[KS] Chunghoon Shin, Contemporary Political Art in South Korea (4/3, 4 p.m.)

[Christine Hong]

***************************Please post widely**********************************



The following talk is open to the public.  Please join us.



Chunghoon Shin (Art History, SUNY Binghamton)

"Post-Minjung Art: Urban Explorations of South Korean Political Art Movements Since the Late 1990s"



Thursday, April 3, 2008

4 p.m.

Barbara Christian Room, 554 Barrows Hall



At the turn of the millennium, a series of political art practices
reemerged in South Korea that critically responded to state-driven
policies of urban renewal.  In particular, these avant-garde art
practices sought to place the neo-liberal restructuring of the urban
landscape in sharp critical relief.  Rejecting the depoliticized,
self-complacent kitschy aesthetics of so-called Shinsedae ("New
Generation") Art, artist collectives such as Forum A and FlyingCity
sought to reactivate the oppositional legacy of minjung (people's)
art—a politically engaged art movement that had vigorously resisted the
oppressive military regime of the 1980s but had fallen into lethargy in
the ostensibly democratized 1990s.  Precariously suspended between
critical realism, on the one hand, and visual romanticization of urban
slums and ruins, on the other, these millenarian art movements
threatened, however, to devolve into an overwhelming concern with
loss.  Relative to post-minjung avant-garde art, the salient task thus
emerged: through what fresh artistic vocabularies could these art
movements counter their own self-destructive, melancholic tendencies?



A graduate of Seoul National University, Chunghoon Shin is a PhD
candidate in Studies in the History and Theory of Art and Architecture
at State University of New York at Binghamton.  His dissertation
concerns the effects of globalization on urban form and urbanism in
East Asia, focusing on how contemporary East Asian artists respond to
transformations in the urban landscape as a result of economic
restructuring in East Asian global cities.  



Sponsored by the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, the
Center for Korean Studies, and the Asian Cultural Studies Working
Group.  For further information, contact Christine Hong
(cjhong at berkeley.edu).
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