The purpose of this case study is to compare two luxury brands’ collaborations with modern Korean artists and the qualitative results achieved by the projects. As argued by J.N. Kapferer (2014), through associations with artists, luxury brands are striving to present themselves as part of a creative industry and as a result elevate and legitimize their brand image. This article focuses specifically on Christian Dior’s Dior Lady Art series and Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines due to the similarity in project structure – the final presentation in form of an exhibition – as well as the objects produced – bags elevated to the status of artworks but still maintaining functionality. Through the selected case studies, this article first explores how partnering with Korean artists enables brands to localize and engage more personally with Korean consumers while building deeper relationships with international consumers by leveraging the continuously growing global popularity of Korean culture. The study then examines how the collaborations contribute to the brands’ goal to present themselves as more authentic – in luxury terms, delivering exceptional experience characterized by high quality, craftsmanship, preciousness, and timelessness (The Quarry Gallery, 2023). This is achieved by providing artists with a platform to reinterpret iconic bags into artwork. Lastly, the article analyzes how, through these limitededition items, the brands are also able to reinforce the idea of luxury as financial investment and a way to build family heritage.

본 연구는 서구에서 기원한 종교적 도상인 ‘피에타’의 한국 작가들의 표현성에 주목하고 그 상징과 의미 작용을 고찰하는데 목적이 있다. 자식을 잃은 어머니의 슬픔을 인간의 가장 극심한 고통이라고 보았을 때 종교를 초월하여 죽은 아들 예수의 시신을 안고 있는 어머니 마리아의 모 습을 표현한 피에타는 고난의 상징으로 보편적 공감의 대상이 된다. 이는 종교적 도상으로서의 차용뿐 아니라 전쟁이나 테러, 재앙과도 같은 사건에서 발생할 수 있는 인간의 고난에 대한 시대 적 상징성을 제시하는 좋은 지표가 될 수 있다. 따라서 가톨릭 교회 미술에서 주로 다루던 피에타 가 현대 미술 안에서 고난의 상징적 표상을 넘어 위로와 공감의 아이콘이 될 수 있으며 또 다른 작 가성이 드러나는 피에타상의 후속 연구에 단초가 되는데 의의가 있다.

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.

After liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945, there was the three-year period of United States Army Military Government in Korea. In 1948, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Republic of Korea were established in the north and south of the Korean Peninsula. The Republic of Korea is now a modern state set in the southern part of the Korean. We usually refer to Koreans as people who belong to the Republic of Korea. Can we say that is true exactly? Why make of this an obsolete question? The period from 1945 when Korea was emancipated from Japanese colonial rule to 1948 when the Republic of Korea was established has not been a focus of modern Korean history. This three years remains empty in Korean history and makes the concept of ‘Korean’we usually consider ambiguous, and prompts careful attention to the silence of ‘some Koreans’forced to live against their will in the blurred boundaries between nation and people. This dissertation regards ‘Koreans’who came to live in the border of nations, especially ‘Korean-Japanese third generation women artists’ who are marginalized both Japan and Korea. It questions the category of ‘Korean women’s art’that has so far been considered, based on the concept of territory, and presents a new perspective for viewing ‘Korean women’s art’. Almost no study on Korean-Japanese women’s art has been conducted, based on research on Korean diaspora, and no systematic historical records exist. Even data-collection is limited due to the political situation of South and North in confrontation. Representation of the Mother Country on the Artworks by First and Second-Generation Korean-Japanese(Zainich) Women Artists after Liberation since 1945 was published in 2011 is the only dissertation in which Korean-Japanese women artists, and early artistic activities. That research is based on press releases and interviews obtained through Japan. This thesis concentrates on the world of Korean-Japanese third generation women artists such as Kim Jung-sook, Kim Ae-soon, and Han Sung-nam, permanent residents in Japan who still have Korean nationality. The three Korean-Japanese third generation women artists whose art world is reviewed in this thesis would like to reveal their voices as minorities in Japan and Korea, resisting power and the universal concepts of nation, people and identity. Questioning the general notions of ‘Korean women’and ‘Korean women’s art’ considered within the Korean Peninsula, they explore their identity as Korean women outside the Korean territory from a post-territorial perspective and have a new understanding of the minority’s diversity and difference through their eyes as marginal women living outside the mainstream of Korean and Japanese society. This is associated with recent post-colonial critical viewpoints reconsidering myths of universalism and transcendental aesthetic measures. In the 1980s and 1990s art museums and galleries in New York tried a critical shift in aesthetic discourse on contemporary art history, analyzed how power relationships among such elements as gender, sexuality, race, nationalism. Ghost of Ethnicity: Rethinking Art Discourses of the 1940s and 1980s by Lisa Bloom is an obvious presentation about the post-colonial discourse. Lisa Bloom rethinks the diversity of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender each artist and critic has, she began a new discussion on artists who were anti-establishment artists alienated by mainstream society. As migration rapidly increased through globalism lead by the United States the aspects of diaspora experience emerges as critical issues in interpreting contemporary culture. As a new concept of art with hybrid cultural backgrounds exists, each artist’s cultural identity and specificity should be viewed and interpreted in a sociopolitical context. A criticism started considering the distinct characteristics of each individual’s historical experience and cultural identity, and paying attention to experience of the third world artist, especially women artists, confronting the power of modernist discourses from a perspective of the white male subject. Considering recent international contemporary art, the Korean-Japanese third generation women artists who clarify their cultural identity as minority living in the border between Korea and Japan may present a new direction for contemporary Korean art. Their art world derives from their diaspora experience on colonial trauma historically. Their works made us to see that it is also associated with post-colonial critical perspective in the recent contemporary art stream. And it reminds us of rethinking the diversity of the minority living outside mainstream society. Thus, this should be considered as one of the features in the context of Korean women’s art.