‘The Only Art Form that Works’Reflections on Collectivity from South Korea [2023]Soyoon Ryu

‘Collectivity is the only art form that works’: this claim by Hyemin has lingered with me for a long time. Hyemin and I work together in the artist collective, Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC), and this year we moved down to Busan to grow microalgae for material research. Exchanging banter about this harbour city has become part of our daily routine. We also talk about how the marine environment and industries have shaped us. We struggle through the intimacies of care and the complexities of communal Beginning of page[p. 90] living. Entering our fifth year, we devote much time to taking on a bird’s-eye view of our lives, picturing ourselves in the broader history of artistic collectivism. Yet among all of the things we discuss, it is usually the question of why that I think about most often. We focus on ‘we’ in lieu of ‘I’ as being the only way — I am captivated by Hyemin’s commitment to the ‘we’, which seems too resolute to rationalize, willingly renouncing artistic freedom and self-determination for the unwieldiness of democratic decision-making. We also wonder, ‘when does collectivity become a need?’, and above all else we ask, why collective practice now?’

The recent institutional interest in collectivity, culminating in — among other things — documenta fifteen, is susceptible to a number of misunderstandings. First, it can seal the word in the presentist vacuum of the category of ‘contemporary art’ with a relative lack of attention to its historicity. Second, it can erroneously attribute collectivity to an ideal of communitarianism, according to which the self only thrives under the auspices of a community. However, group forms with divergent ideological leanings and nomenclatures have existed throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, if not many centuries before. In the case of South Korea, for instance, a wide range of artist groups emerged from the decade of the 1960s, each using different terms to describe themselves, including jipdan (groups), dongin (loose groups of individuals with overlapping interests or ideologies), hyeophoe (more formalized associations), yeonguhoe (research groups), and sogeureup Beginning of page[p. 91](small groups). Groups such as the Korean Avant Garde Association (AG; 1969–75), Space and Time Group (S.T.; 1975–81), and the Fourth Group (Je 4jipdan; active in 1970) brought together artists and critics for joint activities ranging from exhibitions, publications, and research projects to performances. Rather than developing collectivity as an ideological device, their work centred on having a shared aesthetic which later came to be historicized as Experimental Art (silheom misul).

Artistic collaboration in South Korea covers a wide spectrum of aesthetic and/or ideological objectives that refuses to converge into a single movement. Rather than subscribing to a vocabulary of ‘-isms’, I choose the word ‘collectivity’ in order to illuminate different motivations and historical demands that resulted in the collectivisation of South Korean art. Among the divergent group forms, on the one hand, are those that bear a resemblance to a movement that arose primarily in the 1980s when collectivity was considered not so much a choice but a necessity.11For one instance of an analogous argument, see Kim Mi-kyung and Oh Sangghil, ‘Jigeum, dasi — Hanguk hyeondaemisul’ui hyeonjanggwa bipyeong’ [‘Now, Again — The Hyeonjang and Critique of Korean Contemporary Art’], Wolgan Misool (November 2000), pp. 88–131. For more background information on the conventional use of the term ‘collectivism’, see Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, ed. by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (The University of Minnesota Press, 2014). For instance, the Yatoo Outdoor Field Art Research Association (Yatoo Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul Yeonguhoe; now known as Korean Nature Artists' Association – YATOO; 1981–present) took collectivizing as equivalent to building a platform in a region bereft of artistic community and capital — Gongju of South Chungcheong Province — by having multiple performance works unfold synchronously in an outdoor environment. Visibility was paramount for Yatoo, particularly after disassociating itself from an art scene increasingly concentrated in Seoul and starting a new artistic Beginning of page[p. 92] movement amidst a rural landscape. For other groups now known as sojipdan (small groups), most notably Dureong (1982–87), Gaetkkot (1986–92), and Gwangju Free Artists Association (Gwangju Jayu Misurin Hyeophoe; 1979–85), collectivity was an essential tool for linking art to radical politics. Having turned themselves into the visual art units of labour unions, they rendered artmaking indistinguishable from workers’ struggles and democratization movements for which collectivizing was vital, whether in factory complexes or on the streets.22The formation of artist collectives in the 1980s, especially sojipdan, is inseparable from the emergence of labour unions out of anti-capitalist workers’ struggles and the nationwide democratization movement. Collectively called the Democracy Unions (Minjunojo), these unions included Wounpoong Labour Union, Dong-il Textile Union, Bando Company Union, Cheonggye Textile Union, and YH Labour Union, among many others. A significant number of artist collectives were founded in conjunction with one another, alongside university student associations, particularly Korean mask dance (talchum) and theatre groups.

