한국 동시대 회화에서의 사이버고딕 이미지 연구 = A Study of Cybergothic Imagery in Contemporary Korean Painting

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper aims to analyze recurring imagery in contemporary Korean painting with the concept of “Cybergothic” and to establish it as a period style. The paper reformulates Cybergothic as a category for analyzing the formal group emerging in 2020s Korean painting by synthesizing two theoretical genealogies: Nick Land’s concept of Cybergothic and Mark Fisher’s Gothic materialism. Land provides the realist condition of cybernetic capitalism as a nonhuman abstract machine, while Fisher provides the epistemological condition of how that Real is manifested in human cognition and aesthetic form. Based on these two conditions, the paper analyzes the paintings of three artists—Kim Minhee, Han Jihyoung, and Ham Sungju—with three formal categories: “Synthesis and Fusion of the Body,” “Iconography of Boundary and Transgression,” and “Painterly Translation of the Digital Image.” Through this analysis, the paper demonstrates that the synthesis of bodies, the iconography of taboo and transgression, and the painterly translation of digital images appearing in contemporary Korean painting constitute formal manifestations of the Cybergothic style arising at the threshold between a non-humanly augmented capitalist Real and human reality.