국립현대미술관

Surrealism and Korean Modern Art is the second exhibition in the series of “Rediscovery of Korean Modern Artists,” initiated in 2019 with the aim of restoring a richer art history by uncovering and shedding new light on artists who had been overlooked in the twentieth-century history of Korean art. The show presents six unknown artists who displayed “surrealistic qualities rarely seen in the Korean art scene”: Kim Ukkyu (1911–1990), Kim Chongnam (Manabe Hideo, 1914–1986), Kim Chongha (1918–2011), Shin Youngheon (1923–1995), Kim Younghwan (1928–2011), and Park Gwangho (1932–2000).

In the midst of the world’s indifference, these artists independently explored and perfected their own surrealist worlds. Their works, which cannot be defined in a single style, were regarded during their lifetimes as a kind of anachronism or mere imitation of the original, and were gradually forgotten after their death. Unlike André Breton and his colleagues who declared themselves bold avant-gardists breaking the old conventions and taboos that constrained the human spirit, these six artists had no central figure and never formed a collective voice. Rather than becoming followers of the period’s avant-garde, they chose instead to remain on the periphery, steadfastly following a solitary path that no one recognized, unbound by the mission of rediscovering tradition or pursuing national identity—challenges that, especially after Korea’s liberation, were inevitably imposed upon most Korean artists alongside the search for modernity. Such a path was made possible by their captivation with Surrealism, which awakens the timeless creative instinct of man. In this way, the presence of these artists is all the more precious in that they reveal a gap in the history of Korean modern art—a history that has mostly been reduced to binary oppositions of figurative versus abstract, tradition versus modernity, academism versus avant-garde, art for art’s sake and art that participates in reality, and therefore delineated around a few mythologized masters, movements, or art groups—thereby renewing our awareness of its discontinuities and diversity.

Before fully introducing the six artists, the exhibition begins by examining how Surrealism was understood and received in Korean art scene from the initial introduction of the term in the late 1920s to the early 1930s.