Introduction: Sung Neungkyung

Sung Neungkyung (b. 1944), who emerged in the 1970s as a pioneer of Korean contemporary art, has dedicated his life to producing conceptual works, including installations and performance art that incorporate newspapers and photographs, that challenge the traditional definitions and specificity of visual art. Cutting his teeth as a member of the avant-garde art group ST, an organization founded in 1973, this group reacted  against abstract painting which dominated the art scene at the time. In this moment, Sung not only presented performances—or “events” as they were called in some cases—as part of the group, but also gained recognition for his solo works. He was the first artist in Korea to focus on the informational, ideological and connotative aspects of newspapers and photographs and used them for his multi-media pieces. 

At a time when newspapers and magazines functioned as go-betweens for national and cultural authorities, Sung placed the messages found in those media in a new context, thereby changing their meanings as a way of making a social statement. This was an attempt and mode of making that held a unique status even among the various creative and socio-cultural directions that Korean post-war modernist art took at the time. The “conceptual art” that Sung sought at the time was “post-centric” in nature, distinctly defiant towards the materialistic exploration or spiritualist attitude pursued by Korea’s mainstream modernist art and its coterie. It was avant-garde in stance, not only rejecting the traditional but also the conventional status quo for what was deemed popular, political and sometimes acceptable by the public and government. More importantly, however, the anomaly of Sung’s vision came to recognize the paradoxes of capitalism—its unevenness and “creative destruction” in Schumpeter’s words—and thus paradigm shifting work that ultimately internalized the civic value of art for Korean society.

In the 1980s, Sung’s photo installations and performances began drawing from raw aspects of his personal life, which were used interchangeably with artistic elements. This autoethnographic turn could be interpreted as a political statement in that it called out the pretentiousness, chrematistic, and canonical fixations held by elites and others in  the art world; dispatching pompous attachment to institutional status on what is considered art to instead elevate daily life to the level of the sublime. From that time on, he would go on to diligently produce a body of work known as “Botched Art” that renders into art the many unexpected events in his life while questioning the conditions and systems of life outside artistic boundaries. 

Pioneer of the Korean Avant-garde

Since coming to prominence in the 1970s, Sung Neungkyung (b. 1944) has been one of Korea’s leading contemporary artists, persistently subverting mainstream art and ideas about it with his innovative performances and conceptual installations that involve newspapers and reportage photographs. While Korean artists had been questioning the established art field’s myopia, as represented by the National Art Exhibition of Korea, since the 1950s, their demands for reform became more personal—and thus more adamant—in the mid-1960s. It was also around this time that abstract art influenced by Art Informel, which had formerly represented the forefront of the Korean avant-garde, began losing its spirit of resistance as it was gradually embraced by the National Art Exhibition of Korea and the apparatus of the state. Eager to discover new trends and techniques, Korean artists and critics took notice of Western and Japanese modernist who were challenging the formalism and institutionalization of abstract art through unconventional techniques reflecting the anti-modernist tradition of Europe in the early twentieth century. In particular, young artists such as Sung became intrigued by the rise of “post-genre” works that could not be easily classified as familiar physical forms, such as paintings or sculptures, and thus seen more as multimedia in vision and methodology. Starting around the mid-1960s, this new generation of Korean artists began to organize themselves into art groups that diverged from the mainstream art circles to instead present experimental works that transcended existing genres and expectations. 

Sung Neungkyung first became known through his activities with the art group “ST” (“Space in Time”), an avant-garde collective that held its first group exhibition in 1973 in Seoul. Along with Sung, other important members of ST included Lee Kunyong, Chang Sukwon, Kim Yongmin, Yoon Jinsup, Kim Hongzu, Nam Sangkyun, Lee Jaegeon, Chang Hwajin, Cho Younghee, Choi Wongun, Song Jeonggi, Yeo Un, Kim Munja, Park Wonjun, Han Jeongmun, Kim Yongcheol, Kang Yongdae, Kang Changyeol, Kang Ho-eun, Kim Seon, Kim Yongik, Kim Jangsub, Sin Hakcheol, Jang Kyungho, Choi Hyoju, Jeong Hyeran, Kim Yongjin, and art critic Kim Bok-young. Opposing the trend and cultural hegemony of abstract paintings and seeking to diverge from the basic methods of creative works (whether Korean or international), ST was active from 1973 to 1980, during which time they presented seven group exhibitions. Setting themselves apart from other art groups, ST also published art research journals, held forums and seminars, and engaged in various other intellectual activities. After first entering the public eye through his participation in ST performance pieces, of note Event, Sung then began receiving attention for his post-materialist works that involved collaging/combining newspapers and photographs together, which he perceptively recognized as embodiments of analogue “information.”  

