Happening with vinyl umbrella and candles.

This clearly shows that even though it had been 6 years since Yves Klein presented Le Vide(1958) exhibition and Les anthrophometres de l'epoque bleu (1960) to the world ? to Koreans though through newspapers ? the concept of ‘performance’ was at its embryonic stage, only being considered through experiments by very few avant-garde artists.

In the performance, members of group ‘Mu’ and ‘Shin Jun’ ² start to move about slowly in a circle with Youngja Kim, a member of ‘Mu’ at the center, singing a song called ‘Bird Bird Blue Bird’, a well-known folklore song ascribed to Bongjoon Jun who led ‘Donghak Peasants Revolution’³  in 1894.

Happening with vinyl umbrella and candle light was carried out as following. Kim sits down, holding an open vinyl umbrella between two upright parts of a whole installation work titled Stovepipe made by Boonghyun Choi. In the 1960-70s, stovepipe was widely utilized heating equipment of briquette stove in Seoul; he borrowed it as an installation art work thinking the context of Korean scene.

The group of performers who was forming a spinning circle started sticking in a lit-up candle, followed by another identical movement in a circle, making a sudden collective raid on the woman, putting off the candle light and ripping the umbrella apart. The scenario writer, Kwangsu Oh and other artists insisted that the umbrella was a symbol for the nuclear explosion, candle for pure human spirit, and the conjunction of the song and their performance allegedly represented the chance events like Dadaistic happenings.

It can be considered, and thereby inferred, that the writers and artists carrying out performance art believed that to propose a form of artistic expression similar to Western avant-garde was to ensure the legitimacy of progressive avant-garde of Korea.

However, contrary to their belief, I reckon the mixture of performances featuring ‘Bird Bird Blue Bird’ song and ‘umbrella and candle light’ endeavor, while revealing their revolutionary conscience, goes beyond borrowing from Dadaist issues such as the concept of contingency or ‘chance’. This is because implicitly ingrained in them was their will to resist governmental repression that forced them down. This realm of thought, besides Homi Baba’s post-colonialist perspective saying ‘almost the same but not quite’, tells us about the inseparability of ‘art and society’ unique to Korean circumstances at the time. ⁴

(Kang and other artists revolves around Youngja Kim who is sit with a vinyl umbrella.)

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¹  ‘Chungnyun jakka yeunlipjun’ translates into ‘Exhibition of young artist’s union’.

²  ‘Mu’ translates into ‘Zero’ and ‘Shin Jun’ translates into ‘New Exhibition’.

₃‘Donghak’ translates into ‘Eastern Learning’. The ‘Donghak Peasant Revolution’ in Korea was the endpoint of a series of Japanese coups in Korea which brought the Joseon dynasty to an end. In the transitional economy, opened to uncontrollable foreign trade, Korean Yangban scholars and peasants attempted to stop further Japanese incursions into Korea and maintain independence. In the chaos, Japan invaded, put in puppet administrators, and began a colonial empire that lasted until their unconditional surrender in 1945. The question of whether the Donghak revolution was a provocation by Japan to create the circumstances for invasion which then became a mass peasant uprising; or whether it was an intellectually headed revolt that gained speed amongst the peasant classes, and then was exploited by Japan as a pretext for invasion is constantly studied and thoroughly debated by Korean historians” http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Donghak-Peasant-Revolution.

⁴Mikyung Kim, Experimental Art in Korea (Sigong Sa : Seoul, Korea, 2003), pp. 70-74