Why does the Korean art world depend on external discourse?

In Korean contemporary art, the dominance of external theories is not simply a matter of imitation or personal preference. It results from a long-accumulated structure shaped by art education, institutional frameworks, and evaluation systems within the art market and public institutions.
 
Concepts such as postcolonialism, diaspora theory, Western gender theory, intersectionality, and identity politics are widely used not because Korean artists favor them individually, but because the system itself makes it structurally difficult to construct one’s own language. To understand this phenomenon, we must examine how the Korean art world has produced a vacuum in which external discourse fills the gaps that the system itself created.
 
 
 
The educational structure and the emergence of a linguistic void
 
Korean art schools have long maintained a studio-centered curriculum. Theory courses, when offered, often rely on translated texts from the 1980s–1990s or general surveys of Western modern and contemporary art.
 
Meanwhile, contemporary global art—post-material installations, post-internet practices, AI-based creation, archive-centered works, posthuman discourse, and newly emerging non-Western art geographies—appears minimally, if at all, in actual instruction.
 
Postcolonial or diaspora theories, once central to Western academia, are still taught in Korea largely through outdated translations, even though global art discourse today has shifted toward far more diverse and multi-layered perspectives.
 
In this educational vacuum, students graduate without the ability to articulate their own experiences in a contemporary artistic language. As a result, they naturally gravitate toward pre-existing external concepts as the easiest tools for explaining their work.
 
 
 
The institutionalization of overseas study and the “re-importation” of discourse
 
Studying abroad offers artists valuable exposure, but as generations of overseas-trained artists have occupied key positions—professors, curators, museum staff—the Western theories they learned abroad have become institutional standards in Korea.
 
Consequently, concepts such as poststructuralism, Foucauldian power/knowledge, postcolonial theory, Judith Butler’s gender performativity, Donna Haraway’s posthumanism, or Deleuze & Guattari’s rhizome were adopted not through a process of re-contextualization, but as ready-made answers.
 
With limited training in reconstructing these ideas through Korean social reality, external theories became “concepts to import,” and many artists perceived them as the safest and most institutionally advantageous choice. External discourse thus turned from an option into an institutional habit.
 
 
 
How competitions, residencies, and institutional evaluations reinforce this linguistic structure
 
In Korea, the texts required for entry into the art system—portfolios, residency applications, competition statements—often prioritize “global language standards” over the substance of the artwork.
 
Words like “boundary”, “identity”, “memory”, “trauma”, “otherness”, “migration”, and “gender politics”—terms borrowed from postcolonial, feminist, or identity-based theories—are frequently used regardless of whether they genuinely emerge from the artist’s lived context. What matters is the impression of conceptual completeness rather than conceptual relevance.
 
The issue is that these terms function as conceptual templates rather than questions rooted in Korean reality. The work becomes not a site for generating inquiry but a case study to confirm an imported theory. The artist’s experience is reduced to supporting material.
 
 
 
Global art’s rapid shifts and the disconnect within Korean art education

Contemporary global art is evolving rapidly.

Ecological transitions, technology and AI, bio-art, posthumanism, expanded regional perspectives, postcolonial-after neoliberal critique, and Global South discourse are already central topics in major institutions.
 
Yet Korean art schools remain largely disconnected from these developments.

Case studies of contemporary artists, analyses of new institutional models, and the expansion of non-Western perspectives rarely appear in curricula or teaching materials.
 
Students graduate without an understanding of contemporary global standards. The repetition of external theories thus becomes an inevitable response produced by a lack of access to current information.
 
 
 
How four artists exemplify a mode of reconstruction—not imitation

Kimsooja, Do Ho Suh, Lee Bul, and Haegue Yang did not simply apply external discourse. Their practices begin with Korean lived realities, and from that starting point, new relationships with external theory organically emerge.
 
Kimsooja’s work stems from lived experiences of Korean womanhood, labor, family, and mobility—translated through bodily action, sewing, and textile materiality—before intersecting with discussions of migration or gender.
 
Do Ho Suh begins not with identity theory, but with deeply Korean spatial structures—semi-basement apartments, narrow alleys, multi-unit homes—and transforms them architecturally and sculpturally into questions of place and subjectivity.
 
Lee Bul’s early works confront bodily discipline, social control, and patriarchal violence specific to Korean society. The work’s connection to global gender or body politics came later, as a result of these investigations rather than as a theoretical starting point.
 
Haegue Yang transforms domestic Korean objects, textures of labor, and folk materials into sensory systems before those structures intersect with global discourses on mobility or “in-betweenness.”
 
For all four, external theories were not ‘explanatory tools’ but emergent points of contact produced by their own experience-based languages.
 
 
 
Toward a future direction for Korean art

To move beyond the repetition of external discourse, Korean contemporary art does not need more imported theory. It needs the ability to construct questions from its own reality and to organize those questions into visual and conceptual form.
 
Korea’s lived terrain—division and compressed growth, family structures, urban speed, religion and regionality, class imbalances, and technological shifts—is not merely a set of themes but a vital sensory and conceptual foundation for art.
 
Through sustained interpretation, comparison, and reconstruction of this reality, Korean art can shift from being a consumer of external ideas to a producer of new discourse.
 
This requires updates in art education, greater productivity in Korean criticism and curation, and evaluation systems that prioritize experiential grounding over theoretical fluency. Structural change will take time, but accumulated in the right direction, it can finally open a space where Korean contemporary art builds its own linguistic horizon rather than operating in the shadow of external theories.