TO CONSIDER what lies outside a world under political or economic duress is to reject the illusion that an unchanging existence is equivalent to harmonious stability. The artist Sung Neung Kyung understood this especially well. Between the mid-1970s and the late ’80s, his considerations of reading, looking, marking, and grouping afforded viewers space for reflecting on the fraught years of authoritarian rule in South Korea and, later, on the flawed promises of democracy. Avoiding the absorption of culture into the hegemonic enterprise of nation-building that seemed interminable by the time South Korean president Park Chung-hee declared martial law in 1972, each of Sung’s works outlined a realm that distinguished communication from content creation, urging viewers to ask how things mean. Yet Sung was equally critical of the self-regard that reduced art and life to squalid contests of power. Through performance, Sung contended that shaping a political imagination requires not only physical stamina and a high level of tedium tolerance but also a firm refusal of self-affirmation as the primary filter through which to process sensory experience. The world is, as he suggests, always about you but never about only you.
Sung participated in his first exhibition in 1964, shortly before fellow students at Hongik University unveiled the earliest known example of performance art in Korea. But it was not until 1973, after he completed a mandatory three-year tour of duty in the South Korean military, that he began his artistic career in earnest.1 Following a brief dalliance with displays of stones reminiscent of those by Lee Ufan,2 Sung turned to the newspaper to wage new battles.3 Then the most popular mode of spreading information in South Korea, newspapers were both weapons and casualties in the escalating conflict between the state and its critics. For one week at the National Museum of Modern Art in Deoksu Palace in Seoul, Sung hung four sheets of the daily Dong-a Ilbo, then well known for its critical stance toward the government. Using a razor, the artist selectively removed articles, leaving only a few pictures and advertisements. Each day, the previous edition of the newspaper would be neatly laid to rest on the gallery floor in an acrylic container that resembled a ballot box yet whose transparency only emphasized the opacity of the electoral process at that time.
Antonio Dias, The Illustration of Art/Dazibao/The Shape of Power, 1972, silk screen and acrylic on canvas, 3′ 11 5⁄8″ × 10′ 4 3⁄4″.
As a source of knowledge ordinary citizens could convert into forms of political participation—from voting to street protest—the newspaper became Sung’s preferred means of exploring the political legibility of daily life. Begun at home two months before Sung performed the work in public, Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on, reads as an attempt at resocialization following the artist’s long years of conscription. The mandatory draft reminded citizens of the nation’s perpetual war with its neighbor to the north, while “peacetime” in civilian life under martial law meant compulsory silence. Sung recounts how the “idea of peace was really about keeping one’s mouth shut. It doesn’t promise harmony; rather, it only guarantees the erasure of dissent.”4 He broke down the viewing experience into four distinct modes: viewers reading the artwork from a distance, in the nominal privacy of their homes versus reading in public; the artist reading the paper out loud as he excises images and text; the silent and oral habits of reading by an unnamed populace that accessed newspapers through household subscriptions; and those same habits of reading, belonging this time to the impromptu assemblies absorbing the daily papers displayed in front of newspaper offices. Sung transformed passive viewing into active reading, insisting that one look for absence even before apprehending what is printed on the page.
Presaging Sarah Charlesworth’s “Modern History” series of prints in the late ’70s, which also stripped newspapers of text, Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on implores viewers to read newspapers not for content but for how their very form shapes the production of knowledge. Functioning like real-time quotes, Sung’s newspaper works belong to an international fellowship of like-minded engagements in the majority of the world then struggling under nondemocratic rule, including Antonio Dias’s silk-screen takes on the dazibao, the large-scale posters dominating public communication during the Cultural Revolution, and Antonio Manuel’s reconfigured flans, paper matrices used to create lead molds in newspaper printing. Made in Brazil under a military regime similar to that governing South Korea, the works by Manuel and Dias—together with those by Charlesworth, Sung, and others—lay bare a world defined less by ideological, social, or economic divides than by what UNESCO director-general Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow described as “one of the greatest forms of inequality in the contemporary world”: uneven access to information.5
Sung Neung Kyung with Newspaper: from June 1, 1974, on, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 1974. Photo: Lee Kyeong-seok.
