8 Korean Painters Pushing Feminist Art Forward

This edited excerpt is taken from Korean Feminist Artists: Confront and Deconstruct by Dr. Kim Hong-hee, with a contribution from Kim Hyesoon, published by Phaidon, £59.95 (Phaidon.com)

In Korean art today, women’s art and feminist art are more in the spotlight than ever before. While we cannot be sure if this is just a fad or a true feminist “reset,” a whole series of larger and smaller questions has occurred to me: what do female artists think about this phenomenon, what their visions are, how far feminist art has come, and how it is changing? Perhaps because I am someone who has been working with Korean feminist art since the early 1990s as a curator, critic, and art historian, I had long been wanting to make my own attempt to answer these questions and gain a full grasp of the current situation.

Of crucial note is that while Korean feminism outwardly shares certain aspects with global trends, it also exhibits autogenous characteristics born out of Korea’s particular context. Starting with Minjoong feminism in the 1980s, which emerged from a specific Korean political and social climate, through to the “young feminist” activities of the 1990s and 2000s, to the Net Femi of post-2010, Korea’s feminism is now making significant progress domestically with practical results, such as legalizing abortion and strengthening punishments for digital prostitution. Moreover, contemporary Korean feminism, including Net Femi, still inherits the basic tasks of previous feminism, such as the dissolution of the patriarchy, raising expectations for the future of feminist art that can develop as a series of changes rather than with disconnection. Strengthening the capacity of meaningful exchanges, mutual hospitality and feminine solidarity of the new and old generations is a task that the women artists and the feminist community should continue to pursue.

Below, we highlight eight Korean feminist painters in the book.

B. 1981, South Korea. Lives and works in Seoul.

Jang Pa has been among the most prominent figures in the so-called “feminist reboot” that occurred in the wake of the #MeToo movement in the mid-to-late 2010s. In terms of her attitude, however, her painting appears to have less to do with contemporary “net feminism” and more of an essentialist quality akin to the preceding generation’s postmodern feminism.

Jang’s artistic body of work can be divided into her early period, consisting of a trilogy realized between 2009 and 2014, and her later work, as exemplified by the “Lady-X” series she began in 2015. The former focused on a narrative of cultural critique, assessing the logocentrism that represents the origin of Western civilization and a mainstay of modern subjectivity discourse. The latter examines women’s issues through questions pertaining to differences stemming from gender and sexual orientation, raising objections to patriarchally defined concepts of “femininity,” while offering psychoanalytical reinterpretations of female sexuality and eroticism.

Through her series that emphasize liquid textures, such as “Fluid Neon” (2016) and “X-Gurlesque” (2017)—“gurlesque” being a portmanteau of “girl,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”—or the womb motif and imagery in her “Brutal Skins,” Jang’s canvases are dominated by abject bodily orifices, fetuses rebelling against the mother, incomplete bodies replaced with floating eyes, and carnivalistic, decadent female bodies.

Rather than regarding eroticism as a sexual urge or carnal love, Lee understands it as an instinct and primal life force. As an extension of this, she views erotic art as a cultural struggle and a creative mental activity.

While hair is a symbolic signifier of female sexuality, Lee’s “Beauty” works emphasize the sensuality of hair via fine-grained techniques and exaggerated depictions that undulate across the entire picture plane, simultaneously stimulating and repressing male desire through the power of their delicacy and intensity. Lee’s aesthetic and political message of hair as a physical weapon is made clear in her series “Four Noble Men” (2001), the title of which is a reference to the “four noble plants”—plum blossom, orchid, bamboo, and chrysanthemum—that are commonly found in aristocratic literary painting tradition because of their associations with traditional virtues.

By deploying the inherently erotic medium of hair—a female weapon on par with the needle—Lee has situated her own history as a woman at the place where feminism and eroticism intersect.

B. 1987, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul.

Lee Eunsae is a young painter, yet a mature form of painterly reflection can be discerned in her plastic language of abbreviated yet vibrant shapes, unique colors, and free-flowing brushwork.

The most common motifs in Lee’s work are mass media, anecdotes, or taboo incidents uploaded to social media; stray thoughts she has experienced or imagined; and quick impressions of people around her. The artist decontextualizes these themes through abstraction or caricature, rendering them non-realistic and informal.

Lee’s work is divided into two phases: before and after 2015. The first phase is defined by caricatures of specific incidents, while the second is distinguished by character portraits that capture everyday people in her life and, in particular, the eccentric behavior of women. A number of paintings from the earlier phase were included in the 2015 exhibition “Crack; Interference; Witness” at Gallery Chosun, Seoul. These works appear to be representing something, although it is impossible to know exactly what it is. They transmit a mystery associated with something actively happening and the circumstantial changes this produces: images of the ground collapsing, holes spontaneously forming, or a rippling water surface, as in Stone Throwing (2013). The artist paints a momentary action with the use of snapshot-like, impromptu methods.

