The memory of the Korean War is about the time period when people lived toughly during evacuation, due to being exposed to the natural climate such as intense cold or heat without any protection, leaving their comfortable home and living in temporary built shelters which were barely enough to avoid the wind. ‘Death is concealed and only the figures of evacuation for survival were expressed, just as how the government ordered. Since the experience of the battlefield is personal and fragmentary, that is broken into pieces, it does not have compatibility. As war is a distorted experience that cannot be placed in a big picture, it is not possible to take a view of the war’s big picture. Having this individualized experience as a common collective memory is an issue and it is the will that people tries to pursue. The reason why the evacuees from north to south, and as well as from the south to further south were all able to be adopted as the theme of artworks due to the military action that emptied the occupied territories of the North Korean Army under the forced removal command. In such situations, the natural state of the ‘snow’ was like a symbol of the 1.4 Recession. The group of people who were thrown into the intense cold displaced the war damage of loosing their base livelihood, and symbolized the obedient citizens who faithfully follow their government’s command. The figure of advocating anti-communism is projected as a figure of a refugee during cold winter-time and it contains ones past which he or she obeyed its own country’s commands. Evacuation, especially the evacuation during the winter is a visual device that can confirm these kinds of country’s command. The consequences were same for the artists as well. Therefore, the situation being communal could be found due to the individual experiences during war are ideological. The image of the refuge shown in the picture played the role of strengthening the consciousness of defecting to South Korea into the meaning of the ‘Finding Freedom.’ I would like to express that the reason of them leave their home during the harsh winter is in order to avoid the oppression of the Communist Party. The evacuation that people went through was not to ‘Finding Freedom’, but ‘To Survive’. Later, this evacuation has been imprinted as a behavior of choosing free Republic of Korea, which was an ideological issue. Anti-communism was the rule of survival in South Korea society, and people have the tendency to remember what they want to remember. As it is not the people who possesses an incident, but the memory that possesses ones, people cover their memory with disguised plots in order to forget the violence and to live a different prologue. They share the incident of violence as a hurtful memory. The tragedy of the Korean War was the result of Ideology and being in between the powerful nations’ rights, but the violence during the war has been depicted as a natural disaster, which was the evacuation in heavy snow.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the responses of artists on nuclear experiences through an analysis of the nuclear images represented in contemporary Japanese art. Japan has previously as twice experienced nuclear disaster in 20th century. The first atomic bombs were dropped in 1945 as well as the 5th Fukuryumaru, Japanese pelagic fishing boat, exposed by hydrogen bomb test operated by the US in 1954 nearby Bikini atoll. Due to Tsunami taken place by the great earthquake that caused the meltdown of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in March 2010, Japan is being experienced a nuclear disaster again. Despite practical experiences, comtemporary Japanese art has avoided the subject of nuclear disasters since the end of the Asia-Pacific War for a variety of reasons. Firstly, GHQ prohibited to record or depict the terrible effect of atomic bomb until 1946. Secondly, Japanese government has tried to sweep the affair under the carpet quite a while a fact of nuclear damage to their people. Because Japan has produced numerous war record paintings during the Second World War, in the aftermath of the defeated war, most of Japanese artists thought that dealing with politics, economics, and social subject was irrelevant to art as well as style of amateur in order to erase their melancholic memory on it. In addition, silence that was intended to inhibit victims of nuclear disasters from being provoked psychologically has continued the oblivion on nuclear disasters. For these reasons, to speak on nuclear bombs has been a kind of taboo in Japan. However, shortly after the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the artist couple Iri and Toshi Maruki visited to ruin site as a volunteer for Victim Relief. They portrayed the horrible scenes of the legacy of nuclear bomb since 1950 based on their observation. Under the condition of rapid economical growth in 1960s and 1970s, Japanese subculture such as comics, TV animations, plastic model, and games produced a variety of post apocalyptic images recalling the war between the USA and Japanese militarism, and battle simulation based on nuclear energy. While having grown up watching subculture emerged as Japan Neo-Pop in 1990s, New generation appreciate atomic images such as mushroom cloud which symbolizes atomic bomb of Hiroshima. Takashi Murakami and other Neo-Pop artists appropriate mushroom cloud image in their work. Murakami curated three exhibitions including <Little Boy: the Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture> and persists in superflat and infantilism as an evidence in order to analyze contemporary Japanese society. However, his concept, which is based on atomic bomb radiation exposure experience only claimed on damage and sacrifice, does not reflect Japan as the harmer. Japan has been constructing nuclear power plants since 1954 in the same year when the 5th Fukuryumaru has exposed until the meltdown of Fukushima Nuclear Plant although took place of nuclear radiation exposures of Three Mile and Chernobyl. Due to the exploding of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, Japan reconsiders the danger of nuclear disaster. In conclusion, the purpose of this paper may be found that the sense of victim which flowed in contemporary art is able to inquire into the response of artist on the subject of nuclear as well as the relationship between society, politics, culture, and modern history of Japan and international political situation.