Most of Sung’s early works were made in discussion with his friends and colleagues in S.T., the loose assembly of Seoul-based artists active from 1969 to 1981 that included Chang Sukwon, Choi Hyojoo, Kim Yongmin, Lee Kunyong, and Yoon Jin Sup. Dissatisfied with existing pedagogical structures, the self-funded S.T. hosted seminars during which members discussed a highly eclectic variety of writings by Hans Haacke, Heidegger, Joseph Kosuth, Laozi, Wittgenstein, Nakahara Yusuke, and Zhangzi, even if the Korean translations were, according to Sung, “not terribly reliable.”6 Among his S.T. colleagues, Sung was unique in distancing himself from what he considered the apathy of an art world that sometimes appeared too insistent on segregating itself from the politics of a state that controlled everything, from which artists could travel abroad to the supply of imported oil paint and film. Location, 1976, addressed the orientation of the artist vis-à-vis interpretation. Sung had himself photographed with a copy of the June 1976 issue of Space, a cultural journal founded in 1966 by de facto state architect Kim Swoogeun that was then South Korea’s primary outlet for art writing. In one image Sung stands still, holding the publication in his mouth like an obedient dog; another depicts him clasping the issue between hands held as if in prayer.
For some of his contemporaries, performance was a way to resist excessive state oversight such as the 1973 Minor Offenses Act, which regulated choices of attire and hair length. But Sung considered performance as something more: a space for speculating on what he described as “condition of living.”7 As he remarked years later, “Art is not a placard.”8 Sung came of age amid the utopian promise of April 19, 1960, which saw the overthrow of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first democratically elected president as well as its first postwar dictator, and he knew too well the limits of direct protest. In the decade that followed, the revolutionary dreams of April 19 devolved into the ironically named Restoration (Yusin) era, with youthful hopes crushed by a state that appealed to an older generation scarred by the privations of war and desperate for a standard of living beyond mere subsistence levels.
Sung Neung Kyung, Location, 1976, nine gelatin silver prints, each 18 5⁄8 × 10 1⁄2″.
Contraction and expansion, 1976, is a compelling thematization of self-control, following Sung’s body as he moves from an upright position to a fetal curl, then finally extends his arms and legs while balanced on his stomach. The work’s title suggests that during the mid-’70s, freedom of thought diminished commensurate to the spread of authoritarian politics.9 Contraction and expansion asks how the rules and instructions central to Conceptual art can disclose how easily rules can become laws operating as pretexts for domination enforced by the threat of punishment. But it also implies that the execution of Conceptual art can play a more active role in highlighting how and when personal action can undo the rules applied to contain bodies within structures governed by a select few.
One of the few vices permitted in Yusin Korea was smoking, and Sung made this the subject of a brief but pithy performance. In pictures, he exudes a relaxed air as he smokes a cigarette until it is reduced to a precarious column of ash. His attitude reads as a small but significant triumph over the deadening pragmatism used to justify the expendability of personal lives—which persisted long after Park Chung-hee’s assassination and the end of Yusin in 1979. The quick smoke break—once an indispensable staple of the workday—is stretched out over nine stages in seventeen photographs, commemorating the concept of rest so devalued throughout Korean society.
Sung Neung Kyung, Smoking (detail), 1976, seventeen gelatin silver prints, each 10 × 8″.
Many of Sung’s works implicitly problematize how postwar citizenship was filtered through state demands for total obedience. Dying for one’s country may have sufficed during the Korean War, but in the second age of Korean national sacrifice, the state required nothing less than unquestioned conformity to impossible and arbitrary standards. In Counting money, 1976, the artist threw small amounts of Korean currency onto a low white plinth while reciting the sums out loud. At the time, small proprieties exuded the force of law among the unacknowledged bourgeoisie, and such an act, even in the context of an exhibition, would have been regarded as almost unforgivably crude, particularly as it so vividly foregrounded a value system that encouraged calibrating human worth to quantifiable metrics.10 One must not “be satisfied with the falsehood of frequency,” as he wrote years later in his mock curriculum vitae under the heading “Solo Exhibitions.”11
Sourced from the artist’s own personal collection, the fifteen chronologically arranged photographs of Mr. S’s half way career, 1977, insist on a time line indifferent to world events, rational chronological systems ordered in regular increments, and linear thinking reinforced by the idea of a future compromised by the imminence of armed conflict. Always in search of perspective, Mr. S’s half way career shows Sung taking stock at age thirty-three, which was then considered the midpoint of the life span of the average South Korean male. Visualizing his autobiography as a record of personal relationships, the installation consists of photographs from childhood on. Faces of family, friends, and artist colleagues peer out, with the last image showing Sung standing in front of documentation of Apple, 1977, another of his sequential performances. There is little in the way of sentiment. Family and group portraits address an unexamined history of colonial social order, reinforced by Japanese ethnographers who reduced Korean lives into regional, biological, and occupational types. Enlarged well beyond the dimensions of a typical snapshot, published newspaper photograph, or yearbook picture, each image bridges the gap between artist and viewer by inviting us to project our own life trajectories onto the work.
Sung Neung Kyung, Counting money, 1976. Performance view, Seoul Gallery, 1976.
