The Reception of Korean Contemporary Art in America from the 1950s to the Present

This essay examines the reception of Korean contemporary art in America from the 1950s to the present, researching on the pivotal exhibitions held in the U.S., catalog essays, criticisms, and art historical scholarships which are written and published in English. In art, the meaning of reception indicates not only audiences’ accessibility to introduced artists’ works and exhibitions but also encompasses pertinent writings and publications that engender critiques and discourses regarding the artworks and their shows. It further embraces scholarly discussions, researches, and symposiums tracing art historically. In this vein, the paper explores significant Korean contemporary art exhibitions, artists, artistic tendencies, and movement that brought about an impact on and crucial debates in the terrain of the American contemporary art world: Contemporary Korean Paintings exhibition, Dansaekhwa, Nam June Paik, Minjoong art, Korean American art, Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea exhibition, Do Ho Suh, Haegue, Yang, and Bul Lee. Accordingly, it proceeds to recapitulate their characteristics and investigate American receptive modes of those, by dividing them into approximately two decades.BR Through the exhibition, Minjoong Art: A New Cultural Movement from Korea held in 1988, Minjoong art was recognized and understood as an authentic form of Korean contemporary art in American art world. What this study has also found is that unlike the chronologically ordered Korean scholarships on Korean contemporary art, American scholarships as such are “discursive,” “disconnected,” “imbalanced,” and “ahistorical.” It has observed that the history of the unfolding of Korean contemporary art does not correspond to that of the reception of Korean contemporary art. There is quite a considerable temporal discrepancy between the two.BR Filling in the gap enables Korean contemporary art to be evaluated and accepted quantitatively and qualitatively. Today, the growth of comprehensive surveys and reliable scholarships that will prove and enhance the value of Korean contemporary art is beyond necessity but rather urgent. There still remains the responsibility that art historians and scholars should generate continuous and extensive scholarships to properly locate Korean contemporary art in the context of global art history.