With his colleagues in ST, Sung avidly studied Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concepts of “Sprachphilosophie” and “Sprachkritik,” which emphasize language as the measure of all things and linguistic criticism as the path to clarity. The group was also strongly influenced by Lee Ufan’s 1970 essay “Introduction to the phenomenology of encounter: For a new theory of art,” along with related ideas from Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Kitaro Nishida, asserting that the body is the site of one’s encounter with the world and that art can fully reveal the world by presenting things “in and of themselves.” ST drew further inspiration from the ideas proposed and argued by art critics Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Brian O’Doherty, as well as the American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, who based much of his own work on his philosophical research. Through such phlegmatic contemplations, the artists of ST began focusing on the fundamental properties, roles, and meanings of art as media and art’s relation to ontology. Throughout the 1970s, ST presented conceptual installations (known as “three-dimensional art” at the time) and performance pieces (such as Event) that provided a logical and philosophical foundation for Korean art. Unlike the “happenings” of the 1960s, which had often been spontaneously enacted in various public spaces, Event and other ST performances were presented exclusively at museums or other art-related private venues. As such, the performance art of ST was taken more seriously than “happenings,” which had often been dismissed as acts of decadence (especially in political vexed climate of the sixties), rather than artworks. 

In his works as a member of ST, Sung often recontextualized media messages in order to draw attention to the national and cultural power of newspapers and magazines. By converting public messages into personal ones and taking on various social issues, Sung formulated a unique mode of conceptual art based on “decentering.” The resulting works immediately stood out from the rest of postwar Korean modern art, which continued to explore physical properties of the painterly surface and process, or spiritual attitudes drawn from ancestral folklore and Confucianism. Adopting this avant-garde stance, highlighting the social value of art, and pointing out the contradictions of capitalism—to radically disintegrate institutions and dispossess ordinary citizens of property and land, Sung presented compelling challenges to both mainstream views about Korea’s strongman bureaucratic industrialization and traditional Korean art.

Since the 1990s, Sung’s performances and photo installations have become even more political, actively exposing the fallacies of the art establishment and transforming aspects of personal life into art. By continuing to use seemingly arbitrary events (…..) and objects (….) as fodder for his works, Sung has successfully transcended the established boundaries of artistic expression to enact his own vision, which he has dubbed “botched art.”

Throughout his career, Sung has remained true to his singular brand of “anti-aesthetics,” characterized by a scrutiny of authority, recovery of corporeality, and emphasis on daily life. To this day, even as he approaches the age of 80, he continues to leave his mark on the field of art as one of the leaders of Korean post-modernism. Driven by his belief in “art as a political matter,” Sung separates sensual experience from aesthetics to forge a new form of political art that sharply diverges from the conventional realist representations of the conflict between the structure and composition of Korean society in the era of modernization. By continually pursuing such political, “anti-art” motives through his “botched art,” Sung not only separated himself from his peers, but also cemented his status as one of the true experimental exemplars  in the history of Korean modern and contemporary art and avant-garde art. 

1. Conceptual Art with Newspapers, Photographs, and Performances

Before introducing the Venue series in 1979, Sung Neungkyung spent most of the first ten years of his career focusing on conceptual art that involved newspapers, photographs, and in-person performances. Although Sung participated in at least two exhibitions while he was a student at Hongik University, the true starting point of his career came in 1968, when he showed two works—Image 681 and Image 682—at the twelfth “Invitational Exhibition of Contemporary Artists” hosted by Chosun Ilbo. Sung’s early works from this time reportedly followed the style of abstract expressionism, but few have survived, with many having been destroyed by the artist himself. After his military service, Sung joined ST, making his debut by showing his three-dimensional work Circumstances at the group’s second exhibition, held at Myeongdong Gallery in 1973.

