국립현대미술관

“Conceptual art” is generally understood as art that emphasizes the artist’s ideas or concepts over the outward appearance or material form of an artwork. In the mid-1960s, conceptual art reintroduced the element of language, which had largely been excluded from the opticality of modernist painting. It came to be recognized as a form of art that posed fundamental questions about the nature of “art” itself while encouraging linguistic thought and philosophical speculation.

This is (Not) Conceptual Art is an exhibition that explores the conceptual turn in Korean contemporary art, in which the focus of art shifted away from visually perceived objects toward language and thought. In Korea, conceptual art emerged within the context of experimental art in the late 1960s, while the 1970s and 1980s saw the development of intellectual practices that explored the essence and existence of art through linguistic and logical experiments. Around the 1990s, conceptual art or conceptualism was invoked as a methodology and attitude for rethinking reality through the simultaneous engagement of language, concepts, materiality, and form. This transformation coincided with the changing understanding of conceptual art, as its focus shifted beyond North America and western Europe toward a more “global conceptualism” operating within the social, political, and economic contexts of regions such as Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia. In this respect, the exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the contemporaneity of Korean conceptual art within a broader process of international diversification.

Indeed, a number of related terms surfaced within the currents of Korean contemporary art, including gaenyeom misul (conceptual art), gaenyeomjeok misul ​(conceptually oriented art), and gaenyeomjuui (conceptualism). As the title This is (Not) Conceptual Art suggests, the exhibition explores the possibility of interpreting conceptual art not as a single reductive category, but as a broader field encompassing multiple forms manifested across different works. In this context, the four sections of This is (Not) Conceptual Art—“Language, Logic, Performance,” “Objects and Language,” “Mapping and Measuring,” and “Manipulators of Signs”—interpret works of conceptual art not simply as a history of dematerialization, but as complex attempts to consider human beings and the world anew in relation to Korea’s historical contexts. Part of the significance of reexamining Korean conceptual art from today’s vantage point lies in its potential to help the viewers to perceive and contemplate the world differently while examining the essence of art within an era of overabundant capital, markets, and visuality.