President Lee Jae-myung recently emphasized that “in the international society of the 21st century, culture is at the core of national prestige and national power,” adding that “even an additional supplementary budget should be arranged if necessary to restore and strengthen the foundations of culture and the arts.”
 
This statement should not be read simply as a call for increased funding. Rather, it signals a deeper question about the stage at which Korea’s cultural policy currently stands. At a time when “K-culture” is receiving unprecedented global attention, the recognition that the foundations of culture and the arts are in fact drying up is particularly significant.
 
For this awareness to lead to meaningful policy change, however, a more fundamental examination must first be undertaken—one that asks what the current support system is failing to address.

A recent article in “The Guardian”, titled 「Almost collapsed: behind the Korean film crisis and why K-pop isn’t immune」, offers a sober diagnosis of the contradictions within Korea’s cultural industries. While Korean cultural content enjoys overwhelming success in global markets, both film and K-pop domestically are experiencing structural weakening. According to the article, survival strategies driven by short-term results are instead eroding the very ecosystems that make creative production possible.
 
In Korean cinema, audience numbers and production volumes have plummeted, and the foundation that once supported mid-budget films and emerging directors has nearly collapsed. K-pop, meanwhile, has been reorganized around global tours and core fandoms, pushing smaller agencies—once responsible for experimentation and diversity—to the brink of survival. In both industries, only the sectors that directly generate measurable results remain, while the structures that once enabled those results are disappearing.
 
This situation mirrors, with striking precision, the reality of Korea’s contemporary art scene.
 


Why Is Support for the Development of Fine Art Always Deferred?
 
Korea’s public cultural policy and support systems have repeatedly been designed around visible achievements, quantifiable outcomes, and overseas expansion. The problem is that such criteria fundamentally conflict with the way fine art actually functions.

Fine art does not develop on the premise of short-term results.
An artist’s language emerges through long periods of failure and accumulation, through repeated cycles of criticism and interpretation.

Seeds must be planted, roots must take hold, and soil must be sustained before any fruit can appear. Yet the current support structure concentrates resources only at the moment when results become visible, investing little in the seed and root stages that make those results possible.

This pattern is not characteristic of culturally advanced societies, but rather of societies where culture is treated purely as a consumable outcome. It is a typical symptom of systems that ignore conditions of production and long-term accumulation.

When Distribution, Startups, and Global Metrics Replace the Purpose of Support
 
Over the past several years, public support for contemporary art in Korea has shifted from the language of “support” to that of “performance management.” The Arts Management Support Center has positioned market research and statistics on distribution sectors—galleries, auctions, and art fairs—as the policy foundation for “fostering the visual arts industry and revitalizing the market.” Across numerous programs, indicators such as the number of negotiations, participants, transactions, and overseas buyers are accumulated as representations of policy success.
 
International distribution platforms operated or supported by the Center are explicitly labeled as “markets” (such as PAMS), and event outcomes are frequently presented in terms of numerical indicators like deal counts.
 
The issue here is not distribution or market activation in themselves. Rather, it lies in the fact that distribution metrics have begun to replace the fundamental purpose of arts support. Questions central to fine art—what an artist’s work accumulates over time, what kind of language it forms, and how that language connects to criticism, exhibitions, archives, and collections—are pushed to the margins of policy design. As a result, public support becomes less about supporting artists and more about reproducing results in standardized, measurable forms.
 
 

When Programs Take Precedence over Ecosystems
 
The Korea Arts Council has likewise operated under constant pressure to translate support systems into “evaluable results.” Public evaluation reports on the Arts and Culture Promotion Fund have themselves pointed out problems such as oversimplified performance indicators and weak causal links between project goals and evaluation criteria. In other words, structural conditions are in place where indicator management takes precedence over the original intent of support.

Within this environment, public funding tends to favor short-term, trend-driven programs rather than long-term foundational development. Calls for proposals emphasizing online platforms or technology-based creation frequently promise to build “new ecosystems” by spanning creation and dissemination.
 
Yet while such programs may be effective at producing visible results under the banner of “innovation,” they remain structurally insufficient to guarantee the long-term accumulation required by fine art—deepening artistic practice, refining critical language, sustaining networks among artists, curators, and researchers, and systematically linking archives and collections.
 