In terms of element and process, art today has already been fully systemized, yet tends to become even more systemized. All phases of creation and exhibition, appreciation and education, promotion and marketing are planned, adjusted, and decided within the order of a globalized, networked system. Each phase is executed, depending on thesystem of management and control and diverse means corresponding to the system. From the step of education, artists are guided to determine their styles and not be motivated by their desire to become star artists or running counter to mainstream tendency and fashion. In the process of planning an exhibition, the level of artist awareness is considered more significant than work quality. It is impossible to avoid such systems and institutions today. No one can escape or be freed from the influence of such system. This discussion addresses a serious distortion in the selection system as part of the system connotatively called "art museum system,"especially to evaluate artistic achievement and aesthetic quality. Called "studio system" or "art star system," the system distinguishes successful minority from failed absolute majority and justifies the results, deciding discriminative compensations. The discussion begins from work by Hunter Jonakin and Dan Perjovschi. The key point of this discussion is not their art worlds but the shared truth referred by the two as the collusive "art market" and "art star system." Through works based on their experiences, the two artists refer to these systems which restrict and confine them. Jonakin’s Jeff Koons Must Die! is avideo game conveying a critical comment on authoritative operation of the museum system and star system. In this work, participants, whether viewer or artist, are destined to lose: the game is unwinnable. Players take the role of a person locked in a museum where artist Jeff Koons’retrospective is held. The player can either look around and quietly observe the works, which causes a game-over, or he can blow the classical paintings to pieces and cause the artist Koons to come out and reprimand the player, also resulting in a game-over. Like Jonakin, Dan Perjovschi’s some drawings also focuses on the status of the artist shrunken by the system. Most artists are ruined in a process of competition to survive within the museum system. As John Burger properly pointed out, out of the art systems today, public collections (art museums) and private collections have become "something unbearable." The system justifies the selection system of art stars and its frame of reference, disregarding the problem of producingnumerable victims in its process. What should be underlined above all else is that the present selection system seriously shrinks art’s creative function and its function of generating meaning. In this situation, art might fall to the level of entertainment, accessible to more people and compromising with popularity. This discussion is based on assumption and consciousness on the matter that this situation might cause catastrophic results for not only explicit victims of the system but also winners, or ones defined as winners. The system of art is probably possibleonly by desire or distortion stemmed from such desire. The system can be flourished only under the economic system of avarice: quantitatively expanding economy, abundant style, resort economy in Venice and Miami, and luxurious shopping malls with up-to-date facilities. The catastrophe here is ongoing, not a sudden emergence, and dynamic, leading the system itself to a devastating end.

1799 Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos with 80 aquatint etchings. On 6 February he advertised it on the front page of the Diario de Madrid. The long advertisement which began with "a collection of prints of capricious subjects, invented and etched by Don Francisco Goya" informed purpose, themes and methods of this collection of prints. According to this advertisement Goya "has chosen as subjects for his work, from the multitude of follies and mistakes common in every civil society and from the vulgar prejudices and lies authorized by custom, ignorance or self-interest, those that he has thought most fit to provide material for ridicules, and at the same time to exercise the artist's imagination." The text emphasized that the 'author' of this series didn't to want to criticise any individual and to be a copyist. From his phantasy Goya invented many creatures like the anthropic, humanized animals etc.. With Los Caprichos he stood on the threshold to Romanticism. The early researchers of Los Caprichos classified its author, Goya as an enlightened intellectual. The similarity of the themes of the series with the subjects of the Enlightenment, his some enlightened 'friends' and the idea to avoid the prevalent mystification of his life supported this theory. But this trend became revised since the 80's of the last century. This made possible to research Goya's works in new perspective and to see that Goya didn't criticise the Spanish society and his contemporaries. Rather he showed its reality and parodied through creatures which are mixtures of the reality that he observed, and visions that he invented. Characters and scenes in Goya's prints are ambiguous and equivocal. They have the values which are defined by the dualistic metaphysic in Europe as oppositional, like good and evil for example, at the same time. Goya himself also appeared in various types in this series. This ambiguousness, or "polyphony", as Jennis Tomlinson defined, is a symptom of the decay of the belief in the Enlightenment which spreaded in Europe as a result of the attack of Bastille and the French Revolution. Goya's self-portrait in pl. 43 of this series, "El sueño de la razon produce monstruos" shows the complex psychology of him and his contemporaries as well. As the rest etchings after this print show witchcraft and monsters reside in the world in which the reason of the Enlightenment and the through the reason weakened God's rule lost their authority. In this thesis I will examine and analyse how Goya represented in Los Caprichos the nature of man and its society, as complex being in which the 'antagonistic' value couple as good and evil couldn't be divided, but are united.