From 1974 to 1979, Sung focused primarily on exhibiting as a member of ST, where he actively presented both performances and three-dimensional works with unconventional art materials, such as newspapers and photographs. A key work from this time is Newspapers: From June 1, 1974 On, in which Sung spent one week (the length of the exhibition) cutting all of the articles out of daily newspapers with a razor blade, mounting the sliced remains of individual columns on white panels, and then discarding the articles, advertisements, masthead, banner, and reportage photographs in a translucent blue acrylic box. This work evoked the suppression of the press by the military dictatorship and the permeation of political power in everyday life. A clear homage to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Fourand his protagonist’s Winston Smith’s job at the Ministry of Truth, tasked with editing articles to into “Newspeak”, a kind of programming language that lacked deeper meaning and any resonance with politics outside of the state. Transforming censored news, his event Reading Newspapers (1976) directly reenacted the cultural censorship of the government by reading aloud from newspapers before cutting out articles with a razor blade. 

In his subsequent works of the late 1970s, such as Newspaper Page (1977), Eight Newspaper Pages (1977), and the Venueseries (started in 1979), Sung actively distorted or eliminated the meaning and context of newspapers by removing the news content or re-editing pages with no discernible intent. In addition to Sung, artists such as Choi Taeshin and Ha Chonghyun were also using newspapers in their artworks around this time. But whereas those artists were content to investigate various materialities of the newspapers themselves, in the vein of Robet Rauschenberg, Sung, more intriguingly, was keen to manipulate the meaning and context of public discourse chiefly supplied by this print capitalism. To this day (i.e., 2019), Sung continues to create works based on newspapers, such as his Everyday English series (started in 2004). 

Sung Neungkyung was also one of the first Korean contemporary artists who recognized the artistic possibilities of photography as high art form and practice. The first of his works to involve photography was Here (1975), which consisted of about ten photos of himself in various poses, which he took by placing a mirror in a dead-end alley. Then at the fourth ST exhibition and the second Daegu Contemporary Art Festival in 1975, Sung presented five works that involved conceptual representations of specific actions in the medium of photography. For example: Frame, Album, Here, Rules, and Mirror. These photographic works emerged from Sung’s search for a pure conceptual art through his activities with ST, as well as from his complementary newspaper works, in which he removed the text from newspaper pages, leaving only photos. 

At the second Seoul Contemporary Art Festival (1976), Sung continued his conceptual photo works with Apple, a series of photographs showing him eating an apple, arranged in reverse order. Also in 1976, Sung presented a pair of performance works that can be directly linked to his pose series of photographs. At EVENT LOGICAL in 1976, Sung introduced Contraction and Expansion, in which he repeatedly stretched and folded his arms and legs while standing or lying down on the floor. The same year, at the fifth ST exhibition, he presented Location, in which he held the June 1975 issue of SPACE magazine in ten different ways, using various parts of his body. Many “events” conducted by Korean artists from this time were accompanied by photographs, but in Sung’s performances focusing on his specific poses or physical actions, photography played an even more fundamental role as the primary contents of the piece. Explaining this trait, Sung avers, “I wanted to realize the identity of ‘seeing’ from a conceptual point of view in art.”

Location also served as a statement of protest against the editorial power of the Korean press and mass media in general, as represented by the issue of SPACE magazine. Sung recalled, “At a time in which we had only one circuit of communication, I tried to override the power structure of our society by cutting newspapers or holding magazines in unusual ways.” As exemplified by An Upside-down Map of the World (1974), Location (1976), and No Relationship to a Particular Person 1 (1977), Sung’s installations using newspapers or photographs criticized the media’s indiscriminate power to evaluate humanity, employing what the artist described as an “after” censorship of the “before.”  Other important works in this vein include the Venue series; Catalogue (1977), in which Sung emphasized the “namelessness” of the artist; and Nonsense Art (1989), in which he applied black shoe polish to newspapers or corrugated cardboard as a critique of Korean monochrome.  

2. Search for an Integrated Art Form and the Venue Series 

The next stage of Sung’s art began in 1979, when he introduced Venue 1 at the second Seoul Contemporary Art Festival and this creative flourish lasted for approximately ten years. Significantly, the ST Group was disbanded in 1980, around the same time that realistic figurative art started to emerge as the mainstream style of Korean art, complementing photorealism and work by Don Eddy and Robert Bechtle in Los Angles and Gerhard Richter in Berlin. In this environment, Sung did not introduce any new works from 1982 to 1984. Even so, he spent the bulk of the 1980s producing integrative installation works using newspapers and photos (exemplified by the Venue series) in which he continually revised/edited newspapers or photos in different ways in order to subvert and reinterpret simultaneously the power of the media in Korea and globally. The practice of using the same photos to create different installations in various forms for the Venue series eventually inspired the performance works that Sung has presented since the 1990s, in which he highlights the artistic aspects of everyday life through dramatic shifting. In summary, Sung Neungkyung spent this period searching for an integrated art form through the Venue series.