 

The Expansion of Startup and Investment Frameworks, and the Marginalization of Fine Art
 
Programs such as the “Arts Industry Academy” and “Early-Stage Arts Startup Support,” operated by the Arts Management Support Center, translate art into the language of entrepreneurship, investment, and corporate development.
 
While this framework may offer tangible benefits to certain segments of the arts ecosystem, it aligns poorly with the realities of fine art, which constitutes the majority of artistic practice. The non-market value of artistic work, the uncertainty of long-term research and production, and the non-linear nature of artistic achievement do not fit neatly into startup models.
 
As policy frameworks increasingly center on corporatization, commercialization, and scalability, the foundational domains of fine art become structurally inexpressible. This approach is superficial and short-sighted because when artistic value is defined only in terms of what can be immediately disseminated, cultural policy inevitably counts only the fruit while allowing the seeds to wither.
 
The foundations of fine art are built not through programs, but through time—through the slow interweaving of education, criticism, exhibition infrastructure, documentation, research, archives, and museum systems. As this foundation weakens, internationalization devolves from meaningful entry into global discourse into mere momentary exposure.
 
 

Art Korea Lab: Reconsidering the Nature of Its Achievements
 
Art Korea Lab provides perhaps the most emblematic example of this issue. Its reported achievements for 2025 are, numerically speaking, clear: approximately 70,000 annual users, 150,000 cumulative visits, around 4 billion KRW in total investment raised, the discovery of 47 convergence-art projects, and increased utilization of facilities such as media walls, kinetic installations, and immersive sound studios.

However, upon closer examination, these achievements align less with the internationalization of Korean contemporary art than with the overseas expansion of technology-driven creative content.
 
Art Korea Lab’s stated mission encompasses education, experimentation, prototyping, distribution, and startup incubation at the intersection of art and technology, and its performance indicators are correspondingly aligned with investment, employment, and global expansion.

This is a strategically understandable choice. Technology-based art offers high mobility and scalability, enabling short-term international success. But when this pathway is generalized as the internationalization of Korean contemporary art as a whole, a serious problem arises. The internationalization of art is not a matter of participation counts or technological scale, but of how works are interpreted, recorded, and situated within international discourse, museums, collections, and critical systems.
 
As structures that prioritize “what has been implemented” over “what is being articulated” become more entrenched, fine art is pushed ever further from the center of policy.
 
Internationalization Is Not a Movement, but Contextualization

Internationalization in art cannot be explained by the number of overseas exhibitions or technical sophistication.

What matters is how a work is interpreted within global art discourse,what art-historical position it occupies, and how it connects to museums, collections, and systems of criticism.

Current performance metrics emphasize questions of implementation and scalability, rather than meaning and context. As a result, what travels abroad is often not an aesthetic language but a technological format—closer to entry into international media-arts markets than into the global art world.
 
This structure disadvantages fine artists not because of a lack of capability, but because of the way support systems are designed. Painting, sculpture, concept-driven installation, and non-material practices are inherently difficult to visualize within short-term, results-based evaluations.
 

 
What Should Public Platforms Be Responsible For?
 
Serving as a global distribution hub for technology-based art and bearing responsibility for the internationalization of Korean contemporary art are fundamentally different objectives. If both are to be pursued simultaneously, performance indicators and support structures must be clearly differentiated.
 
When heterogeneous outcomes are bundled under a single banner of “global success,” technology-driven sectors are strengthened, while fine art is naturally marginalized. This is not a matter of intention, but of structure.
 

 
Before Results, the Criteria Must Be Rebuilt
 
For the President’s remarks to carry genuine significance, they must lead not only to increased funding, but to a redesign of support criteria themselves. Unless obsession with short-term results is abandoned and parallel investment is made in preserving seeds and roots—long-term working conditions for artists, criticism and documentation, archives and museum systems, and sustained engagement with international discourse—the internationalization of Korean contemporary art will remain structurally unattainable.
 
The internationalization of Korean contemporary art is not a question of adopting more technology, but of deciding which art, and by what standards, is introduced to the world. This is not a moment to celebrate results, but to ask what those results have cost—and to reset direction accordingly.