The Internationalization and International Contemporaneity of Korean Modern Art in the 1960s

This paper examines how Korean contemporary art in the 1960s recognized and enacted “international contemporaneity” within the broader trend of internationalization. In particular, it highlights how new movements initiated by young artists in response to the established art scene and the state’s biased cultural policies during the mid-1960s were driven by an emerging awareness of contemporaneity. Unlike the South Korean art world, where such contemporaneity remained weak and delayed, Nam June Paik’s performance in Japan in 1964 can be seen as a pinnacle of international contemporaneity. At the time, the burgeoning avant-garde movements in Europe and the United States frequently intersected both temporally and geographically in Japan, which functioned as a hub for interpersonal networks and artistic actions. Thus, the orientation toward internationalization in 1960s Korean art signaled not merely an outward expansion but a shift toward engaging with contemporaneous artistic practices—a trajectory aligned with the international nature of avant-garde contemporaneity. The year 1964 marked not only a critical moment in Paik’s transition from Germany to the United States, but also a turning point when experimental and performative actions in avant-garde art drew artists into the vanguard. Paik’s own “actions” traversed these international networks with a distinctly pioneering quality, offering an important point of reference for what would later emerge as contemporary Korean art.