous Dialogue between Images and Texts in China.”

Sung Neung Kyung (b. 1944-) is a prominent Korean conceptual artist whose works embracing nontraditional mediums such as newspaper, photography, and performance broke the ground for experimental art in Korea. Sung debuted in Korea’s art scene in 1973 as a member of the avant-garde art group ST. Until the late 1980s, he showcased newspaper-related installations and performances challenging government censorship of the media and the press’ misuse of editorial power. Also, he was among the first artists in Korea to use photography in the context of fine art in the 1970s. Sung Neung Kyung’s daily practice of art has escaped critical notice, yet like the mosquito he has been active for much longer and his influence is felt more widely than many realize. Sung’s conceptual actions, documented through photographs and performance artifacts, reflect his decades-long interest in everyday moments of exchange between people in a social context.

Young Joon Kwak (b. 1984, Queens, New York) received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007, an MA from the University of Chicago in 2010, and an MFA from the University of Southern California in 2014. Kwak is the founder of Mutant Salon, a roving beauty salon and platform for collaborative performances and installations with their community of queer/trans/POC artists and performers. Kwak is also lead performer in the electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner. Their work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Arko Art Center, Seoul (2022); Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles (2021); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021, 2017, 2016, 2014); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2018); and Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada (2018). Group exhibitions and performances include those at Hauser & Wirth, New York (2021); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2019); CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2019); 47 Canal, New York (2018); Anonymous Gallery, Mexico City (2018); Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016); The Broad, Los Angeles (2016); and Le Pavillon Vendôme–Centre d’Art Contemporain, Clichy, France (2016).