Despite having aligned themselves with radical politics, the groups’ vision of collectivity in the 1980s was as hierarchical and rigid as it was liberatory. One such example was the culture of living together for days or weeks in order to finish a project, a strategy through which members internalized the ethos of putting the individual’s time and space fully at a group’s disposal. This internalization was a gendered process. Female members, if there were any, were mostly responsible for the housekeeping work that was necessary for co-living though deemed extraneous to artmaking. Against this reinsertion of pre-existing power structures, groups including Museum (1987–91), Golden Apple (1989–90), and SUB CLUB (1990–91) emerged at the turn into the 1990s. One of the ways they attempted to undo the earlier generation’s vision of collectivity was to eschew any ‘ideological resolutions or determinations’ for ‘personal narratives and aesthetic freedom’.33See the statement of the Museum Founding Exhibition catalogue, reprinted in Hangukyeondaemisul dasi ilggi — 80nyeondae sogeurup undongui bipyeongjeok jaejomyeong [Re-reading Korean Contemporary Art — The Critical Re-examination of Small Group Movements in the 1980s], ed. by Oh Sangghil (Cheongeumsa, 2000), pp. 265–68. Aptly called the ‘new generation small groups’, they hosted their events at cafes, clubs, cabarets, and other hideouts rather than at Beginning of page[p. 93] art institutions or factories. They further put forth a principle of loose project-based collaboration that prioritized singular authorship over co-production.

Almost four decades have passed since the heyday of collectivity in South Korea. Today, groups crop up and disperse at a faster pace, with transience and flexibility being two main features of collaboration. Envisaging a ‘club’ rather than ‘collective’, RBSC too holds an annual meeting in which each member negotiates the terms of membership. Hyemin’s approach, on the other hand, strikes me as resisting such premises. It echoes a time when collaboration was simply understood as being necessary; it testifies to the persistence of a model in which collectivity is the only valid form of making art. Looking back, I am inclined to call this model one of hyeonjang, which roughly translates into English as the ‘actual place’ or ‘field of situated presence’.44Hyeonjang was one of the most widely used words to describe South Korean art groups of the 1980s. For example, Yatoo called itself Yatoo Yaoe Hyeonjang Misul Yeonguhoe, and Dureong is frequently evoked as a representative of the hyeonjang-orientated Minjung art. The link between collectivity and hyeonjang is best illustrated in the exhibition Hyeonjang’ui Misul, Yeoljeong’ui Jakgadeul (Art of Hyeonjang, Artists of Passion) held in 2000 at the Hanwon Museum of Art, in which twelve small groups of the 1980s were archived and introduced for the first time in the context of art history. For a study of the art of hyeonjang, see Yang Jungae, ‘80nyeondae Hyeonjang-jihyang Minjungmisul’ui jaeguseong: 1985nyeon Hangugmisul, 20dae’ui himjeon sageon’e eolkin misuldongin Dureong’ui hwaldongeul jungsimeuro’ [‘Restructuring hyeonjang-Orientated Minjung Art of the 80s: The Case of Dureong in the Korean Art in 1985, Power of the Twenties Exhibition’] (Korea Democracy Foundation, 2018). Different groups throughout the 1980s have mobilized the term in their own ways. For Yatoo, it referred to a natural environment where artists came into direct contact with their materials. For Dureong, it meant a site of state-sanctioned capitalist violence against which artists turned themselves into instruments of the socialist struggle. In this sense, it might not be a coincidence that the gravity of the word rings true for RBSC as well: hyeonjang is our home, kitchen, farm, neighbourhood, and all other sites of production in which we pledge to be fully present. The word’s open-endedness notwithstanding, latent in these mobilizations, both then and now, is a belief that artmaking is akin to committing to a certain world of truth, whose scale and Beginning of page[p. 94] complexity always exceeds that of an individual. The need for collectivity must arise from this conviction in hyeonjang, where making artworks, building worlds, and seeking truth coalesce into the only art form that works.