Kim Hong-hee illuminates a vision of Korean art history in which no one is othered in Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct (2024). The curator and scholar traces the history and trajectory of Korean feminist artists from the 1970s through today around 15 themes, including body art, queer politics, ecofeminism, and the North American diaspora, across essays on 42 artists — all but two of whom were alive at the time of publication.
The structure of the publication is modeled after Kim’s monthly column in the Kyunghyang Shinmun newspaper, published between 2021 and 2022, which considered the work of Korean artists through a feminist lens in 17 installments. Originally published in Korean by Youlhwadang earlier this year, Phaidon’s book marks its English translation. How does this treatment of Korean feminist art translate to Western readers?
One consideration is “K-feminism’s” strong influence on the West. In the wake of Trump’s reelection, American social media has co-opted Korea’s mid-2010s fringe 4B, or “Four No’s” movement, shorthand for bihon, bichulsan, biyeonae, and bisekseu, or “no marriage,” “no childbirth,” “no dating,” and “no sex with men.” But while declaring yourself a feminist is still taboo within Korea’s relatively conservative and overwhelmingly patriarchal society, Western feminism has had time to develop over decades.
Against this backdrop, Kim provides a substantial overview of the Korean feminist movement as it intersects with art to aid the general reader, albeit one rife with academic language. Kim, for instance, trusts the audience to decipher the difference between “non-modernism,” “anti-modernism,” “de-modernism,” and “post-modernism,” nuanced concepts that could be broken down more for a non-specialist.
As a brief overview: Korean feminist art started in the early 1970s, marked by the Pyohyeon (Expression) Group, which resisted the modernist abstract work of the 1960s by emphasizing femininity through craft methods, including textiles and sewing. The movement gained traction in the mid-1980s with the Yeoseong misul yeonguhoe (Women’s Art Research Association), which honed a realist style that reflected the conditions of working women. By the mid-1990s, sinsaedae (New Generation) culture challenged the existing commercial art world by emphasizing issues of gender and identity. Korean feminist art of the 2000s reflected the globalized art world by beginning to incorporate intersectionality theory, a framework that explores how race, gender, and class, among other identities, combine to create systems of oppression and privilege.
The thematic chapters begin by discussing post-essentialism, which views female-ness as constructed by social processes, as opposed to first-wave feminism’s focus on the biological, through the work of Yun Suknam and Jang Pa. Though four generations separate them — Yun is a pioneering feminist artist and radical activist focusing on themes of motherhood across painting, sculpture, and installation, while Jang is an emerging artist whose multimedia work subverts gender hierarchies and patriarchal norms — they both engage deeply with this conversation around the representation of womanhood. Foregrounding this debate, which is central to the trajectory of feminism, builds a solid foundation to understand further developments while emphasizing that such movements are not solely tied to the time at which they first emerged.
Kim follows this with a discussion of body art via the work of Lee Bul, one of Korea’s most prominent conceptual artists, and emerging figures Fi Jae Lee and Mire Lee, who recently debuted her Turbine Hall Commission at the Tate Modern. All three artists employ cyborgs and humanoid machines to explore how the female body figures into our post-human, hybridized condition, wherein identity is not bound by its physical vessel but instead constructed through patterns of information. Kim draws connection between the artists’ grotesque and monstrous aesthetics, which breaks down the gender binary as well as the boundaries of normality.
siren eun young jung, Black Jaguar, and Nahee Kim examine queer politics, demonstrating the diversity of the category’s calls for inclusivity, including disruption of perceived normativity and broad civil rights. This chapter perhaps best exemplifies Kim’s championing of equitable intersectionality, demonstrating how breaking down societal extractions linked to gender politics can make room for other vulnerable facets of society to be uplifted, including people with disabilities, refugees, and laborers.
Shifting to sociopolitical subjects, the book examines the work of Minouk Lim, Sanghee Song, Yang Ah Ham, and Ayoung Kim in relation to resistance art, which critiques modernism’s implicit truths and grand narratives associated with Western constructions of history and mythology, particularly in relation to South Korea’s rapid urbanization. These artists advocate for what Kim calls the “little narratives” of socially marginalized groups, including women, employing research-based new media practices that incorporate autobiographical stories of overlooked private and public grief. One example is Lim’s “New Town Ghost” (2005). In this performance piece, a female activist raps slam poetry through a loudspeaker to the beat of a drum through Seoul’s busy Yeongdeungpo Market, singing the stories of memories lost to the rapid development of commercialized “new towns.”
The chapter on the North American diaspora also has strong political undertones, highlighting the work of the late artists Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Yong Soon Min, as well as Jin-me Yoon, who all emigrated as children. Kim borrows Homi K. Bhabha’s phrase “the genealogy of that lonely figure” to describe the displacement inherent in migrant communities as a direct effect of globalization. She discusses, for instance, Min’s series Defining Moments (1992), which includes six self-portraits that overlap with words and numbers, representing historical links to her identity, including the 1960 student uprising, the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. These artists also consider the displaced body of an Asian woman as a site of erasure, violence, and instability, acknowledging the unfilled desire to return to a unified Korea or feel a sense of belonging in America.
As a whole, the book offers an expansive and intimate survey of Korean feminist art, analyzing inter-generational female artists intervening in art history’s patriarchal canon. With her more than three decades of experience working in the field, including as director of the Seoul Museum of Art from 2012 to 2016, Kim’s expertise as an early and enduring proponent of feminist art shines through. And poet Kim Hyesoon’s accompanying essay rightfully praises Kim Hong-hee’s “breathless” writing, which is tuned to the specificity of each artist’s practice. Adapting its overly academic language to more accessible terms could help incorporate a broader readership, but Korean Feminist Artists nonetheless exemplifies how such artists continue to break down the boundaries of patriarchal convention, while hinting at a future where the goals of feminism have long been met.
Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct (2024) written by Kim Hong-hee with a contribution from Kim Hyesoon and published by Phaidon, is available for purchase online and through independent booksellers.
