The Antimonumental Impulse in Korean Contemporary Art

Abstract

This study examines the genealogy of the antimonument in South Korean contemporary art as it manifests in the works of three artists: Bahc Mo, Suh Do Ho, and Oh Inhwan. Born in the period around 1960, the three grew to maturity during South Korea’s rapid economic development in the 1970s and witnessed the violent struggle for democratization in the 1980s. Public monuments were grandiose structures deployed in the nation’s period of military dictatorship as propagandistic expressions of collective identity. In this essay, I argue that in their own unique ways each of these artists embraced antimonumentality as an idiom that could subvert the grammar of official monuments and reveal the dialectics at play in the sociohistorical and psychological processes of forming national identity. Humble, fragile, and often antagonistic, the artists’ antimonuments, which began to appear in the 1990s, challenge established views of Korean society and its gendered ideology and complicate the nation’s notions of communal values and the virtue of solidarity.