Rereading Korean Conceptual Art
 
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) is presenting《This is (Not) Conceptual Art》at MMCA Seoul through October 11, 2026. The exhibition examines how the current of “conceptual art” was formed and expanded within Korean contemporary art from the 1970s to the 1990s.

The exhibition brings together 28 artists, including Kim Beom, Kim Soun-Gui, Bahc Yiso, Ahn Kyuchul, and Lee Kun-Yong, and presents around 140 works and archival materials across various media, including painting, photography, video, and performance. Related programs, including artist talks and international symposiums, also provide opportunities to deepen the understanding of Korean conceptual art.

The exhibition traces the process by which Korean art moved beyond visually centered expression and came to engage with language, action, thought, measurement, signs, and institutions, transforming itself into an art of thinking. Here, conceptual art does not simply refer to art that privileges ideas over finished objects. Korean conceptual practices developed through complex intersections of language and logic with materiality, the body, action, and social conditions. Rather than binding these practices to a single fixed definition, the exhibition focuses on how concepts, processes, and contexts have operated within Korean contemporary art.
 
 
 
Expanding the Narrative of Korean Contemporary Art after Dansaekhwa
 
This exhibition is significant within the recent effort to reinterpret Korean contemporary art. For a long time, Korean contemporary art was introduced internationally largely through Dansaekhwa, or Korean monochrome painting. While Dansaekhwa played an important role in raising the global visibility of Korean contemporary art, the diverse experimental and conceptual practices within Korean art were comparatively less examined.

This situation has begun to change in the 2020s. MMCA’s 2023 exhibition《Korean Experimental Art 1960s–1970s》later traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles under the title《Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s》, bringing Korean experimental art into renewed focus within the context of international art history. Through performance, happenings, objects, photography, film, and installation, the exhibition presented another genealogy of Korean contemporary art by highlighting the diverse practices of the Korean avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s.
 
《This is (Not) Conceptual Art》can be understood as part of this broader trajectory. If the exhibitions at the Guggenheim and the Hammer Museum brought international attention to the historical significance of Korean experimental art, the current MMCA exhibition offers a focused examination of how conceptual thinking unfolded within Korean contemporary art.
 
 
 
The Question Implied by “This is (Not) Conceptual Art”
 
The word “Not” in the exhibition title clearly reveals the exhibition’s central concern. 《This is (Not) Conceptual Art》does not attempt to define what conceptual art is in a fixed way. Instead, it questions the boundaries and conditions of the very term “conceptual art.”

Western conceptual art is generally understood as a movement that emphasized ideas, language, and institutional critique over the material form of the artwork. In contrast, Korean conceptual practices were often closely connected to social realities, political environments, site-specific conditions, the body, and everyday experience. For this reason, Korean conceptual art needs to be understood not simply by applying the terminology of Western art history, but by examining the internal conditions and contexts of Korean contemporary art.
 
The importance of this exhibition lies precisely in this point. Rather than organizing conceptual art as a closed category, it investigates how conceptual thinking emerged and transformed within Korean contemporary art. In this context, conceptual art does not refer only to a specific style or form. It includes the way an artwork is made, the way it relates to viewers, and the way art reflects on reality, institutions, language, and society.
 
 
 
Language, Logic, Action: How Does a Work Become an Event?
 
The exhibition is organized into four sections. The first section, “Language, Logic, Action,” explores the relationship between action and language, which may be understood as a starting point of conceptual art. Instead of presenting finished objects such as painting or sculpture, artists foregrounded process through repeated actions, rules, bodily movements, and the accumulation of time.
 
Works by Lee Kun-Yong and Sung Neung Kyung transform everyday movements into events through logical structures. In front of these works, viewers do not simply look at art; they are asked to consider the conditions and procedures through which the work comes into being.

Cody Choi’s Scamps, Modeling for Scram also addresses the body, action, and accumulation. The artist repeatedly inserted and held parts of his body, including his head, palm, abdomen, genitals, and toes, inside a wooden box for varying lengths of time. This act was intended to accumulate the energy generated by bodily movement inside the box, allowing the work to be understood less as a material result than as a record of action and process.
 
 
 
Objects and Language: Where Does Meaning Arise?
 
