The term “The Conditions of the Post-Contemporary” is not intended to declare the arrival of a new era. Rather, it functions as an analytical concept designed to bring the operative principles that contemporary art has established for itself back into the realm of critical reflection. Meaning continues to be produced actively, incessantly, across diverse sites and through a wide range of practices. The crucial question is how these meanings and values are to be organized, and, more fundamentally, how they are to be judged.

The limitation of contemporary art does not lie in a failure of meaning production, but in the neutralization of the structure of value judgment.

Unless this structure is reconstituted,
any discussion of the future of contemporary art remains inevitably hollow.
The notion of the post-contemporary condition begins
precisely from this recognition.

Modes of Value Judgment in Modern and Contemporary Art
 
In modern art, meaning was organized through the internal formal logic of the artwork. Form, composition, materiality, and the autonomy of the medium functioned as criteria for evaluating artistic achievement, while criticism compared works on the basis of these criteria, ranking them and accumulating hierarchies over time.
 
The strength of this structure lay in the clarity of its evaluative circuit. It was possible to articulate, in logical terms, what a work had achieved and where it had failed, and such articulations functioned as valid criteria for judging other works as well.
 
Contemporary art, however, emerged by rejecting or redefining this structure. From the perspective of modernism, the notion of an artwork’s intrinsic meaning no longer fixes the work to a single interpretation. Instead, meaning is generated through the social, institutional, and discursive conditions in which the work is situated, as well as through the position and experience of the viewer and the modes of circulation and reception.
 
In this sense, the artwork is no longer a vessel containing a complete meaning, but a medium that triggers the production of meaning. This shift proved effective in accounting for the complexity of the contemporary condition and, in moving beyond the exclusionary logic of modernism, appeared to accommodate a wide range of practices within a single field.
 
The problem, however, is that while contemporary art achieved a significant expansion of meaning, it revealed a serious structural vulnerability at the stage where such achievements needed to be translated into a language of judgment. Production became excessive, while the mechanisms capable of converting meaning into value judgment remained insufficient.
 

 
What the “Deferral of Value Judgment” Has Produced
 
In contemporary art, the “deferral of value judgment” emerged from the recognition that singular and immediate judgments—the mode practiced by modern art—were no longer capable of adequately grasping the complexity and multiplicity of the contemporary condition.
 
As a result, value judgment was not abolished but left unresolved: both its criteria and its timing remained undefined, and this suspension came to be accepted as natural and legitimate. Under the name of the “deferral of value judgment,” this suspension performed several important functions.
 
It undermined the authority of form-centered evaluation, excluded the dominance of particular aesthetic universals, and operated institutionally to place regional and cultural differences on a shared platform. Accordingly, what defines the current state of contemporary art is not the absence of criteria, but their excessive proliferation. Criteria such as context, political engagement, participation, community, institutional critique, identity, narrative, research, archives, technology, and ecology are invoked simultaneously.
 
This plurality in itself is not the reason the post-contemporary condition has come into question. On the contrary, such plurality has enriched the field of art. The problem lies in the fact that these criteria fail to complement or verify one another, functioning instead as parallel forms of suspended judgment.
 
A judgment made on the basis of one criterion is immediately nullified by another. References to formal completion are dismissed as “formalism,” discussions of aesthetic achievement as “apolitical,” emphases on political radicality as “moralism,” and institutional critique as merely “a role performed within the institution.”

As this process repeats, value judgment becomes structurally impossible.
Criteria block other criteria, cancel one another out,
and ultimately consume one another.

Under these conditions, it becomes impossible to rigorously assess the specific achievements of individual works. Criticism ceases to address “why” a work matters and instead limits itself to describing “what context” it occupies. Countless exhibitions pass by as events, failing to accumulate as aesthetic or art-historical achievements. This is the most damaging consequence produced by the absence of value judgment in contemporary art.
 


The Successes and Failures of Contemporary Art

Contemporary art continues to operate effectively in its capacity to register the conditions of the present, to shift between media and forms, to formulate sensitive problematics, and to articulate languages capable of interpreting institutions and society. What no longer functions, however, is the capacity to preserve questions such as what a work has achieved, on what grounds that achievement is valid, where its limits lie, what kinds of revisions are required, and what remains or is exhausted when themes and formats are repeatedly reproduced.

When sentences of value judgment fail to endure, causal analysis becomes impossible. Without such analysis, criticism loses its influence. The space vacated by diminished criticism does not remain empty; it is occupied by a distorted system of signals—what may be described as symbolic capital.
 
The void created by the neutralization of value judgment is most rapidly occupied by the art market, including galleries, art fairs, and auctions. This signaling system produces powerful indicators of value without analyzing the intrinsic achievements of artworks. Transaction records, hammer prices, repeated exposure, booth placement, gallery networks, and collector lineups do not explain quality, but effectively replace it.
 
