Plastic tradition: Jeong-hwa Choi’s artworks and the work ethic of Korea’s developmental era

Abstract

This study is an attempt to analyse the work of Jeong-hwa Choi (b. 1961), one of the most prominent Korean contemporary artists, in relation to Korean tradition. The ‘work’ here refers not only to the artwork as an artistic object, however, but also to the physical work as manual labour. Accordingly, ‘tradition’ also has a double meaning, designating not only material heritage and inherited styles, but also the strong commitment to labour embodied by the Korean traditional work ethic, and all its incumbent social implications, historical constructions and ideological contexts. Throughout his career, Choi has frequently referred to the ajumma, or middle-aged Korean woman, as his primary source of inspiration. However, the feminine nature of Choi’s works exists in opposition to the discursive endeavours that various cultural institutions have employed in relation to Korean traditions. For this reason, Choi’s consistent acknowledgment of the ajumma deserves more serious attention as an interpretive framework for his artwork. Indeed, Choi’s works, in both their materials and modes of production, capture the complex social significance of the Korean working women, who provided the ‘manpower’ behind the country’s rapid industrialisation in the mid- to late twentieth century.

Keywords:

• Jeong-hwa Choi
• plastic
• Korean tradition
• Korean monochrome
• Minjung art
• ajumma
• female labour
• work ethic

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at Negotiating Histories: Traditions in Modern and Contemporary Asia-Pacific Art, a symposium organised by the Tate Research Centre: Asia-Pacific at Tate Modern on 21 October 2013. I would like to thank the participants for their responses.

Notes on contributor

Jung-Ah Woo is Assistant Professor in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Postech (Pohang University of Science and Technology), South Korea. Woo earned her PhD in art history from the University of California at Los Angeles (2006), and her MA (1999) and BA (1996) from Seoul National University. Her research area is the post-war art of East Asia and the United States with particular interests in collective memory, historical trauma, and identity politics. She has published her studies in numerous academic journals including Art Journal and Oxford Art Journal, and regularly contributes to the exhibition reviews of Artforum International and www.artforum.com.

Notes

1. Details of the artist’s career can be found on his official home page, www.choijeonghwa.com, and in an interview at http://navercast.naver.com/contents.nhn?rid=5&contents_id=1 (both accessed 17 September 2014).

2. For my review of the show, see http://www.artforum.com/archive/id=40645 (accessed 17 September 2014). Jeong-hwa Choi was granted an opportunity to present a solo exhibition at Ilmin Museum in Seoul (2006) as part of the ‘Artist of the Year’ award that he received from the museum. However, instead of his solo show, Choi curated a large-scale group exhibition, Believe It or Not Museum, in which many Korean contemporary artists participated. Choi also displayed his signature plastic baskets and even sold them to visitors on the spot; but technically, this was not his solo exhibition.

3. Nanjie Yun’s research analyses Choi’s art within the theoretical framework of Frederic Jameson’s cultural logic of late capitalism, with particular attention given to the specific social situation of Korea (N. Yun 2013). Shin Chunghoon focused on Choi’s interior design and architect Cho Geonyoung’s building projects, both of which the author sees as being inspired by ‘moon villages’, poor urban residential areas (C. Shin 2011, 2014). Koh Dongyeon examined Choi’s plastic objects within the broader cultural context of the ‘retro’ from the 1990s (Koh 2012). This research is indebted to these previous studies.

4. Quotations from the artist are taken from a dialogue between the author and the artist on 28 September 2013, unless noted otherwise.

5. For a comprehensive study of monochrome as an artistic movement, see Kee 2013. For a comparison of Seo-bo Park and Ufan Lee in terms of their disparate strategies for distinctive identity formation, see N. Yun 2012. For a critical analysis of Seo-bo Park’s Ecriture and its discursive relationship with Korean traditional aesthetics, see Park 2007.

6. For an understanding of the sociohistorical context of Minjung art, see Sung 1999. Sung introduces Minjung art as the Korean manifestation of global conceptualism in its commitment to social criticism and political activity. For a heated discussion about national tradition revolving around the Minjung art movement, see J. Kim 2012.

7. In September 2014, Kukje Galley opened a major retrospective of the monochrome movement, curated by Jinseop Yoon. Along with the curator, the attending artists, including Seo-bo Park and Ufan Lee, claimed that their ‘silence’ was the only possible means of ‘resisting’ the military dictatorship at the time.

8. ‘Minjung’ is a combination of two Chinese characters designating ‘people’ (min) and ‘mass’ (jung). Discursively promoted as a ‘true historical subjectivity’ by the leftist intellectuals and the university students who led the Korean Democratization Movement, Minjung was conceived as the ‘common people’ who are politically oppressed, economically deprived, and culturally marginalised, but able to rebel against the dominant sociopolitical system. Therefore, the concept was aided by Marxist ideas about class-consciousness; but due to Korea’s specific postcolonial context, it also contained nationalist inclinations. For further discussion of Minjung, see N. Lee 2009, 3–6.

9. For Minjung art’s stance against industrialisation and the Westernisation of Korean society in the 1980s, see H. Kim 2011. Nanjie Yun (2007) sees Minjung art’s embrace of peasant identity and nationalism as a critical reaction against globalisation.

10. Sociologist Won Kim (2005b), in particular, has researched the identity formation of female factory workers in the 1970s from a wide-ranging perspective.

11. See the company’s official website, www.npc.co.kr/English (accessed 17 September 2014).

12. The most popular ritual that is associated with pagoda in Korea is Tapdori. Literally meaning “circling around pagoda,” Tapdori is a folkloric festival, in which people are circling around a pagoda while praying for their health and prosperity.

13. For a brief history of the restoration of the Wongaksa pagoda, see G. Lee 2007.

14. This tendency seems to be accelerating with advanced technology, as illustrated by the following anecdote. At the start of the production of his recent film Snowpiercer, director Joon-ho Bong performed the gosa ritual using an iPad with a photo of a pig’s head, as a courtesy to the foreign staff who would probably have been disgusted by the ritual. This incident seems to be symbolic of the new age, when people’s fear of the ‘real’ makes them prefer the ‘virtual’. Interestingly, with just a photo, there is nowhere to put the actual money; so perhaps the next step will be to incorporate a credit card scanner.

15. In his book, Shim (2013, 18) stated that he and Kim co-wrote the chapter on snobbism in Korean society.

16. Frances Cha, ‘10 things South Korea does better than anywhere else,’ CNN, 29 August 2014, http://edition.cnn.com/2013/11/27/travel/10-things-south-korea-does-best/ (accessed 17 September 2014).

17. From my dialogue with the artist as we walked through the alley in December 2013.

18. For example, in 1975, 70% of Korea’s total earnings from exports came from ‘female manufacturing industries’. For the relationship between female labour and the typical pattern of economic growth in developing East Asian capitalist states, see Han and Ling 1998.