After the Fall

Abstract

Abstract In the early 1990s, a pair of Korean reunification-themed art exhibitions in Japan took up the question of art’s capacity to contribute to national reconciliation, an issue that appeared crucial in light of the contemporaneous surge of rhetoric celebrating the end of the Cold War. The first of these events, which opened in 1992, brought together Minjung (literally ‘People’s’) artists from South Korea and artists with official ties to North Korea living in Japan. The second exhibition, which took place the following year, featured Minjung artists and North Korean artists. In failing to congeal as expressions of national homogeneity, the works on view prompted audiences to question what an aesthetics of reunification would or should look like. In contrast to spectacles of national unity, as state-sponsored reunification events often strive to project, these exhibitions suggested that engaging an aesthetics of reunification would entail vexatious encounters with artworks forged from within an enduring Cold War impasse.