Historian Eric J. Hobsbawm once said “the task that historians have is to analyze the meanings of the past within the context of society and to track the changes and implementation.” It would not be too far of a stretch to apply Hobsbawm's quote to art historian since art history, although quite specific, is still history. In addition, Hobsbaum also asserted that, “a mold called the past continuously forms the present or at least thought to be.” It is my recognition that the major westernization of the last century took place under the Japanese colonization which served as the channel to usher in western art; however, the current 20th- century Korean art history fails to recognize that the mold of the past, namely western art in this case, has formed the modern art of the present. Based on this recognition, attention was given to what lacked in the analysis of the current 20th-century Korean art history in terms of “Informel” which was identifed as the turning point towards “modern art” in the Korean art history as well as the following “experimental art.” My belief is that the art history of Korea has to be reassessed from , a socio-cultural perspective as well as adopting multi-level and diachronic understanding. However, the existing Korean art, especially the one between the end of 1950s to the 1970s was based on the perspective of “severance”; thus, raising the needs for the starting point of a new perspective. It is my conviction that meta perspective on writing is most essential in order to lay a solid basis for the Korean art scene to have a productive discussion. I feel the utmost necessity to reinterpret the typifed history analysis and criticism which stemmed from the trauma under the Japanese colonization. The most urgent task is to avoid academic closeness and to share the research. Painting is an individual expression of the artist, but the act of expression is not free from the cultural and societal infuence to which the artist belongs.

The inauguration of the collective Reality and Utterance (Hyŏnsil kwa Parŏn) in 1979 and 1980 marked a watershed moment in Korean art. This is not only be-cause the collective gave birth to the politically-engaged art movement that would come to be labeled “Minjung Art” by the middle of the 80s, but also because it enthusiastically embraced a wide range of images from the urban culture. With a special focus on the members’ early work, my research explores an issue largely neglected in the dominant narrative of Minjung art as a form of activism against the authoritarian Korean government during the 80s. The issue is what was at stake in Reality and Utterance’s exploration of contemporary urban visual culture. The aim of this essay is to recognize the engagement with the urban visual culture as central to the group’s early project and to consider it at some distance from the anti-urban and anti-mass culture perspective which was endorsed by the Minjung narrative. Focusing on members’ turn to urban visual culture, this essay instead argues that this turn was by no means merely a means to making art as social cri-tique, but more importantly, it was an experiment with the shared image world, as opposed to the rarefid visual vocabularies of abstract modernism. Visual produc-tions such as advertisements, billboards, posters, and kitsch paintings, which come from outside the narrow confins of fin art, were definitly ominous signs of the colonization of everyday life in the capitalist city, but at the same time they were an-ticipated to be a catalyst for redefiningKorean art in a more communicative, acces-sible, and democratized way. In this regard, in the early 1980s—in particular 1980 and 1982—the members’ gesture oscillated between critique and embrace, which allowed the group to occupy a unique domain in the realm of Korean art production.

This paper explores the key figure of minjung misul (“the people’s art”), Kim Bongjun, and the art collective Dureong in the relationship between ‘dialogue’ and the dissidents’ structural critique of Korea’s modernities. During the 1980s’ prodemocracy movement, the minjung artists and other dissident intellectuals used the notion of dialogue as metaphor for and allegory of democracy to articulate not only Koreans’ experience of modern history, which they saw as “alienating” and “inhumane,” but also the discrepancies between Koreans' predicaments and their political aspirations and their working toward the fulfllment of those ideals. Envisioning alternative forms of modernities, Kim Bongjun and other Dureong members paid attention to the fundamental elements of art, which consist of art as a modern institution, as well as the everyday lives of people as the very site of Koreans’ modernities. They endeavored to create “art of life,” which presumes its being part of people’s lives, based on the cultural and spiritual traditions of the agrarian community. They also participated in the national culture movement, the minjung church, and the alternative-life movement to radically envision everyday lives through the indigenous reinterpretation of democratic values. Despite the signifcant role played by the church mission and its community involvement, its effects on minjung misul have received little attention in the relevant studies. Thus, I consider in particular the minjung church’s and the alternative-life movement’s confuence of multiple cultural and social constituencies in relation to Kim and the Dureong collective’s vision of a new art and community.

