UCLA

This dissertation explores the experimental art scene in the late 1960s and 1970s in South Korea with a central focus on four artists, Kim Kulim (김구림, b. 1936), Lee Kun-yong (이건용, b. 1942), Shim Moon-seup (심문섭, b. 1942), and Lee Kang-so (이강소, b. 1943), who participated in the Paris Biennale in the early-to-mid 1970s. The Biennale served as a vital platform for Korean artists to showcase their experimental art alongside their international counterparts. Under the framework of “untimely matters,” this project examines the structure of the artists’ subversive interventions, which inserted dissonant temporalities in an oppressive society under dictatorship and tackled its regulatory rhythms and progressive narrative. By exploring the diverse mediums that artists experimented with—ranging from painting and installation to film and performative projects—this dissertation sheds light on a rich period situated between two significant art movements in Korea: the postwar abstract painting movement, Informel, and the politically charged democratic movement, Minjung Art (People’s Art). Frequently intersecting artistic experimentation with subversive connotations in a subtle manner, experimental art also diverged from Dansaekhwa (Korean monochrome painting), which rose to prominence as a representative style of Korean sensibility in the mid-1970s.With the notions of environment, displacement, nature, and encounter serving as conceptual underpinnings for each chapter, this dissertation provides a nuanced perspective to fully map out the art of the period, safeguarding it from being read as outright political or artistically derivative. Against the backdrop of the formative years of art criticism, the art market, and art institutions in Korea, this project explores ways in which the four main artists grappled with spatiotemporality, subjectivity, and contemporaneity in their individual and collaborative art praxis. In their early-to-mid 30s, the artists shared aspirations to align with international art movements, explore a distinctively Korean art, and respond to a rapid transformation under oppressive rule. Focusing on their shared historical consciousness based on nonlinear temporality and diverging ideas, this project examines how their untimely interventions posited timely artistic and political questions. The Paris Biennale bore significance at this juncture as a rare opportunity for the artists to directly engage with the international art world beyond Japanese influence, which continued from the colonial era (1910-1945). Despite the conflicting responses the four artists faced in Paris, the Biennale served as a site of cultural encounter, prompting each artist to reflect on their positionality. By tracing visual and intellectual itineraries of the artists and their initiations of group activities and the Daegu Contemporary Art Festival, this dissertation elucidates underexplored trajectories in Korean art history while illuminating a precursory moment of the current global art phenomenon.