The central issue here is not a moral condemnation of the market. Rather, it is the structural fact that as internal mechanisms of value judgment weaken, market signals come to function as substitutes for judgment. Consequently, the intrinsic value of artworks fractures. What a work does becomes less significant than where it is shown, who acquires it, and at what price it is traded. Qualities such as completion, density, structural design, skill, and formal control recede from the center of evaluation, while indicators of exposure, connectivity, and transaction take precedence.
 
When the internal system of value judgment collapses, the market ultimately operates as a comprehensive apparatus of evaluation. The result is a decline in cultural awareness and the erosion—and eventual disappearance—of art’s unique role in producing and sustaining human value, leading to the conditions characteristic of a culturally regressive society.
 
 

What the Conditions of the Post-Contemporary Signify
 
The core claim of the post-contemporary condition is not that contemporary art lacks meaning, but that a state in which meaning and value judgment are indefinitely deferred—never converted into judgment—has become structurally entrenched. Thus, the post-contemporary condition is not a slogan calling for the transcendence of contemporary art, but a framework that enables reflection on what must be reactivated in order to sustain contemporary art as a bearer of contemporary value.
 
In the context of Korean contemporary art in particular, this deferral functioned as a de facto necessity for rapid integration into international exhibition formats and discourses. It allowed practitioners to avoid comparison based on singular criteria and to justify their practices within the shared language of “contemporary issues,” postponing evaluation.
 
Yet as deferral persists, it shifts from a period of reflective consideration to a state in which judgment simply does not occur. It is this shift that constitutes the post-contemporary condition.
 

 
What Constitutes the Post-Contemporary Condition
 
To speak of “overcoming” contemporary art is abstract and meaningless. Instead of vague prescriptions, it is necessary to identify precisely the elements that require reconfiguration.
 
First, the evaluative circuit must be restored. This entails developing a language capable of assessing achievement and limitation after meaning production, procedures for preserving such assessments in accumulative form, and feedback mechanisms through which accumulated judgments inform subsequent practices.
 
Second, criteria must be aligned through processes capable of shared agreement. Plural criteria arranged in parallel do not constitute plurality, but cancellation. Alignment does not mean reduction to a single standard, but minimal structuring that prevents criteria from nullifying one another.
 
For example, exhibitions cannot conclude merely by claiming to have “raised an issue.” They must specify what was raised, how it was realized through form, composition, and experience, where density diminished, and what ultimately remained. Such articulation is not an imposition of hierarchy, but a statement of responsibility.
 
Accordingly, the role of criticism must be redefined. Criticism must both contextualize production processes and return to functioning as an analytical apparatus capable of evaluating intrinsic achievement. This does not imply a return to authoritarian judgment, but the ability to frame judgment not as a fixed verdict, but as a transparent and verifiable analytical result.

Market signals need not be denied, but the moment they become substitutes for value judgment, internal evaluative structures collapse. Transactions and exposure may serve as reference data, but they cannot replace assessment of achievement. This separation is not an ethical issue, but a structural one: where value judgment disappears, symbolic market value inevitably takes its place.
 
 

For the Future of Korean Contemporary Art
 
What Korean contemporary art requires is not a call to “do better,” but a return to foundational questioning.
 
It is necessary to reconsider what constitutes value, what defines the intrinsic achievement of an artwork, what exhibitions and criticism should record as outcomes, and how market signals should be interpreted and where their influence should end.
 
If the deferral of value judgment is not reconfigured within the context of contemporary art, meaning will continue to be produced but will fail to accumulate internally, remaining subject to external signals. Under such conditions, Korean contemporary art cannot escape a structure in which its value is determined by others.
 
Therefore, what practitioners in Korean contemporary art must recognize is the urgency of reconstructing—without delay—a structure of value judgment capable of capturing this unstable and disordered moment in objective language and articulating it through clear concepts.
 
What is required to avoid subordination or marginalization within a pluralistic, international, and volatile world is not increased production, but the reconstruction of a judgment system capable of assigning new value and order to what has already been produced. Without the establishment of such post-contemporary conditions, the future of Korean contemporary art cannot meaningfully be said to exist.

Jay Jongho Kim graduated from the Department of Art Theory at Hongik University and earned his master's degree in Art Planning from the same university. From 1996 to 2006, he worked as a curator at Gallery Seomi, planning director at CAIS Gallery, head of the curatorial research team at Art Center Nabi, director at Gallery Hyundai, and curator at Gana New York. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the executive director of Doosan Gallery Seoul & New York and Doosan Residency New York, introducing Korean contemporary artists to the local scene in New York. After returning to Korea in 2017, he worked as an art consultant, conducting art education, collection consulting, and various art projects. In 2021, he founded A Project Company and is currently running the platforms K-ARTNOW.COM and K-ARTIST.COM, which aim to promote Korean contemporary art on the global stage.