To ask a question and find out the answer about how the starting point of modern and contemporary Korean art is recognized by the academic experts on modern Korean art history, I am going to infer the researchers’cognizance by looking over many papers in the 21 editions of Korean modern art history journal and modern and contemporary Korean art history journals1) published from 1994 to 2010 and examining how they reflected the various points of viewing the history as having been severed, continued, exogenously shocked, or immanently developed to distinguish the time periods of Korean art history. Only the papers discussing the Korean art history prior to 1910 and after 1953 have been the objects of this writing.
What was the criterion for defining the starting point of modern and contemporary Korean art history? Lee Kyung Seong stipulated it as ‘the evolution through negation and resistance based on spiritual and creative mind’ allegedly. Lee derived two standards from the West, as he wrote ‘one is modern Dadaism and the other one is contemporary Informel’ and ‘repetitive cycles of These and Anti-These is the art historical regime, which should be acknowledged as an aspect of development’.
The researchers agree that 1910’s and 1950’s are the starting points of modern and contemporary Korean arts, respectively, because Korean artists began to use the Western painting materials and styles adopting Impressionism in 1910’s and adopted the Western Informel in 1950’s.
Furthermore, they commonly and consistently define the starting points of modern and contemporary Korean arts by focusing on the facts that the ruling power was shifted in 1910’s as the Chosun Empire collapsed and was forfeited as a part of colony, and that the regime was changed in 1950’s as the country was separated into two governments, i.e., two political systems after the Korean War. Such view on the starting points of modern and contemporary Korean arts seems like reflecting the dynasty-based perspective of history.
Although the researchers easily set the starting point of contemporary Korean art based on the previously stated facts, there has been a fierce contention of ‘skewed contemporary‘ because transplanting and accepting can be regarded as neither self-renewal nor revolution with legitimacy and inevitability. In the western region, the demeanors and methods like Impressionism, Dadaism, Informel set as convincing standards to classify each time period can be regarded as the process of evolving self-renewal. Nevertheless in the West, it may be a possible to establish such demeanors and methods like refer Impressionism, Dadaism, and Informel as convincing standards to classify each time period as parts of the process of transforming self-renewal. However, in the Non-western region, applying the Western standard will result in only biased classifications due to the dual-structure of coexisting flows of transplanted art history and traditional art history.
Moreover, if the transplanted arts are placed at the center of art history only because it constitutes the mainstream, the traditional arts will be forced to degenerate into the periphery so that it becomes inevitable to describe the Western influences and the traditional methods, unevenly, as mainstreams and peripheries, respectively. Can any standard rule indeed be derived to distinguish each time period evenly for the two different styles of art coexisting in the same area and a time unit during the same period?
Despite of the various research results discussed above, the difficult dual structure problem has not been properly dealt with. Neither has the problem of dualizing and ordering the time periods of modern and contemporary Korean art been resolved as pointed out by Kim Hyunsook2) and Mok Soohyun3) in their writing “Bicameral and ranking systems in Korean art history”. Thus, in the real situation where “nothing like reconciliation or harmonization has still been made between the traditional Korean art history and modern/contemporary Korean art history”, the issue of distinguishing the time periods of Korean art history seems to be destined to go through repetitive confusions and drifts in the cognizance of researchers.