This study aimed to examine the process of vernacular cosmopolitanism in Korean art in the age of globalization by focusing on the dynamics of binary structures of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and of locality and globalism located in the texts an...
This study aimed to examine the process of vernacular cosmopolitanism in Korean art in the age of globalization by focusing on the dynamics of binary structures of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and of locality and globalism located in the texts and practices since the implementation of art in the modern era. This process includes Dansaekhwa movement of the 1970s, Minjung Misul of the 1980s, 1988 《Olympiad of Art》, the opening of the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale(1995) and the Gwangju Biennial(1995), which reflected the unstable identity of ‘contemporary Korean art’ caught between the issues of the national/the international, the local/the global, abstract art/figurative art, and tradition/modernity, largely due to the influence of colonial modernity and westernization in Korea and became the sites for the imaginary community of artists without borders to exchange ideas and dialogues and to implement the so called ‘global art’ in the consciousness of artists in Korea. This process reveals that the issues of globalization and cosmopolitanism gradually evolved in the history of Korean contemporary art backed by cosmopolitan artists who were conscious of globalization and the transnational art systems such as global biennials.