Korean Avant-Garde Art and Its Socio-Political Roots

This article reconsiders Korean avant-garde art of the 1960s in relation to the socio-political conditions from which it emerged. Existing art-historical narratives have positioned the decade between Korean Informel and Dansaekhwa, interpreting its post-medium approaches as formal experiments derived from international movements. By contrast, this article argues that the April Revolution of 1960 and subsequent student activism fostered a new generational subjectivity that transformed artistic practice. Drawing on contemporary literature, newspaper reports and artists’ testimonies, it examines how young artists rejected painting-centred modernism and expanded art into everyday things and bodily actions. Burning pictorial supports, exhibiting gas masks, staging processions and exposing the artist’s body were responses to realities experienced by this younger generation. The article therefore redefines Korean avant-garde art as an anti-modernist practice through which this generation articulated its reality and political subjectivity.