The second section, “Objects and Language,” questions the role of language, which we often take for granted. There is always a gap between an object and the language used to describe it. Language explains the world, but it can never fully capture it. Through works that reveal this gap, the exhibition encourages viewers to construct meaning for themselves.

Ahn Kyuchul’s works lead viewers into reflection by adding speculative language and philosophical meaning to everyday objects. Five Questions for an Unknown Artist, made in 1991, is an installation composed of two doors marked “Art” and “Life,” along with a flowerpot in which a chair has been planted. The five handles attached to the door marked “Art” suggest the many questions one must confront in order to pass through it. By contrast, the door marked “Life” has no handle, revealing a situation from which one cannot easily turn back.
 
In this work, objects are not merely objects. The doors, handles, flowerpot, and chair become devices that question the relationship between art and life. Through the work, viewers are invited to consider what it means to enter art, or to return to life.
 
 
 
Maps and Measurement: How Is Objectivity Constructed?
 
The third section, “Maps and Measurement,” dismantles the systems of standards through which the world is explained. Maps, coordinates, time, and units of measurement appear to be objective standards, but they are in fact socially agreed-upon rules and devices of perception. By altering or reconstructing them, artists unsettle the accuracy and objectivity that we have come to trust.

Sung Neung Kyung’s An Upside-Down Map of the World clearly demonstrates this critical approach. The artist cuts and rearranges a world map, overturning the existing standards through which the world is perceived. Here, the map no longer functions merely as spatial information. It becomes a device that reveals questions of viewpoint, power, center, and periphery.
 
This section demonstrates that Korean conceptual art did not remain confined to abstract ideas. By dealing with systems such as measurement, classification, maps, and coordinates, the artists questioned how the world is constructed and perceived. This shows that art can go beyond visual forms to address the structure of perception itself.
 
 
 
Mediators of Signs: How Are Images Re-edited?
 
The final section, “Mediators of Signs,” introduces works that re-edit already existing images and information, including newspapers, advertisements, statistics, photographs, and records. Instead of creating new images, artists rearrange existing signs to reveal how information is constructed and given meaning.

Kim Yong-Ik’sUntitled (in the《1st Young Artists Exhibition》, 1981) exemplifies this approach. The work is a 2010 remake of a piece originally shown in the《1st Young Artists Exhibition》held at MMCA in 1981. Archival photographs of the 1981 exhibition installation are attached to the surfaces of the boxes. This is not simply an attempt to restore an earlier work. Rather, the process of re-editing and recontextualizing his own previous work becomes part of the work itself.
 
Such works revisit the relationship between record and original, remake and interpretation. The artwork is no longer a fixed result. It becomes an open structure that is reread and reconstructed over time.
 
 
 
Conceptual Art Is Not the Past but the Present
 
Today, contemporary art operates within increasingly immaterial and conceptual conditions shaped by AI, data, algorithms, networks, and participatory practices. In this context, revisiting Korean conceptual art is not merely an act of historical reflection. It is closer to a process of confirming the historical foundations on which contemporary art has been formed.
 
《This is (Not) Conceptual Art》 both revisits the history of Korean conceptual art and offers an important opportunity to reread Korean contemporary art from a broader perspective. The exhibition moves beyond asking what Korean contemporary art has shown. It asks how it has thought, recorded, and been reinterpreted, revealing Korean conceptual art as an essential basis for understanding Korean contemporary art today.

Introduction to the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea
 
The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea is the country’s leading national museum dedicated to the collection, preservation, research, and exhibition of Korean modern and contemporary art. Operating four branches in Gwacheon, Seoul, Deoksugung, and Cheongju, MMCA presents exhibitions that examine major currents in Korean art history while introducing new discourses in contemporary art. Through international exchange and scholarly research, the museum also plays an important role in expanding the global presence of Korean contemporary art.
 

 
Exhibition Information

Title: This is (Not) Conceptual Art
Period: June 19 – October 11, 2026
Venue: MMCA Seoul, Galleries 6 and 7, and Museum Madang
Participating Artists: 28 artists, including Kim Beom, Kim Soun-Gui, Bahc Yiso, Ahn Kyuchul, and Lee Kun-Yong
Works on View: Around 140 works and archival materials, including painting, photography, video, and performance
Admission: KRW 2,000
Organizer: National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

References

• The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art