1960년대 한국미술에서 ‘구상추상 논쟁’과 ‘리얼리티’의 문제

Abstract

This thesis will focus on the ‘figurative versus abstract debate’ emerged in the 1960s Korean art. The study has its purpose in re-examining Korean art of the 1960s, which has been regarded as a period when the resistance and negation-based avant-gardism started to deeply penetrate in it. Korean art of the 1960s, to be exact, started in the late 1950s, has been assumed as the time when the early Korean Modernism was initiated. The reason for such assumption lays in historical influences such as the art politics surrounding the <National Art Exhibition> and political situations such as 4.19 and 5.16. This dissertation looks into the ‘figurative versus abstract debate’ that was developed in the 1960s by artists such as Oh Ji Ho and Park Seo Bo and other art critics, yet that never gained much attention as a serious argument so far. The ‘figurative versus abstract debate’ was the issue of the art of 1960s that emphasized ‘international simultaneousness’ and ‘Korean Identity (its regional peculiarity)’, the ‘country’ and the ‘nation’, ‘avant-garde’ and ‘contemporary’, ‘culture’ and ‘spirit’. These issues show that the ‘figurative versus abstract debate’ not only developed within formal boundaries of whether ‘figurative’ or ‘abstract’ but provided the process of accessing and exploring the figurative ideologies and aesthetic values in Korean art. It was one of the first attempts of formal, spiritual and ideological introspection on art. Such facts were a preview of future changes in the world of Korean art, acting as a significant stimulus on the development of attitude, content and structure of the artworks of both figurative and abstract artists, proving that Korean art of the 1960s was the starting point of ‘Korean Modern art’ as well as a meeting point with the issue of ‘reality’.