Contemporary Korean art has garnered a place in the narrative of Western contemporary art with Nam June Paik and Ufan Lee, who had retrospective exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum in 2000 and 2011, respectively. Although both were born in Korea, they left at a young age. Along with these two stars, the recent story of contemporary Korean art has focused on Lee Bul, Do Ho Suh, and Kimsooja, among others, who have likewise attracted attention at international art institutions and fairs in recent years. Generally excluded in the Western narrative are the talented young or established artists who live and work in Korea. Although Korean government-sponsored exhibitions are steadily gaining global visibility and a plethora of domestic Korean artists take part in the biennale circuit, a holistic and critical view of contemporary Korean art has been curiously absent. In an attempt to fill this gap, Korean Eye: Contemporary Korean Art, edited by Serenella Ciclitira, makes an excellent contribution.

This book grew out of the 2010 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London, Korean Eye: Fantastic Ordinary, which then traveled to the Art House in Singapore, the Seoul Museum of Art, Gyeonghuigung, and the Standard Chartered’s Jeil Building, also in Seoul. The show stemmed from the 2009 exhibition at the Saatchi gallery, Korean Eye: Moon Generation, which attracted over 250,000 visitors, making it a record-breaking exhibition for Korean contemporary art. These ostensibly successful events were the result of the curatorial efforts of David Ciclitira, founder of Korean Eye, the organization tapped to organize the annual Korean Eye exhibitions in 2011 and 2012. In line with the established format, Korean Eye is, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue containing short essays by five contributors, followed by the artists’ works and their biographies.

Youngna Kim, a well-known specialist in Korean modern art, offers “A Brief History of Modern Korean Art” to set the historical stage for this book. Kim briefly discusses Korean modern art under Japanese occupation (1910–1945), and describes postwar Korean art. In Kim’s account, the first postwar avant-garde movement was initiated by the young art students Park Seo-bo, Kim Tschang-yeul, and Chung Sang-hwa, who attempted to identify Korean abstraction in their work as distinctive from that found in their Western counterparts.

Kim’s explication of the politics of national identity is clearly contested in the Monochrome painting (dansaekjo) of the 1970s by Park Seo-bo, Yun Hyong-Keun, and Ha Chong-Hyon. Evoking the traditional monochrome Korean ink-style painting, this movement consciously distanced itself from Western art movements and Minimalism by its diversity of styles and practices. The subsequent period, referred to as the Art of the Masses (Minjung art) under the dictatorial regime of President Chun Doo-hwan, moved beyond the ontological quest characteristic of the Monochrome painters and toward a search for political causes in the everyday realities of the country. The capitalistic economic boom of the late 1980s gave rise to an expanded class of nouveaux riches and skyrocketing real estate, providing the Art of the Masses fertile subjects for social activism.

A number of young Korean artists in their thirties and forties, catalogued in Korean Eye, would have been exposed to the international globalism of the 1990s, with its cultural and financial euphoria that culminated in the formation of the Gwangju Biennale in 1995 and a number of corporate art museums and galleries, and which in turn ended with the financial crisis of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1997. Kim notes that “such exhibitions are important not only for those who appreciate art, but also as cultural events connected to tourism,” acknowledging that Korean contemporary art is closely related to the “lucrative potential of combining art and business” (19). The chronological discussions on the different decades are somewhat generalized for the non-Korean audience who may not be knowledgeable about twentieth-century Korean history. This approach persists throughout the catalogue, which gives it a quality that perhaps affects how one weighs the value of this book.

Jiyoon Lee enlists Korean’s significant involvements in international exhibitions such as Documenta 12 in 1989 (the Korean contributor was Yook Keun Byung) and the Daejeon Expo Art Show in 1993, not to mention Korean art fairs such as the Pusan International Contemporary Art Fair in 1998, and others, which mark the flourishing Korean contemporary art scene in the 1990s and 2000s. Lee’s chapter, entitled “Artist’s Responses to Globalization and Post-Modernity,” positions Do Ho Suh, Osang Gwon, Jeon Joonho, Cho Duck Hyun, Lee Bul, and Kimsooja within this scene, yet is problematic because it does not critically engage the concept of “Korean-ness” in the context of globalization and post-modernity, a subject sharply debated today by Korean critics, theorists, and art historians.

