GWAC H E O N
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art
Korean Video Art from 1970s to 1990s: Time Image Apparatus
Installation view of MOON JOO's Sea of Time, 1999/2019, kinetic video installation, 10 TFT monitors, stainless steel, moving system, 350 × 50 × 240 cm, at “Korean Video Art from 1970s to 1990s: Time Image Apparatus,” National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, 2019–20. Courtesy the artist.
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South Korea’s modern art history largely unfolded at a remove from Western art movements, forestalling the possibility of contemporaneity with the international avantgarde. The development of Korean video art, however, was subject to a relatively short lag time with the West and thus responded more closely to the methodologies that informed its emergence outside Korea. After its introduction in the early 1970s, the use of this new means of expression saw exponential growth in Korea over the subsequent decades before becoming a mainstream mode of contemporary art in the 1990s. Held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) in Gwacheon, “Korean Video Art from 1970s to 1990s: Time Image Apparatus” explored the range of aesthetic, technical, and conceptual approaches that propelled the development of the art form in Korea, presenting more than 130 works by some 60 artists. Lending structure to the exhibition was a conceptual framework that prioritized artists’ concerns over their chronology, resulting in a nonlinear progression of cogent chapters that united
asynchronous networks of artists and ideas; converging on such themes as art and technology, body discourse, and consumer culture, the exhibition's seven subsections helped viewers make sense of the various strands that comprise this complex history. Park Hyunki, a pioneer of minimal video installation in Korea, anchored the exhibition’s opening section, which grouped together early experimental works that used video to explore notions of temporality and materiality. Amid representative pieces by Kim Soungui, Kim Youngjin, and Kwak Duckjun, Park’s iconic configurations of televisions and organic materials demonstrate an early use of video to interrogate perceptions of presence and representation; these sculptural installations insert television monitors displaying still images of stones within stacks of actual stones, conflating real and recorded media. Other videos by Park consider the visual phenomena of shadow and reflection, with works such as Reflection Series (1979) using water to suggest an interspace connecting the actual and the imagined, which resonated with similar video experiments happening overseas by the likes of Bill Viola and Shigeko Kubota. Due in large part to Park’s influence on subsequent generations, the sculptural impulse remained a defining characteristic of Korean video art until the late 1990s. Elsewhere in the exhibition, a section focusing on video sculptures and kinetic video art centered on foundational works by Moon Joo, Kim Haemin, Yook Taejin, and other artists 20 years Park’s junior. This new wave of Korean video artists responded to similar dichotomies of authenticity and artifice that interested Park,
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with a key difference being their updated methodologies that challenged perceptions of the TV monitor as a stationary object with fixed physical parameters. Moon proposed the TV as a “meaningful apparatus” with works such as Sea of Time (1999/2019), in which ten horizontally aligned TV monitors displaying disparate seascapes slowly rise and fall in a wavelike movement pattern, creating a dynamic and multilayered platform for presenting video content. Kim Haemin’s TV Hammer (1992/2002) operates along similar lines, although to a more illusionistic effect: a television mounted on a pivoting pedestal alternately jerks back and forth or flickers before going black, in sync with video sequences that show a hammer appearing to smash against the screen itself. Increased public fascination with rapidly-evolving technological innovations in the early 1990s produced an anomaly in the discourse surrounding video art in Korea during this era, when the term “technology art” took root as a way to describe the practices of Kim Yun, Kim Jae-Kwon, and other members of Art Tech, an artist group founded in 1991. Their works here offered wide-ranging perspectives on the implications of technology for the future of humanity, from utopian aspirations—seen in the symbiotic relationship between electronic media and architecture in Kim Yun’s Intelligent Building (1991/2019)—to more foreboding prognoses—as in Kim JaeKwon’s Dialectic of Negation (1993), which adopts an Orwellian tone to presage anesthetized modes of digitallymediated communication. By the end of the 1990s, however, Korean video artists had mostly shed such
technocentric associations, and figures such as Kimsooja and Kim Beom began to engage with new social realities wrought by the country’s widespread adoption of emerging telecommunication technologies. Formative works by these artists wrestled with situating Korea’s modern and contemporary history within a global dialogue that foregrounded postmodern and neoliberal ideologies. Chief among them was Kimsooja’s seminal performance video Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck (1997), tracing the artist’s journey through the Korean countryside on the back of a pickup truck, where she sits atop a pile of cloth bundles used to wrap and transport household items. The work’s potent symbolism addresses polemics of displacement and memory, touching on the artist’s own biography, traditional Korean cultural practices, economic uncertainty following the Asian Financial Crisis, and the effects of globalization on vulnerable communities. Attempts were made throughout the show to realize historical video installations according to their original specifications, facilitating direct encounters with each artist’s particular vision. Among the ten works recreated by MMCA was Kim Kulim’s Light Bulb (1975/2019), a conceptual installation that juxtaposes an actual light and a video image of a light which respond to each other in real time as they
repeatedly turn on and off. A restaging of Yook Keun Byung's The Sound of Landscape+Eye for Field (1988/2019) was more imposing; the totemic burial mound of soil implanted with a video closeup of a blinking eye, which caused a sensation at the Bienal de São Paulo in ’89 and Documenta 9 in ’92, offered a striking contrast to the decidedly inorganic works it neighbored. By defaulting to each work’s original parameters wherever possible instead of acquiescing to archival versions, “Time Image Apparatus” enlivened what might have otherwise been a tedious visitor experience. Any considered discussion of Korean video art would be remiss to exclude Nam June Paik, represented here by two major broadcast projects. Paik’s moving-image collage of performance footage and appropriated ads, Global Groove (1973), opened the door for engagement with video as an experimental artistic apparatus, while Good Morning, Mr. Orwell (1984), which set up a live satellite link between New York’s WNET TV and Centre Pompidou in Paris and aired simultaneously in Germany and South Korea, exposed the creative potential of video technologies for global communication. A conspicuously missed opportunity with regard to Paik’s legacy, however, loomed in the museum’s central atrium, where his monumental TV tower The More, The Better (1988) is permanently installed.
NAM JUNE PAIK, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, 1984, still from video installation: 38 min. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Since 2018, the work has been unplugged while undergoing conservation, precluding visitors from beholding this singular achievement of Korean video art among such a superlative milieu. Despite endeavoring to contextualize Korean video art in relation to the specific conditions of Korea’s modernization, democratization, and globalization, “Time Image Apparatus” largely fell short of placing the works in a meaningful dialectic with the sociopolitical transformations that defined this turbulent period in Korean history. Notwithstanding, the show spotlighted the complex spectrum of strategies developed in Korea for investing the new medium of video with meaning in a local context while historicizing the evolution of Korean video art within a contemporaneous transnational trajectory. A N DY S T. L O U I S
KIMSOOJA, Cities on the Move – 2727 Kilometers Bottari Truck, 1997, still from single-channel performance video, no sound: 7 min 3 sec. Courtesy the artist.
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