New Media Art and Ethics in South Korea
by Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge © 2001

Since the South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee's assassination in 1979, Korean art has known two essential tendencies: "Minjung" or "People's Art," a minority movement of essentially figurative painting and sculpture, and what Korean critics lump together under the heading of "Modernism," an assortment of ephemeral groups that practiced avant-garde art and that, according to their perceptions of every tendency of the international art scene, hatched, saw the light of day, then disappeared.

For our purposes, Modernism means art that gave a low or zero priority to political intent. Minjung and Modernism also represent what in the West would be called left-wing and right-wing political tendencies. Strange as it may seem, most artists in Korea are conservative.

Throughout most of the 1980s Minjung artists struggled against first the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan (1980-88), then the presidency of former general Roh Tae-woo (1988-93). Minjung's activities were in stark contrast with those of the majority of Korean artists, including Modernism's tolerance, if not easy acceptance of, military-style government. With the election of Kim Young-sam, the first civilian Korean president in 1993, Minjung seemed partially vindicated. Then, with Kim Dae-jung's election in 1998, it seemed that Minjung, although now officially inactive, had won the day.

Kim Dae-jung is a former dissident twice condemned to death by dictators, Nobel Peace Prize winner and native of the Kwangju region, which was the site of the military regime's massacre of hundreds of people in 1980. Today, former Minjung personalities and loyalists are becoming some of the key players on the Korean art scene. Minjung ideals have indeed triumphed. Or have they? In fact, what are they?

Politically, Minjung and Modernism still form the two poles of the Korean art world psyche today, even though in ethical and esthetic terms both are discredited. What these two tendencies really represent are the lost opportunity to make ethical and esthetic choices that could have changed the Korean art world: for or against corrupt government; for or against the military dictatorship whose most heinous act was the crushing of the Kwangju Uprising in a bloodbath; and, more and more, for or against the former collaborators of dictators and military criminals - big business.

Minjung is discredited for its propagandistic art and its artists who collaborate today with a government that, even though it is now democratically elected, has failed to clean up politics, including in the art world; and with the same big business that received the lion's share from past military regimes and that in spite of today's economic crisis, which is partially the fault of its corrupt ways, remains largely unchastened.

Modernism is discredited not only because of its lack of artistic originality and its expedient politics, but because of something that is even more important. The Korean one of us (the other one of us is American) went to live in Paris because there was supposedly something to be learned there, because of Modernist ideals.

Koreans believe they love learning. They do indeed love Western diplomas. The Korean elite must be educated in the West. Yet what does it mean if, when it comes back home, it behaves badly, disregarding all that it supposedly learned corrupt politicians and business people? When it disregards Western ethics? Yes, it can pick and choose and not just accept wholesale Westernisation. It can also refuse Western ethics. After all, we live in a postcolonial world. But at least where is the beginning of a debate on the ethics of collaborating today with corrupt government and big business? Where are the few art world voices speaking out against them?

Modernism, all those Korean artists who went to study and work abroad, was just an excuse to avoid Minjung's difficult ethical questions of the period. So difficult in fact that today, in far easier circumstances, not even former Minjung artists themselves can face the still difficult answers to them.

One of YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES' basic artistic stratagems until now, one that is maybe inspired by an instinctive disgust for both Minjung and Modernism, has been to make certain works that contain a relatively strong political and social intent, but clothed, we hope, in an ironic ambiguity. Another stratagem is for us to claim that our art is unimportant (but of course, artists really don't know what they're doing, so judge for yourself). Both stratagems have a sound enough theoretical basis. After all, anything, not just our own art, can lend itself to being more or less political; and art isn't as important as a lot of things in life. We know we've wanted art and artists to be unimportant so that we can go on not considering our possibly unethical associations in Korea. For if the work we do is unimportant, how can we do anything unethical?