B. 1973, Seoul. Lives and works in Seoul.

Using color rather than shapes to represent the visual impressions that she experienced in nature and cities, MeeNa Park’s “color landscape” series [created while studying in the U.S. in the 1990s] took on a pure form of abstraction. Upon returning to Korea in 2000, Park began transforming indoor settings into colored landscapes. For the monochrome abstract work Orange Painting (2002–03), she acquired all the orange that she could get her hands on and began applying the unmixed paints line by line on the canvas to form horizontal bands.

After first gaining attention with her orange paintings, Park began emerging as a new face in abstract painting with her aforementioned “dingbat painting” series. Park transformed Korean swear words, such as gaejiral (“a mean and nasty act”) or gaejasik (“son of a bitch”), into dingbat characters. The result was a variety of adorable symbols, such as people, trains, guns, and houses, that she transformed into paintings marked by winsome images and soft colors and titled with the original Korean words. As if to remind the viewer of the nature of homo ludens—the playful human being—Park’s lighthearted exploration of the dingbat’s linguistic system humanized dry, abstract concepts with humor and poetic sentiment.

B. 1949, Seoul. Lives and works in New York and Kangwon Province, South Korea.

Myong Hi Kim began producing allegorical portraits of women in the mid-to-late 1980s and they had already formed an important feminist strand within her work. These early portraits drew analogies between contemporary women and mythical female figures from art history. The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1986) juxtaposes a white woman in contemporary New York with one of the victims of abduction shown in the 17th-century painting by Nicolas Poussin of the same title; Running Women (1987) placed a female marathon runner next to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s image of the nymph Daphne.

The juxtaposition-based double-painting approach that Kim utilized in her early portraits of women would be formalized into a painting-within-a-painting style in her self-portrait series from the 2000s onwards. In Preparing Kimchi (2000), she juxtaposes her self-portrait with a moving video image within a frame of a willow swaying in the wind and a quote from the “Virtuous Woman” chapter of the Oryunhaengsildo (a Korean text from 1797 containing pictures and stories of loyal subjects, filial sons, and virtuous women worthy of imitation). In the self-portraits, which are also portraits of women in general, we discover Kim the feminist: someone who dreams of female solidarity with her feelings of kinship towards the displaced girls of Central Asia.

B. 1953, Busan. Lives and works in New York.

Notably, most of the figures appearing in Wonsook Kim’s images are either herself or women like her. They appear alone or with a man who is an object of love/hate. Kim lampoons the male/female gender hierarchy and inequality by representing the women as frail, submissive wives under the protection of an exemplary strong and adventurous male.

In Night Drive (1987), the woman naps in the back seat while the man drives along a dangerously rainy road with lightning flashes; in Under the Cliff (1993), Kim contrasts a man crossing the sheer drop of a valley over a rickety single-log bridge with a woman who is contemplating flowers beneath it. Balancing Act (1991) shows a couple walking a tightrope over a raging river with the woman balanced upside down on the man’s shoulders, giving a sense of how difficult it can be to achieve balance between a wife and husband.

Kim also summons the forgotten female heroes of Korean history and allegorizes them in the present tense with her own artistic language, including the legendary goddess Saso, Queen Seondeok, Madame Suro, and the gisaeng (Korean geisha) Hwang Jini. The artist rewrites a new history of women by depicting these “problematic” figures as pioneers, vigorous and bold, and by lauding them as liberated individuals who actively practiced love.

B. 1962, Gangjin, South Korea. Lives and works in Anseong, South Korea.

Jung Jungyeob of the Ipgim group is a “life feminist” who has personally witnessed and experienced the realities of women in their daily lives and their working sites. She produced woodcut portraits of the female laborers who worked with her at the industrial complex. Using woodcut as her medium since it was more transportable than oil painting, allowing for easier creation and reproduction, she created various works, such as Sewing the Blanket (1988), which shows images from the daily experiences of women who continued wearing upbeat expressions even as they went on strike and demonstrated for higher wages, and Cotton Gloves (1987), depicting these essential workwear items hanging on a wall.

Jung also presented a series entitled “First Dinner” at an exhibition of the same name, which was held in 2019 when she received the Lee Ungno Award. The centerpiece of the series was The First Dinner 2 (2019), which referenced the title and composition of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98). In contrast with Western counterparts that have parodied The Last Supper, such as Mary Beth Edelson’s Some Living American Women Artists (1972) or Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974–79), Jung’s work uses an idiosyncratic folk flavor with an everyday quality and autobiographical elements to alleviate the weight and prestige not only of the Renaissance master, but also great women who have left their mark on “herstory.”