“Home That Never Was: On Anxiety and Nostalgia of Korean Contemporary Artists”
Jung-Ah Woo
(Professor of art history in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, KAIST)
Friday, February 20, 4:00 -6:00 PM
CWAC 156
Abstract
This study investigates the works of three Korean artists: Suh Do-Ho, Kim Sooja, and Lee Bul. Since the early 1990s, these artists have emerged as visible figures in the international art scene, especially under the euphemistic rubric of nomadic identity and hybrid aesthetics. In other words, the body of their works was immediately embraced by the rapid influx of “postmodern” discourses to the Asian continent at the end of the century. Yet, the current military crises and financial catastrophes engulfing the entire globe complicate the understanding of such celebratory discourses of hybridity and nomadism. For the individuals living in this epoch of uncertainty, being hybrid and nomadic might invoke the fundamental anxiety of loss: loss of identity and original space.
The artists in this study have presented disparate modes of dealing with this sense of anxiety and nostalgia. I will argue that Suh generated nostalgia for his childhood home in Korea through architectures in fabric; Kim created an imagined location of origin in her video and performance; and Lee demonstrated her conscious rejection of melancholic attachment to organic body by offering cyborgs and monsters. These works clearly address the artists’ privatized memories, yet the individual processes of remembrance and representation offer a deeper understanding of the lost histories, as well as histories of loss in modern Korea.
