Strategic Non-Alignment and Networked Agency: New Generation Art and Institutional Voids in 1990s South Korea

Academic Article

Kunstlicht, Vol. 45: Aesthetics of Non-Alignment
Amsterdam, 2025
Link

Emerging with MUSEUM’s inaugural exhibition in 1987, so‑called New Generation Groups—marked by an explicit distance from fixed ideologies, an emphasis on personal narratives, kitsch-tinged sensibilities, and alternative exhibition formats—coalesced as small, agile constellations. This study examines how New Generation Groups such as MUSEUM, Golden Apple, and SUB CLUB fashioned non‑aligned modes of artistic agency within South Korea’s post–Cold War milieu from 1987 to 1995. In a period when the art field remained polarized—an institutional modernist bloc (Dansaekhwa) closely aligned with American hegemony on one side, and Minjung art drawing on socialist‑leaning principles and anti‑American activism on the other—these groups did not merely reject or skirt the margins of dominant paradigms. Instead, they mobilised temporary infrastructures and collaborative tactics to open new interstitial zones within the existing system. As state‑led cultural democratisation adopted the rhetoric of pluralism while facilitating Segyehwa (globalisation), their strategies bore both generative promise and built‑in constraints.Through case‑based analysis of selected projects, this article traces the formation of hybrid networks by New Generation Groups and their later absorption into institutional and curatorial regimes—revealing a dynamic stratum of 1990s South Korean contemporary art.