1968, or Vulnerability in Prewar Korea

Abstract

By 1968, tensions between North and South Korea threatened to bring the world closer to total destruction than any other moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. The multidirectional nature of these tensions spawned numerous combustions of form and feeling across a wide variety of artistic media, especially ink painting and photography. As individual works became de facto battlegrounds, what was previously credible as postwar Korean art increasingly emerged as instances of a prewar condition. Moving away from postwar-centred approaches to Korean art anchored to the end of World War II or the provisional end of the Korean War in 1953, I argue for a unified theory of prewar Korean art rooted in vulnerability, a word without a precise equivalent in Korean but whose presence was nevertheless palpable in artworks produced in both halves of the Korean Peninsula.