At his first solo exhibition, entitled The Venue and held in 1985 at the Kwanhoon Gallery in Seoul, Sung presented Venue 8 through Venue 24. As Sung later recalled, the works were “photo installations” made from about 1,500 photos taken from various newspapers over the years. For the installations, Sung used a micro lens to take close-up photos of the newspaper photos, printed them as 35mm gelatin silver prints, drew symbols on them with a fine brush and Chinese ink, enlarged them to 20 × 25 cm, and finally displayed them on the wall in various forms, in consideration of the conditions of the gallery. Sung sought to “question the meaning and procedure of these indecipherable photos, while also providing an archaeological reinterpretation of Korean contemporary history in a panoramic style, by excavating and recalling memories that have vanished into the history of oblivion.” These same photos were used to create numerous installation works in various forms and realizations, which were linked to his performance works. Just as piano keys make individual notes that become infinite when played together, Sung’s separate installations and performances are modules of a single system.

Further integrating his works in 1987, Sung combined an installation and a performance into a new version of Venue. After presenting the installation Venue 27 at the thirteenth Seoul Contemporary Art Festival (held at the art center of the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation), Sung then performed Venue 28 at Batangol Time of Literature at the Batangol Theater in Seoul with poet Sung Changkyung, who had been a major influence on the artist since childhood. In their performance, entitled Work for Art and Poetry by Two Men, Sung Chankyung read a poem while Sung Neungkyung performed with his photo installation. Hence, Sung’s photo installation and performance were integrated into a single, overarching work called Venue. Continuing this path and serialization, Sung began actively conducting his own performance works in the 1990s. 

3. Photo Installations and Performances as “Botched Art”

In the 1990s, some Korean artists began incorporating actions into their works, leading to a new era of performance art. Following the “happenings” of the 1960s and the “events” of the 1970s, the new wave of performance art in Korea—sought like most regions of the world—to integrate elements of various arts, including fine arts, drama, dance, music, and literature. After the first signs of this transition appeared around 1986, the Korea Performance Art Society was formed in 1988. That same year, the Society hosted Sung’s first performance exhibition, Sung Neungkyung’s Performance Art. From that point, Sung began transforming his installations using personal photographs, such as An Album of Four Children(1990) and Posterity of S: Beautiful Bad Photos (1991), into performance works, such as Beautiful Bad Photos (1991), The Wall – Botched Movies Are More Beautiful (1992), and Botched Art Is More Beautiful (1993). In this period, Sung focused on developing his unique concept of “botched art,” which emphasizes the unity of art and life. 

In performance works such as Botched Art Is More Beautiful, Sung assembled an “anti-aesthetic” module from an abundance of ordinary civic activities, such as fanning, burning a fan, reading a prayer, changing clothes, applying baby oil, drawing, stretching, eating or drinking food from sacrificial rituals, pulling a suitcase, jumping rope, hula hooping, taking photos of the body, urinating, drinking urine, reading English, spraying shaving cream (on himself and the audience), cutting newspapers, counting money, picking his teeth, scratching, and more. In these performances as “botched art,” Sung sought to take arbitrary events from daily life more seriously, translating and transferring them into art. He claims that these performance works are intended “to convert the monotheistic unification and power of art genres into a system of multiple beliefs, while pushing the artist’s body even further as a valid medium of art.”

Another defining trope of Sung’s performances from this period are puns or other plays on words, in the form of proverbs, epigrams, adages, or phrases from commercial and art cinema or advertisements. He asserted that such elements were his attempt to view contemporary life “linguistically, by mixing buzzwords from the cutting-edge of high culture and parasitic words from popular culture.” Such interests can be seen as an extension of his post-material conceptual art pieces of the 1970s, which often incorporated language. The words in Sung’s works elicit myriad notions of visuality, the hierarchy of language, de-materialization, emphasis on process, and intersubjectivity.