This paper examines a number of Korean artists-Whanki Kim, Po Kim, Byungki Kim, Lim Choong-Sup, Min Byung-Ok and etc-working in New York in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on their motivations to head for the U.S. and their life and activity in the newly-emerged city of international art. The thesis was conceived based upon the fact that New York has been one of the major venues for Korean artists in which to live, study, travel and stay after the Korean War. Moreover, the United States, since 1945, has had a tremendous influence upon Korea politically, socially, economically, and, above all, culturally. This study is divided into three major sections. The first one attends to the reasons that these artists moved out of Korea while including in this discussion, the long-standing yearning of the Korean intelligentsia to experience more modernized cultures, and American postwar cultural policies that stimulated them to envision life beyond their national parameters, in a country heavily entrenched in Cold War ideology. The second part examines these artists' pursuit of abstraction in New York where it was already losing its avant-garde status as opposed to the style's cutting edge cache in Korea. While their turn to abstraction was outdated from New York's critical perspective, it was seen to be de rigueur for Koreans that had developed through phases from Art Informel in the 1960s to Dansaekhwa (monochromatic paintings) in the 1970s. The third part focuses on the artists' struggle while caught between a dualistic framework such as Korea/U.S, East/West, center/margin, traditional/modern, and abstraction/figuration. Despite such dichotomic frames, they identified abstract art as the epitome of pure, absolute art, which revealed their beliefs inherited from western modernism during the colonial period before 1910-1945. In fact, their reality as immigrants in America put them in a diasporic space where they oscillated between the fixed, essentialist Korean identity and the floating, transforming identity as international artists in New York or Korean-American artists. Thus their abstract and semi-abstract art reflect the in-between identity from the diasporic space while demonstrating their yearning for a land of political freedom, intellectual fulfillment and the continuity of modern art's legacy imposed upon them over the course of Korea's tumultuous history in the twentieth century and making the artists as precursor of transnational, transcultural art of the global age in the twenty-first century.

Pliny the Elder said that multiple cultures agree that the painting began as a shadow trace. A daughter of Butades, the potter in Corinth, traced an outline around a man's shadow, and it was the very beginning of painting. In this anecdote, the profile, i. e. the portrait substitutes body of the absent lover. It makes the absent body present and replaces his place. In this context Hans Belting put the anthropological value to this visual practice. Human being made images to cope actively with the shock of death and the disappearing of body. With the aid of the representation of the bodily presence, the image struggles to resist the death. This paper is a study on the critical meaning of representation in the context of bodily survival by image. The representation is the paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as 'there' and 'not there' at the same time. So the connection between image and the body would be suspicious. Although this relation was tight in the ancient shadow painting and the medieval effigies, the modern visual practice forsakes this connection and exposes the trick of representation. It insists that image was not real and even expels the medieval visual practice from the boundary of fine arts. The genealogy of the portraiture is formed by two different visual practices. The belief and the disbelief in the image are observed in the process of representation and anti-representation, and this ambivalence transforms the ontological meaning of portrait in the visual representation.

Capriccio which has emersed in Italy of the 18th century is a new genre of the landscape painting. This genre represents reality, but it is very artificial product correspondingly its concept and character. It's birth place is distributed on various regions in Italy, but the main stage was Rome. Till the middle of the 18th century Rome was the Holy city of the Grand tour, the home of the Neo-Classicism and furthermore the field where archaeology and art history began to be instituted. On such historical situation the Capriccio came out and was recognized as the best popular genre in the visual art. It was favor of the art collection with the antiquity together and reflected the consciousness of the contemporary to the ancient. This study will examine the phenomena in the newly-developed archaeology and with few representative works of Giovanni Paolo Pannini as central term consider the Capriccio and the archaeological connotation. The systematical and institutional archeology which appeared at the age of the Enlightenment, on the contrary to the critical theories at the same time against capriccio, because it was regarded by them as paradoxical and too much sensitive, utilized it as a theoretical method very actively. Some among Historians and archaeologists did it, especially Francesco Bianchini distinguished the capriccio from simple imagination and made it a capacity of the knowledge. And through it he wanted to find out the historical truth. The visual art was influenced and encouraged by such attitude of the archaeology. However it's output spreaded out in various courses. While Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the best known Capriccist of the 18th century, tried to revive the antique through the epical value and his own imagination, Pannini gave priority to the strict historical research. In the such context Panni succeed Giovanni Battista Nolli who made the great map of the city Rome. Their Capriccio profited motive and was inspired by the historians and archaeologists such as Bianchini and Muratori. The Capriccio reflects not only the academic and popular interest for the antique, but also influenced on the upcoming scientific archaeology vice versa. It caused by their reasonable Interpretation and restoration of the antique through the visual medium. Finally as archaeological landscape Pannini's Capriccio is a historical case, in that the Capriccio applied the theoretical method of the archaeology to make art. It served as a momentum for the connotation to the archaeological thought.