Yet we're on shaky ground. Y-H_C_H_I was in a Web show out of Montreal last month called Maid in Cyberspace with, among others, the Web artist Pat Binder, whose Web piece is called Voices from Ravensbrueck. It's a beautiful work that presents some of the writings of women in the Nazi concentration camp of the title. Unimportant? When she first put it online last fall, she wrote an email asking if we were interested in the Holocaust. We wanted to write back to her a long letter expressing our interest based on our experiences and readings in Paris. We never did, and we think it's because her Web piece startled and embarrassed us at a moment when we were beginning to confront and feel guilty about our shirking even the most minor ethical reflections on the role of new media art in Korea, even just a thought on, well, just about everything, every thoughtless step we take here in our collaborations with government and big business.

It is difficult to define, much less lead the ethical life in Korea. In the 1960s and '70s, the dictator Park Chung-hee established today'sKorean economy on the "chaebol," the giant corporation turned multinational conglomerate. There are five or six dominant ones in Korea today, all of which started and thrived in that seemingly golden economic age that is one part of Park's legacy. That has made more and more Koreans today turn a blind eye to the other part of it, his reign of terror that ended in his assassination in 1979 by the head of the notorious Korean CIA. In fact today, a majority of Koreans including the current president, who only want to remember Park's economic policies, would like to even build a museum to his glory.

The chaebols provide literally everything you need in life, from delivery room to deathbed. We're not speaking metaphorically. Samsung, which is the number one or two chaebol, manufactures everything from sugar, rice, frozen fish, paper and clothing, to cell phones, stereos,computers, TVs, refrigerators, cars, apartment buildings and skyscrapers. It sells insurance and securities, and owns department stores, luxury hotels and restaurants, theme parks, a professional baseball team, an art and design institute, a major newspaper and an online auction house You can be born in a Samsung hospital, die there and have your funeral there. A Samsung backhoe will dig your grave. This is one way to see the Korean chaebols.

Another way, the accepted way, is to see them as national heroes. In korean prime-time soap operas, most of the heroes are businessmen. In korea, businessmen lead the ethical life par excellence. But then so can artists--if they're willing (and they are) to act like businessmen. Nam June Paik, the "father of video," recently made a TV commercial for Samsung in which he shouts but one word: "Creativity, creativity,creativity!" His message is clear, that business and art are but one and the same. But are business ethics and art ethics one and the same?

In 1999 we presented ten videos called "The Samsung Project" during the screening program of Multimedia Art Asia Pacific in Brisbane, Australia. One of the Samsung curators (Samsung also has an art foundation and several museums) who had the misfortune of being there by accident walked up to one of us afterwards to ask "Why do you want to hurt the country?", the implication being that Samsung = Korea. It does.

If out of ethical responsibility you were to boycott the chaebols because you had decided that they were guilty of collaborating with former Korean dictators to enrich themselves and the dictators, and that their monopolies and corruption coupled with the corruption of the government had thrown the country into the economic crisis of 1997 that Koreans are still trying to dug out from, you would surely die from a lack of food and shelter. But maybe that's taking things a little too seriously--which brings us back to our tack of seeing art and the artist's life as relatively unimportant.

The Kassel Documenta 11 "platform" statement is titled DemocracyUnrealized Now there's a group of people in the art world that thinks art is important. Why is it then that most if not all of them--Westerners, that is--abandon critical thinking and ethical responsibility when they come to Korea? One gets the feeling they come to Korea like Western movie stars go to Japan, to get paid for promoting something they wouldn't be proud to promote in their own countries. If they knew they were working with corrupt government officials and big business and even criminals, would they still come here?

But they do know. They have to know. Don't they? If they don't, is it up to Y-H_C_H_I to tell them? Should we tell those who email us that they're coming to Seoul to work with such and such an institution: "Don't come, you'll be aiding and abetting corrupt government and big business and hurting the people"? But Documenta 11(we just happened to see its platform statement while we were writing this text) is seeking artistic expressions of"Democracy Unrealized." It isn't concerned about what worries us, which is the ethics of doing new media art (or any art) in collaboration with unethical people.

