To consider the future of Korean contemporary art, we must first examine the structures and standards through which the global art world operates today. Over the past century, Korean modern and contemporary art has developed by absorbing artistic forms, concepts, and institutions that originated in the West and transforming them within Korea’s own historical and social conditions. Today, however, the situation is different.

Moving beyond Orientalism entails more than shifting the center from the West to Asia. It requires transforming the structure through which particular actors have classified and evaluated the art of other regions, while developing new values and criteria grounded in diverse histories and experiences. What is needed is a new system of knowledge—one that recognizes the achievements of Western art history as a shared global legacy without treating them as the sole standard of judgment.

BTS emerged in Korea and developed within the cultural and industrial framework of K-pop. Yet the market in which its music is produced and consumed, as well as its audience and influence, moved beyond Korea’s geographical boundaries long ago.

“Asian contemporary art” does not refer to a single shared style or aesthetic. Korea, China, Japan, and the countries of Southeast Asia each have distinct histories, political and social conditions, art institutions, and markets.

The Anachronism series began by examining how Korean art has continued to understand and organize itself under changing conditions through languages, institutions, and models of success inherited from the past. It considered the recurring tendency to reproduce earlier

A fundamental problem in Korean art history remains insufficiently resolved: the criteria by which its historical periods are distinguished. When did Korea’s modern period in art begin? What does hyeondae misul—the category conventionally called “modern art” or “contemporary art” in Korean—actually signify, and where does it begin? And from what