Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. vii, 347 pp. (Figures.) US$39.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-7988-1.
Recently, a certain type of Korean abstract painting has been commanding prices of well over half a million dollars. Called “Tansaekhwa” on the international art market, this art genre’s success has spurred unprecedented attention to its style, both in academic and artistic commercial circles. Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method by Joan Kee provides timely information on this group of painters and their Tansaekhwa works. Kee eloquently historicizes the development and practice of Tansaekhwa, a sub-genre of broader artistic trends in Korea dating to the 1970s. Kee argues that the Tansaekhwa painters’ lack of explicit expression in sociopolitical space under South Korea’s repressive regimes marginalized and ostracized them from the country’s artistic mainstream. She distinguishes Tansaekhwa’s abstract works from both the Western and Japanese Mono-ha abstract paintings, arguing that Tansaekhwa’s “inverted teleology” demonstrates instead strong ties with the historical and cultural particularities of Korea.
The Tansaekhwa paintings’ historical agony and sociopolitical complexes stem from the fact that the genre was born, practiced, and developed predominantly during the 1970s and 1980s, when socially expressive arts, i.e., “participatory arts,” prevailed in South Korea across all genres—visual, performative, and textual. Participatory arts were a reaction against the political repression of South Koreans’ freedom of expression, and Tansaekhwa paintings have often been criticized as being absent and silent during this trend.
The reasons for the Tansaekhwa paintings’ perceived passivity (if not complete silence) is partly attributed to their artists’ early exposure to Western-style abstract paintings while studying in Japan, Europe, or the US—mostly during the period of Japanese colonial rule over Korea. Their pursuit of universalities was another catalyst that might have caused these artists to remain silent on the specific, immediate social agendas of Korea. In the context of the historical imperatives of their society, Tansaekhwa paintings have long been relegated to a peripheral position within Korean artistic circles. Following decades of suspicion and uncertainty regarding Tansaekhwa as a genre, Kee undertakes the challenging task of redeeming the Tansaekhwa paintings and thus restoring their stolen symbolic power.
According to the author, Tansaekhwa was marginalized to an intellectual space that lacked different modes of interpretation. She argues that Tansaekhwa is not limited to a style of resistance. Rather, it requires a particular narrative form that reveals questions of political and social urgency. The author urges readers to leave the “bounds of style, the parameters according to which painting tended to be gauged in Korea and elsewhere” (3) and presses them to look further, to discover the unique arrangement of materials, techniques and process—what she terms “method”—used in the production of Tansaekhwa works. Kee describes “method” as a salient messenger that connects Tansaekhwa paintings to their own historical time and creates/discovers their symbolic relationship and historical space within the Korean society of their period. The author attempts to prove this by highlighting the group’s artistic “actions” of adopting methods, paying special attention to certain forerunners such as Kwon Young-woo, Yun Hyongkeun, Ha Chonghyun, Lee Ufan, and Park Seobo. Kee argues convincingly that their use of materials, colours, and techniques connects them to notions of postwar deprivation, industrialization, social oppression, and the Cold War by means of “methods of spreading,” “methods of bleeding,” “methods of spilling,” and “methods of pushing,” as well as “methods of painting,” as Yi Kyungsung puts it.
The historical particularities for artistic platforms have changed drastically in South Korea since the country’s democratization in 1987, and so have those of international art markets from the 1990s onward. Social demands under the country’s longstanding dictatorship faded away, while the global art markets became much more accessible and receptive to artists of different ethnic and cultural orientations. These historical shifts within and outside of Korea—especially those observed in international art markets—have anointed the Tansaekhwa paintings with the financial and social imprimatur of cultural and ethnic diversity. Thus, the Tansaekhwa painters’ original pursuit of universal, pure, and non-ethnic expressions has (ironically) evolved to meet contemporary demands for historical re-contextualization within its place of origin, while being positioned in the contemporary international art world as authentic and therefore ethnic artwork.
Kee’s attention to forms and method is brilliant, and her theoretical knowledge of contemporary Korean art provides pleasurable reading for even non-art historians like myself. Obviously, the Tansaekhwa is a case of “local meets global,” in which artists capitalize on Korean-ness to separate themselves in a crowded and demanding international market. It should be noted that an effort to redeem “proper” historical representation for Tansaekhwa, however, may overshadow the movement’s other historical context: questions of de-colonialization, which played a substantial role in the trend’s foundation. Addressing this issue will, I believe, broaden the academic effort on Tansaekhwa into the fuller historical redemption Kee seeks, rather than simply the teleological action of apprising readers of Tansaekhwa’s newly obtained iconography outside Korea.
Heejeong Sohn
State University of New York, Stony Brook, USA
pp. 917-919