Is ethical conduct a question of degree or of essence? The criminal acts of government, military and big business in Korea are understandable everywhere because to a greater or lesser extent they exist everywhere.But are their wrongdoings of the present and recent past, most of which have been only symbolically punished if not wholly unpunished, so essentially criminal that it is up to us (why us?-again, what has become of other dissident voices in the Korean art world?) to abstain not only from participating in their cultural projects that include new media, but to alert all those who might otherwise fall prey to their continuing cover up and strategy of legitimisation? Or is it safe to say"What's the use? All governments and big business have corruption problems. Better we get some of that money than not"?

Is it enough to continue to believe that one makes art that is ethically uncompromising? Frankly, this is not so hard to do. Web art is a relatively virtuous art. It depletes little or no natural resources,takes up little or no space on the planet, ends up at worst (or at best) as mere cybertrash, and in Korea one can create it and exhibit it with the bare minimum of dealing with government and big business. Until now,Web art has helped us avoid the very ethical problems that are suddenly creeping up on us. Yes, things are changing, for us and for Web art in Korea. Last year, Rhizome's Alex Galloway and Fine Art Forum's Nisar Keshvani both asked us the same question: What's happening in Korean new media art?

Their question implies that new media artists participate in their local new media scene. Is that so? And here we've been trying not to. Once we learned how it worked, it became a relief for us not to deal with a Korean art scene that mirrors the malfeasance of government and big business. Now we're taking the time to see why Web art has set us free.

Free until now. The other day a Samsung Foundation curator invited one of us to meet and talk with its curatorial department about Web art.Samsung? Samsung! The very multinational giant that is synonymous with the nation and that supposedly we wanted to hurt. The honorarium is symbolic, but the import is real for those who have dared to mock Goliath. So do we accept? (We did--although we can always change our minds, we suppose.) And we guess we had better come clean that for the last few months we have been doing some copy writing for Art Center Nabi, the recently inaugurated new media center owned by the corporate giant SK

It is no secret to anybody in Korea that the Nabi director is the wife of the CEO of SK and the daughter of a former president who was convicted and then pardoned for corruption, having admitted taking $654 million impolitical bribes (the fine of which was only $350 million), and treason for his participation as a general in the Kwangju massacre. The director is intelligent and highly competent and will probably become the most powerful voice in Korea for new media. She is also a charming person. So why did she allow or encourage her father to attend the opening of the centre? We guess because nobody saw a problem with it. Among others, one of the former leading artists of Minjung, the so-called "People's Art,"was even there to network. And by the way, we were there.

In the following days, Korean women's magazines featured the opening in laudatory articles that included photos of her and her father. Who are we to make a big deal about it? Different ethics for different folks,right? Not to mention that President Kim Dae-jung has allowed himself to be photographed dining with Chun Doo-hwan, the former Korean dictator-general who condemned him to death on trumped up charges in 1980. Closer to home, no less than Rem Koolhaas gave us the green light not to make a big deal about it - not personally, but we hear he has designed a projector for the new SK headquarters, a skyscraper that would include on its ground floors Art Center Nabi. Who are we to second guess his ethics?

That's where we stand today. We are far from being as idealistic as others about new media art. To us it is primarily a wonderful new medium that fits and molds our lifestyle. We do feel though that since new media artists inside and outside Korea can just as easily if not more easily than other artists become the partners of possibly unethical situations and cybersituations sponsored by Korean government and big business, both of which are bent on adding new media art to the window dressing of their high-tech facades, it would be nice to open a debate on new media ethics in Korea.

YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES http://www.yhchang.com/ was founded in Seoul by Young-hae Chang, C.E.O., and Marc Voge, C.I.O. This year it has been in the Stuttgart Filmwinter and the Rotterdam Film Festival, and was a finalist in the trAce / Alt-X New Media Writing Competition, in Nottingham, England. Marc's recent exhibition "Web Project 8" appeared at the Total Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea.

This article first appeared in Rhizome on March 16, 2001