'뮤지엄'의 폐허 위에서: 1990년대 한국 미술의 동시대성과 신세대 미술의 담론적 형성

Abstract

Since the 2010s, art historians and critics have paid great attention to the 1990s as the original moment of Korean contemporary art. By the late 1980s, the Korean art community was split between two opposing factions: monochrome paintings (Dansaekhwa) and ‘People’s Art’ (Minjung misul), pure art and politically engaging practices, the institutionally established and the anti-institutional. However, at the beginning of the 1990s, such dichotomy disappeared with the end of the Cold War, the advent of postmodernism, and the emergence of the new generation. It is generally agreed that the advent of the new generation artists led to the long-awaited globalization and contemporaneity of Korean art. Among the thriving artist groups of the late 1980s, in particular, the group Museum, which was organized in 1987 by the young artists in their twenties from Hongik University, such as Nak-beom Koh, Kyeong-ae Noh, Hye-kyeong Myeong, Bul Lee, Seung Jeong, Jeong-hwa Choi, and Seong-min Hong, has been widely acknowledged as the representative group of the new generation that initiated both the theories and practices of contemporary art. Through a series of controversies, the ‘new generation’ was characterized as freely using installation and multi-media, being cynicalor indifferent about institutional authority and political ideology, focusing on the popular culture and commodity, exposing vulgar and kitschy sensibility, preferring the ephemeral projects, and having a playful and light-hearted attitude. This ‘new generation’ was regarded as the outcome of postmodernism as a part of the global phenomenon. Despite the heated debate about the ‘new generation’ and ‘postmodernism,’ however, there has been no deeper analysis about the Museum’s artistic practices beyond the simple labeling of the new generation and postmodernism. Consequently, the explicit bifurcation between the group Museum and the nature of ‘new generation’ has been widely ignored. This research is an attempt to examine the process of discursive construction of the new generation around the activities of the group Museum, and to evaluate the nature of ‘contemporaneity’ in the art of Korea.