Daehyung Lee, the third contributor, was also a curator for the 2009 and 2010 exhibitions and notes the diversity of young Korean artists born in the 1960s who experienced cultural and psychological euphoria and liberalism. Lee’s categorization of contemporary Korean art is divided into several themes: “identity,” “hybrid culture,” “staged fantasy,” “landscape,” and “playing reality.” These themes vividly summarize the types of works produced by this younger generation of Korean artists, whom Lee declares as “marching into a new era,” signaling Lee Yong Baek as the Korean representative for the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Originally, the 2010 exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery focused on ten artists: Bae Chan Hyo, Joonsung Bae, Osang Gwon, Yong In Hong, Jeon Joon Ho, Yong Ho Ji, Kim Dong Yoo, Hyunsoo Kim, Park Eun Young, and Meekyoung Shin; when the show traveled to Korea, it featured twelve artists, many of whom were not well known to those in the Korean art world. The book, however, includes seventy-five artists and a wide range of themes and media. This broadened scope serves the purpose of the volume well. The curator emphasizes departures from Western idioms and trends, requiring further explanation about features related to the vernacular in these works. There is also a need to examine the rationale behind the inclusion of the artists chosen for the book as well as the exclusion of well-known contemporary artists from the Saatchi exhibition in London.

In “Development of a Market,” Rodman Primack elucidates the changing markets and Korea’s awareness of commodification as well as its driving power through the mechanisms of biennales, media art exhibitions, and so on. Whereas Primack explains the current position of contemporary Korean art in relation to the art markets, Chang Tsong-Zhung’s “Eye on Korea,” a three-page essay, offers a more personal view of it as “[negotiating] the legacy of Western modernism and its own history . . . conscious about its own difference and cultural character” (43).

It is satisfying to see this first Skira publication on contemporary Korean art for English-speaking readers. The objectives set forth by Korean Eye’s international curatorial team are borne out by the careful editing and international attention to exhibition venues. Nonetheless, there are some discernible flaws.

Foremost among my observations is that the book, despite its being based on the exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, is strangely absent of scholarly criticism or literature by Korean art critics, specialists, and curators. Furthermore, there are no serious footnotes or bibliography; indeed, lacking in this almost 400-page tome is a list of critics and references. There is a strong consensus among a number of critics, curators, and artists in Korea that contemporary Korean art, after the 1997 IMF in Asia, has moved toward commercialization, as attested to by the phenomenon of young artists eagerly pursuing top galleries, such as in the case of the Young British Artists (YBAs). This trend has turned curators into curatorial dealers. I think a book and exhibition of influence could exert curatorial critical power and shape interpretations. After this groundbreaking book, one hopes to see further writings from the not-for-profit Korean Eye organization.

If this curatorial project attempts to build an alternative inventory of contemporary Korean art, then its critical intentions need to be further posited, inasmuch as the book may well produce “the Saatchi effect” whereby young artists benefit from Saatchi’s art-world power and status, and it will be considered the contemporary art book on Korea for English readers who do not have access to Korean texts. Additionally, the critical perception of what is happening inside and outside Korea in the long term will make this kind of project, as well as the art market for Korean contemporary art, sustainable and strong.

Another aspect of the book that needs to be discussed involves the criteria for the artists selected for the exhibitions, which is not examined in depth here. Can we say these artists represent contemporary Korean art in the West? Or, do they represent “alternative” individuals and voices from institutionalized contemporary art in Korea? The book needs to offer a clearer explanation of these questions. Another problem with the catalogue, common to many of its kind, is over-generalization, which is often the case when targeting a wide audience. The end result invariably flattens the complicated world of contemporary Korean art. One misleading impression is that Korean art is still “there” with them, whereas Western art is “here” with us. There is, as well, the usual, minor confusion in the use of last and first names, depending on whether artists present their names Western or Asian style. Without a list of artists arranged by last names in alphabetical order, readers unfamiliar with the Korean language could easily be confused. Even from this perspective, there is no arguing the importance of this substantial introduction to contemporary Korean art.