Mr. S’s half way career rehearses some of the aims contained in Here, 1975, Sung’s first sustained work with a camera. After asking his father to buy him a Nikon F2 in 1974, the artist began photographing ephemeral works by his S.T. colleagues. Noting how cameras were veritable luxury goods in ’70s Korea, art historian Kim Mikyung points out the then-nascent class divide between artists who could have their works photographed and those who could not.12 Such privilege underwrites Here, which depicts Sung photographing himself in a mirror placed at a three-way intersection in an alley outside his home in Seoul, rotated to show eighteen different backgrounds.
However, the artist seems to disappear from Mr. S’s half way career, displaced by a slew of grainy images. Reflecting his belief that much could be “learned from that which was third rate,” Sung’s deliberately “low quality” images snap to attention as foot soldiers marching against the tide of pictures carefully manage to crowd out even the possibility of other descriptions of a given theme or subject.13 The brilliantly titled series “No relationship to a particular person,” begun in 1977, pivots around a history of photography imbricated in a parallel history of internal violation via gross infringements of privacy in the name of public interest, condoned by the very institution entrusted with safeguarding personal and national security. Sung initated this series by mining newspapers for pictures of faces and rephotographing and silk-screening approximately 110 of them, which he obscured with thin yellow strips across the eyes, the action recalling attempts to ensure the anonymity of victims and criminals. A perverse isonomy emerges, in which public and private figures are rendered equally anonymous in the context of harm that recognizes people only as insitgators or recipients. The strips flattens faces once belonging to bodies in the round while also shrouding preexisting connections a viewer might have with the depicted subjects.
Many of Sung’s works implicitly problematize how postwar citizenship was filtered through state demands for total obedience.
Sung Neung Kyung, Mr. S’s half way career, 1977, fifteen gelatin silver prints. Installation view, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2016. Photo: Netjjae.
Shown at the second Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1974, a major experimental-art exhibition in Korea, An upside down map of world challenges cartographic authority. A large world map is divided into rectangular sections, which are then re-presented as a gridded display next to the dissected original. Sung is sharply attuned to language in a manner echoing that of his cousin the poet Sung Chankyung, and the work’s Korean title (“Segye chŏndo”) carries several loaded meanings. The words literally translate to “complete map of the world,” but chŏndo is also a homonym for “guidance,” “transmit,” and “evangelize.” By weaponizing its facture, the work retools Yves Lacoste’s watershed critique of the map’s susceptibility to political machinations. Whatever instructional force the map once possessed is literally cut into pieces and—in later iterations of the work where sections are assembled flat on a horizontal plinth—brought back to earth.
An upside down map of world was for Sung a “scenario” foreshadowing one of his longest-running series, “Venue.” Begun in 1979, each entry in the series (forty-two exist to date) begins with Sung identifying newspaper photographs bearing editorial markings, usually broken dashes encircling damage or small arrows and crosses marking the scene of an accident, crime, or construction, which the artist describes as “internalized daily violence.”14 The pictures are then rephotographed, with Sung painting his own notations directly on negatives with white ink so that they will appear more prominent than the original markings. Printed and enlarged to the dimensions of standard office paper, the images are arranged in patterns on a wall.
Sung Neung Kyung, Here (details), 1975, eighteen gelatin silver prints, each 3 1⁄4 × 4 1⁄2″.
“Venue” challenges the claim that media publications can mint truths, a point Sung underscored when he described “information as mere taxidermy and the truth as a living, breathing creature.”15 Comically large arrows studding Venue 3, 1980, attempt to “invalidate the editorial gesture” unilaterally instructing readers what to see while also refusing a space for response.16 Stripped of their original captions, the images bait viewers into asking when disclosure in the name of public interest becomes a pretext for illicit surveillance. With every distortion, manipulation, and degradation of published images, Sung emphasized the gap between a fourth estate convinced of its own authority to legitimate representation as truth and a public for whom the politics of representation entailed much more than accepting reported accounts as fact.
Venue 6, 1981, puts into concrete form what the artist imagined as the trail North Korean spies followed while infiltrating the South. “I wanted to convey something of the anxiety those spies must have felt, knowing that as soon as they crossed the border, they were forever excluded from any chance at belonging to a home, a family, or a nation.”17 Rather than arrows, Sung used dashes to track footsteps moving into enemy territory while visually stitching together the work so that the entire installation appears to crawl across the wall. As if to distance “Venue” from potential demands for experimental art to champion liberal democracy, Sung made versions that cast doubt on the spectacularization of electoral politics using press images of the 1985 Korean national-legislature elections. Unsurprisingly, “Venue” appealed to artists associated with the stridently pro-democracy Minjung movement, but Sung’s commitments remained firmly aligned with bracketing what tried to pass as legitimate information rather than with staging clear-cut confrontation.18 Indeed, Sung’s works appear especially suited to audiences as skeptical of collective unity as they are of libertarian detachment; the tacit, but nevertheless palpable, critique Sung makes of representational politics in all forms may explain the general absence of his post-1980 work from supposedly progressive histories of Korean art.
