Experimental artists challenge 'suffocating' conformity in 1960s Seoul

Update: The lecture can be watched here.

This Tuesday, January 16, I will give a lecture for the Royal Asiatic Society titled “'We feel like we’re suffocating’: Experimental Artists Confront Conformity in Seoul, 1968-70.” My latest Korea Times article, "Experimental artists challenge 'suffocating' conformity in 1960s Seoul," gives a preview of the lecture. For more information about the lecture see here (note that the lecture will be given at a new venue).

I’ll be leading a follow-up excursion to Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art to view the Kim Ku-rim Exhibition on Saturday, January 20, at 2:00. (The exhibition has a 2,000 won admission fee.)

This lecture is based on years of digging through the weekly magazines that began proliferating in the 1968. The first few years saw some of them publishing risque material, including nudity, but the government's crackdown on the artists featured in the lecture also affected the weeklies, and they become less interesting after 1970 (though, to be clear, they still had lots of interesting material, just less so than before). 

Two sources I recently discovered were the websites of Gang Guk-jin and Kim Kulim, which have digitized a lot of newspaper and magazine articles from that time.