The tradition of the representative art style in the Sinosphere, Shanshui hua, expresses the traditional representation of the harmony and principle of the universe. This tradition is reflected in the Chinese garden. These Chinese gardens were precisely the three-dimension representations of Shanshui hua, a visual form of abstract expression of the oriental philosophical thinking. This research determines and draws attention to the vestiges of the reflection of Shanshui hua in the European gardens through visual art and culture. It will also approach the two subjects, Shanshui hua and garden, from a transcultural view to integrally analyze visual art. The appearance of Anglo-Chinese gardens, reflecting Shanshui hua, foreshowed a big change in traditional European gardens. This is a concrete example of the transcultural phenomenon. This has formed the typical naturally curved English gardens in the gardening history. This also divided these English gardens completely from the symmetrical, geometrical French gardens. This study considers the influence and the reverberation of Shanshui hua reflected on European gardens in the European culture. The cultural exchange of European and Chinese styles in the 18th century left an impact on the European gardening style history. Finally, this study analyzes the origin of these Anglo-Chinese gardens and its content to approach it with a transcultural view as a research methodology.

As the great catastrophe in the modern and contemporary history of China, the Cultural Revolution(CR) is an object, which must have sutured the past of darkness. At the same time it is a continuous event and also a scar of memory. In other words, for history is “a dialog between the past and the reality”(E.H.Kar), CR intervenes in the reality and, on the contrary, the reality recomposes CR. From this point of view, CR is a historical event, which so far is not ended, and it is an object of memory, which is still being composed at the moment.As the saying: “Poetry is greater than history”(Aristoteles), artistic works more intensively refect the past. The works related to CR can not be an exception. And CR is endlessly exposed in the contemporary Chinese fne arts and the works of the contemporary Chinese artists—Wang Guangyi, Yue Minjun, Zhang Xiaogang and others are proved to be those who suffer from the trauma of CR and who feel no liberty from CR. For example, CR probably is a symbol showing the “identity” of the Chinese artists. And the diversity of the symbol is the experience and pattern of the dialog between artistic works and CR (i.e., intervention in reality). For example, with withering of grand-narrative and appearance of micro-narrative, the CR critical works of Guan Zhoudao were the root of the Chinese fne arts in the late 70s and early 80s. In the contemporary cultural situation, the literary works about CR actively analyzed the history (CR) from the personal point of views and explained in the way of monolog and micro-method led the 1990s’ works. In this way they tried to recompose the history “randomly”, like looking at reality with their own eyes. In this process, CR is continuously exposing new features and the real facts are appearing before us as unfamiliar phenomena. This is a way of combination and “reappearance” of contemporary arts and reality. In conclusion, the purpose of this article is to make it possible to see a section of the contemporary Chinese fne arts through the study of the icon image of CR and to analyze the way of fne arts recomposing the history and the intervening in the reality. In this sense, the author has entitled the article “Icon and Form”. It means how to reshape (the present) the typically formed icon of the CR (the past).

This paper analyzes six different ways of articulating the relationship between art and politics. It calls attention to the differences that lurk behind the seemingly simple phrase—everywhere in vogue today—the “politics of aesthetics.” Five of these models are drawn from contemporary discussions regarding the politics of art. The last model is the attempt to develop an account of the politics of aesthetics that is faithful to the diffcult and ambiguous dimensions of the aesthetic experience that were hinted at by the texts of classical philosophical aesthetics. Most notably, this paper is concerned with the idea that the aesthetic experience can be understood as a form of disinterested contemplation—one that is not reducible to cognitive or moral considerations—and with some of the consequences that this entails. It explores some of the political signifcance that can be attributed to this idea of disinterested contemplation, arguing that the aesthetic should be understood as a withdrawal from the world’s pre-established meanings. Unlike some of the other thinkers discussed in this paper, this author doubts that a single, uniform meaning can be ascribed to the aesthetic experience. I thus argue that we need to approach the aesthetic through the networks of textual signifcance that have been built up around it. Throughout this paper, I attempt to explain how the efforts to link art and aesthetics to politics simultaneously give rise to ideas about the nature of the human community. In looking at the sixth and fnal model, what I have called the “anarchical politics of aesthetic ambiguity,” I argue that the aesthetic tradition offers a rather unique way of understanding the relationship between the individual and the community. Here, we see that the aesthetic is prone to a number of paradoxes, central among them the one that makes art the bearer of a solipsistic pleasure in which we nevertheless discover our capacity for genuinely communicating with others, outside of clichés and banalities.