Sung Neung Kyung, An upside down map of world, 1974, world map, panel. Installation view, Seoul Museum of Art, 2017. Photo: Netjjae.
Of the series, it is Venue 22, 1985, that most immediately manifests what Sung intended by the title “Hyŏnjang,” whose Korean meaning is sometimes translated into English as “field” but which the artist explains is a compound of “the time called ‘now’ and the place called ‘here.’”19 For that work, eight hundred photographs papered the wall of the Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul, while the floor teemed with loosely piled images, an anarchic overload of information. Exhibited on the eve of Korea’s reemergence as a full-fledged democracy, Venue 22 signaled a new contest of survival, in which keeping one’s head above the oceanic torrent of information amounted to a critical life skill. If Sung’s early works have only gained potency since their debut, it is because the questions they ask of representation and its politics remain as prescient as ever.
Sung Neung Kyung, No relationship to a particular person 1, 1977, silk screen on 110 gelatin silver prints, each 10 × 8″. From the series “No relationship to a particular person,” 1977–.
Sung Neung Kyung’s work appears in “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, September 1, 2023–January 7, 2024. The show, curated by Kyung An and Kang Soojung and co-organized with the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, travels to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, February 11–May 12, 2024.
Joan Kee is a professor in the history of art at the University of Michigan and a contributing editor of Artforum. She is a coeditor of Primary Documents Korea (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
NOTES
1. Partly based on his interest in the Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work he encountered in the pages of the Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techō, Sung’s early art included abstract paintings, which he later disowned after having “intense shame for feeling as if he copied foreign artists.” Sung, “Pijuryu ŭi kaenyŏm misulga, Sŏng nŭnggyŏng ŭi ‘mangch’in’ modŏnijŭm,” interview by Cho Soo Jin, in Chungsim kwa chubyŏn ŭi misulsarŭl nŏmŏsŏ: ‘chiyŏk misul’ ŭi yŏksa, chaengjŏm, hyŏnan (Seoul: Hanguk kŭnhyŏndae misulsahakhoe, 2022), 33.
2. Beginning with his July 1969 article on contemporary Japanese art for the influential journal Space, Lee had a significant impact on a small but critical group of younger Korean artists.
3. Sung realized that, as a “three-dimensional artist,” he would never be more “than a second or third-rate.” Sung, “Pijuryu ŭi kaenyŏm misulga, Sŏng nŭnggyŏng ŭi ‘mangch’in’ modŏnijŭm,” 34.
4. Sung, conversation with the author, March 28, 2023.
5. Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow, quoted in Tran Van Dinh, “Non-Alignment and Cultural Imperialism,” Black Scholar 8, no. 3 (December 1976): 45.
6. Sung, conversation, March 28, 2023.
7. Sung, conversation with the author, September 1, 2022.
8. Sung, quoted in “OB dŭl ŭi suda,” in 1970–1980 nyŏndae hanguk ŭi yŏksajŏk kaenyŏm misul (Seoul: Noonbit Press, 2011), 307.
9. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022.
10. Sung recalls that during the performance at the Seoul Gallery in 1976, fellow experimental artist Chung Chan-seung screamed, “Wow you have a lot of money! Drinks on you!” Sadly, Chung died of liver cancer in 1994. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022.
11. Sung Neung Kyung, “Career sibilgyemyŏng” [Eleven commandments for a career] (1991), reprinted in Tangsinŭn na ŭi t’aeyang: tongsidae han’guk misurŭl wihan sŏngch’aljŏk not’ŭ (Seoul: Total Museum of Art, 2005), n.p.
12. Kim Mikyung, “OBdŭl ŭi suda,” 285.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Sung, conversation, March 28, 2023.
16. Sung, conversation, December 27, 2022.
17. Sung, conversation, September 1, 2022.
18. Venue 29a-1 and Venue 29b-w were included in the 1987 group exhibition curated by Um Hyuk, “Min Joong Art: New Movement of Political Art from Korea.” It was the first North American presentation of Minjung art at A-Space in Toronto and at Minor Injury, run by the artist formerly known as Bahc Mo (Bahc Yiso), in New York.
19. Sung Neung Kyung, “Hyŏnjang” [Venue] (August 8, 1986), reprinted in Tangsinŭn na ŭi t’aeyang: tongsidae han’guk misurŭl wihan sŏngch’aljŏk not’ŭ, n.p.
Sung Neung Kyung, Venue 22, 1985, gelatin silver prints. Installation view, Kwanhoon Gallery, Seoul. From the series “Venue,” 1979–.
