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Jane Jin Kaisen, Offering (still), 2023. © Jane Jin Kaisen
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Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at MASI Lugano, K-NOW! Korean Video Art Today invites readers to reflect on the role of video art as a tool for perception, memory, and the narration of the contemporary.
Featuring essays by Francesca Benini and Je Yun Moon (curators of the exhibition), as well as Adeena May, the catalogue provides an overview of the history of video art in Korea, while also examining the video medium itself and the broader Korean art scene.
Interviews with the participating artists—Ayoung Kim, Chan-kyong Park, Jane Jin Kaisen, Sungsil Ryu, Sojung Jun, Heecheon Kim, Onejoon Che, and 업체eobchae—offer further insight into the genesis and significance of the works presented in the exhibition.
Below you can read an excerpt from the essay by Francesca Benini featured in the publication.
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Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (still), 2022. © Ayoung Kim
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Video Horizons from Korea
by Francesca Benini
South Korea (henceforth referred to as Korea) has a fascinating recent history: In the space of just sixty years, it has undergone momentous change, transforming itself from a nation devastated by war into a leading economic and technological power. Following a twentieth century marked by violent oppression,[1] the road to democratization began in the late 1980s, accelerated by the 1988 Olympics, when perceptions of the country began to change, although its level of popularity was still far from what it would reach in the twenty-first century. A crucial turning point was the Asian financial crisis of 1997, which devastated the Korean economy but, at the same time, pushed the government to pursue new resources. With dedicated funding, promoting and exporting culture soon started to play a strategic role in the country’s development and international image.
Commencing in the 1990s, Korean popular culture began to spread throughout the world, becoming the now extensively studied phenomenon known as “Hallyu,” or the “Korean Wave.”[2]
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Sojung Jun, Green Screen (still), 2021. © Sojung Jun
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In the introduction to the catalogue of Hallyu! The Korean Wave, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Rosalie Kim writes that “Hallyu emerged from this context [post–financial crisis], at a time when cultural policies, creative industries and digital technologies converged, sowing the seed for its development into a tech-savvy cultural powerhouse that would lead the field in an era of social media and digital culture by the dawn of the twenty-first century.”[3]
As is often the case, the convergence of several factors enabled this rise. Innovation and the propagation of technology and media amplified the force of the wave’s spread, while the opening up of markets, which characterized the whole of Asia in the late 1990s, allowed the government to capitalize on culture, supporting its export with the same determination that had previously been devoted to cars and electronics.[4]
CONTINUE READING
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Chan-kyong Park, Citizen’s Forest (still), 2016. © Chan-kyong Park
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[1] Korea was under Japanese colonial occupation from 1910 to 1945. At the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the country was divided along the thirty-eighth parallel, under the influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1950 the Korean War broke out, and although it ended in an armistice in 1953, a peace treaty was never signed, making it a frozen conflict. Over the following decades, South Korea experienced harsh repression under military regimes prior to the advent of democracy.
[2] Hallyu is a neologism that was originally coined in mid-1999 by journalists in Beijing, surprised by the Chinese public’s interest in Korean cultural products. They thus dubbed the phenomenon Hánliú, from han (韓), “Korea,” and ryu (流), “flow” or “wave,” hence meaning “Korean Wave.” The same term, pronounced in Korean, became Hallyu (한류), the form now internationally recognized.
[3] Rosalie Kim, “Introduction: The Hallyu Origin Story,” in Rosalie Kim, ed., Hallyu! The Korean Wave (London: V&A Publishing, 2022), 27.
[4] Youna Kim, The Korean Wave: Korean Media Go Global (London/New York: Routledge, 2013), 4.
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