This paper briefly charts the history of excrement as part of the late 20th-century art and explores ways in which excrement functions in the realms of 'High' art. From Piero Manzoni's <Merde d'artiste> to David Hammons' performance <Pissed Off>, excrement has taken a small yet distinctively important part in the development of contemporary art. In an attempt to challenge the hegemony of 'high' art, on the one hand, and resist the commercialization and fetishization of art, on the other, Manzoni allegedly offered his own "shit" preserved in a tin can and sold it at the price of gold of the same weight. Andy Warhol took the legendary Abstract-Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock as the object of parody, simulating Pollock's dripping action by pissing onto the canvas that had been primed with copper-based paint. Warhol's urination produced splashes and stains of iridescent colors just as the patterns on ordinary abstract paintings. In contrast to Pollock's masculine action, Warhol's pissing alludes to the artist's homosexuality. Excrements in art also provoked controversies, debates, and even acts of vandalism against the artworks. The works of Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili infuriated many Christians for the blasphemous use of excrement with religious icons. Politicians engaged in the heated debates on the use of public and national funds in support of some of the 'politically incorrect' contemporary art. In the midst of media sensation and criticisms, these works challenged the conventional understanding of artistic beauty. The preexisting artworks were also targeted. African-american artist Hammons assumed the role of spectator in <Pissed Off> by urinating on Richard Serra's sculpture in the street of New York City. It was an act condemnation levelled at the racist pattern of the way in which large portions of funds and commisions of "public" art tended to promote established 'white' artists, whose work or creative process often failed to reflect the actual public. The use of excrement in art is not unusual in contemporary art practices. With its subversive power, excrement plays an important critical roles in the shaping of contemporary art.

This essay examines Jacques Callot’s Les Grandes Misères et Malheurs de la Guerre (1633) as a moral meditation on war as catastrophe. It also uses Callot’s Miseries to reflect on the nature of catastrophe as such, particularly as “An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things.” As such, catastrophe refers less to nature or the natural gone awry, than it does to the abnegation or suspension of moral aspects of human nature. More than a reflection on war as catastrophe, and catastrophe as fundamentally moral, Callot’s Miseries are a timeless meditation on aspects of the human condition; or on human beings in what amounts to state of nature―as evidenced in times of disaster. Such reflection, again, does not by itself imply that all war―even when catastrophic― is unnecessary, let alone necessarily unjust. But it does suggest that artistic engagement with war understood as catastrophic, may yield insights into human nature that are as important to human self-understanding as those represented in artistic subject matter that is more quotidian.

Charles Stankievech’s 2011 installation LOVELAND includes a wall-sized screen depicting video footage of a barren arctic landscape in an enclose room, painted and bathed in white light, that appears as an extension of the imaged environment. A melodic and industrial musical score emanates from multiple sound panels and as the music increases a cloud of purple smoke becomes visible on the horizon line in the distance and gradually advances toward the viewer until it completely fills the screen. The smoke then remains, rushing about madly and lapping at the border between the screen and the room before it suddenly subsides and the spectator is again left with the desolate landscape. The entire process takes a mere five minutes and then, fixed on an endless loop, begins again. This paper positions LOVELAND as an attempt to simulate a sublime experience of the end of the world through a transposition of the Arctic atmosphere into the gallery space. Encompassing a discussion of the historical and contemporary significance of the Arctic in popular culture, aesthetics and environmental politics, it is suggested that Stankievech employs an apocalyptic trope in reference to the unstable position of the North in the current political and ecological climate. Revisiting critiques of modernist exhibition practices and investigating the perceptual and temporal dimensions of the work, this analysis focuses primarily on the experience of the installation’s spectator. Visually, aurally and phenomenologically immersed, the viewer is made subject to, and implicated in, the events unfolding on the screen and within the space. Due to the looping of the video footage, this paper argues that the apocalypse imaged in LOVELAND is presented as an endless event – incessantly enacted, yet infinitely deferred – and that the spectator is enveloped in an uncertain and unceasingly extended present moment.