본 연구는 1970년대 중반의 한국 미술 현장에서 두드러진 ‘새로운 평면’에 주목해 형식주의 관점에서 일반화할 수 없는 평면 작업의 개별성을 확인하고자 한다. 이때의 새로운 평면은 국제 무대의 새로운 아방가르드 기획으로, 68혁명 이후 후기구조주의 맥락에서 회화 요소를 통해 회 화 매체를 전복하고자 한 미술 양상으로 설명된다. 국제 조류에 민감하게 반응했던 한국 미술계 역시 1973년의 제8회 《파리비엔날레》를 주요 통로로 동시대 전위를 수용했고, 양식적으로 차용 했다. 구체적으로 이우환의 <선으로부터>(1973), 박서보의 <묘법>(1973), 그리고 이건용의 <신 체 드로잉>(1976)에서 동시대 평면 경향의 영향을 확인할 수 있다. 이 작품들은 1970년대 중반 을 배경으로 반복적 행위가 표상된 평면 드로잉이라는 유사성으로 유비된다. 특히 ‘한국적 모더 니즘’이라는 회화 중심의 서사에서 동시대 전위의 맥락이 굴절된 채 단일 매체로 범주화되기도 한다. 이에 본 논문은 이우환, 박서보, 이건용의 각기 다른 작업 기반을 살펴 형식적 유사성만으 로 일률적으로 규정할 수 없는 평면 작업의 개별성을 논증하고자 한다.

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 While their turn to abstraction was outdated from New York's critical perspective, it was seen to be de rigueur for Koreans that had developed through phases from Art Informel in the 1960s to Dansaekhwa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.