Korean Avant-Garde Association

The AG Group's foundation has been contextualized within South Korea's modern and contemporary art history following the various attempts of artists engaging in new and experimental modes of expression.[1] More specifically, the AG Group was active during a period scholars had long overlooked for lack of a coherent, major art movement, caught between the preceding Korean Art Informel movement of the mid-1950s and following the Dansaekhwa painting and Minjung art movement of the mid-1970s.[2]^: 29[1]^: 243

The term avant-garde was introduced to Korea when the country began to embrace and accept Western art and culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Sinheung (신흥 新興) and Jeonwi (전위 前衛) had been terms employed during the 1920s to signal the most novel form of expression, generally understood as abstract painting, and later to the work in advocacy of certain social values, especially of the proletariat.[1]^: 237 Later post-war artists of the 1950s and 1960s embraced Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism protesting realist academicism and the feudalistic system of National Art Exhibitions (국전 gukjeon).[1]^: 238 Artist groups founded during this time were the Contemporary Artists Association (현대미술가협회 hyeondae misulga hyeopoe) and the 1960s Art Association (1960년미술협회 yooksimnyeon misul hyeopoe), which were later merged to become the group Actuel (악튜엘 aktyuel).[1]^{: 238–239} As its leading artists integrated into teaching institutions and the Informel movement lost steam under the Third Republic of South Korea headed by president Park Chung Hee, another generation of artists emerged seeking out and exploring various possibilities of transitions.[1]^: 239 Small-sized artist collectives, such as Origin Society (오리진 orijin), Zero Group (제로그룹/무동인 jerogeurup/mudongin), and the New Exhibition Group (신전동인 sinjeondongin), began to experiment with genres gaining traction in the West, such as geometric abstraction, installation art, and performance art. In 1967, these artists came together to uphold the Young Artists Coalition Exhibition (also known as the Union Exhibition of Korean Young Artists or Combined Exhibition by Young Artists 청년작가연립전 cheongnyeonjakgayeollipjeon) as a push against the dominant National Art Exhibitions and the Informel Art movement. Their manifesto stated: “Informel didn’t provide anything for the last ten years. We are artists as activists who aim to create art after abstraction, art in everyday life, and public-friendly art.”[3] op art, op art, geometric abstraction, sculpture, anti-art, and post-materialist performance was presented in the exhibition, which became a marker for the beginning of a Korean experimental art period.[3] Performance art gained significant traction during this period, becoming increasingly suppressed going into the Fourth Republic and president Park's intensified military regime. Artists adopted this genre of art that could interject into everyday life and in public, especially in the form of happenings, to satirize conventional social values and culture in Korea.[4]^: 77 The Fourth Group (제4집단 jesajipdan), formed in 1967, began staging public happenings that led to debate and commotion within and outside of the Korean contemporary art scene.[1]^: 240

In this lieu of advancing Korean experimental art, a group of artists formed the AG Group in 1969. While following the spirit of the Young Artists Coalition Exhibition but aiming for a more organized attempt, the group aimed to support its practice with critical theory and discourse. Thus the AG Group's activities began with publishing their own Journal AG in September 1969, a significant feat for a time when art-focused periodicals or magazines were nearly absent.[2]^: 32 Their efforts were united under the statement: “The AG has been established to contribute to the progress of Korean art and culture by exploring and creating a new plastic order in the visionless Korean art worlds on the basis of strong consciousness towards avant-garde art.”[5]^: 59

The AG Group organized exhibitions under a singular theme, which is considered one of the first attempts to do so in Korea.[2]^: 32 The AG Group held four group exhibitions and one biennial between its founding and dissolution.[5]^: 59

AG Group's journal, AG, was primarily led by critics Lee Yil, O Kwang-su, and Kim In-Hwan . While there had been artist groups such as Origin Society, Zero Group, and the New Exhibition Group that preceded AG's attempts to propagate experimental and avant-garde art, the AG Group's approach was set apart by its members centering their practices upon theoretical discourse in the journal format.[2]^: 32

A total of four issues were published: the first issue was published in 1969, the second and third in 1970, and its fourth and final in 1971. Each issue balanced the amount of texts written between critics and artists. Such texts introduced contemporaneous art trends and major critical theories hailing from the West, particularly France and the US. This included discussion on land art, conceptual art, and experimental architecture such as that practiced by the British architectural group Archigram.[2]^: 32–33 The first page of each issue declared the AG Group's statement: “The AG has been established to contribute to the progress of Korean art and culture by exploring and creating a new plastic order in the visionless Korean art worlds on the basis of strong consciousness towards avant-garde art (전위 예술에의 강한 의식을 전제로 비젼 빈곤의 한국 화단에 새로운 조형질서를 모색 창조하여 한국 미술 문화 발전에 기여한다).”[5]^: 59

The first 1969 issue was published prior to the group's first exhibition. It presented the names of the following members: artists Choi Myoung Young, Ha Chong Hyun, Kim Kulim, Kim Han, Kim Tchah-sup, Kwak Hoon, Lee Seung Jio, Park Suk Won, Park Chongbae, Suh Seung Won, critics Lee Yil and O Kwang-su, and journalist Lee Yil Hwa. The issue lists Ha Chong Hyun as the publisher and O Kwang-su as its editor. In Lee Yil's essay, “Avant-Garde Art Theory,” the critic explores the concept and role of avant-garde art by quoting French critic Pierre Restany: “Today's avant-garde is not an art of resistance, but an art of participation.”[2]^: 33

Contemporary critics and many later scholars observed that the group and its activities lacked a clear objective of resistance to particular institutions or established art systems, which questioned the group's identification as avant-garde. Recent studies offer various reasons as to why the group seemed to steer away from responding to sociopolitical issues, including its elitist tendencies that gravitated toward their interests in intellectual and theoretical explorations of artistic issues.[2]^: 39 Scholar Sooran Choi, however, argues for a reconsideration of such apolitical characteristic to be in fact the group's “implied association with Western avant-garde art itself functioned as a form of subterfuge that protected them from censorship and persecution” since the anti-Communist, pro-American, authoritarian military regime aimed to rapidly industrialize and catch up to more developed countries in the global stage.[4]^: 78

A universally agreed-upon significance of the AG Group is its organized efforts in backing its artistic practice by writing and publishing. Enabled by the group's membership between artists and critics and their close collaboration in publishing theoretical texts in the form of exhibition catalogs and journals. Inspired by the Paris Biennials, in which Korean artists began to participate in 1961, the AG Group also differentiated from other associations for its goal of creating a platform for young avant-garde and experimental artists at an international scale. Such efforts resulted in aiding the Korean contemporary art scene to include varied practices based on new concepts of artistic mediums and depart from uniform interests in painting, constricted between figurative and abstract art.[1]^: 242