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 point can we speak of Korean contemporary art in the more specific art-historical sense of dongshidae misul?
 
There is no shortage of scholarship addressing each of these periods. Yet a coherent framework that connects geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae within a continuous historical trajectory—and explains the character and boundaries of each according to consistent criteria—has yet to be fully established. Starting points vary among scholars, and the same term is often used to designate different historical periods and conceptual categories.
 
This problem is not limited to deciding where one chronological boundary should be drawn. Periodization provides a historical framework through which transformations in artistic form, the concept of art, institutional structures, and social conditions can be explained. When terminology remains unclear, the nature of those transformations also becomes difficult to articulate with precision.
 
Before discussing the beginning of Korean contemporary art, it is therefore necessary to reconsider when the Korean concepts of geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae were formed and how they have been used.
 
 
 
The Translation of Modern Art as ‘Hyeondae Misul’
 
According to currently available scholarship, the use of the term hyeondae misul in Korea can be traced back at least to the early 1920s.
 
The painter and critic Kim Chan-young used hyeondae misul as a translation of “Modern Art,” a term he encountered while studying in Japan. In a published dialogue between Kwon Haeng-ga and Kim Youngna, the scholars explain that during the Japanese colonial period, the English word “modern” was translated inconsistently through both geundae and hyeondae. They specifically cite Kim’s early-1920s use of hyeondae misul as a translation of Modern Art.[1]
 
In journals such as Pyeheo, Changjo, and Yeongdae, Kim introduced and defended new Western artistic movements after Post-Impressionism as questions of hyeondae misul. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture likewise describes him as one of Korea’s early modernists and as an advocate of the new Western art that emerged after Post-Impressionism.[2]
 
It is therefore reasonable to conclude that hyeondae misul began to be used in Korea in the early 1920s as part of the process through which Western Modern Art was received and translated.
  
It is important, however, to understand the historical meaning of the word “modern” at that time.
 
The English adjective modern still carries the general meanings of “new,” “up-to-date,” “of the present age,” and “suited to contemporary conditions.” This was even more apparent in the early twentieth century. For Kim Chan-young and his contemporaries, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism were not yet components of a completed historical canon called Modern Art. They were among the newest and most radical artistic developments of their own time.

Modern Art was therefore simultaneously a modern historical formation and the newest art of the day.

In this context, Kim’s translation of Modern Art as hyeondae misul was not inherently irrational or simply mistaken. The term could naturally have been understood as “the art of the present age,” “the new art of the time,” or “the latest art.”

The problem arose later, when this relative expression of presentness became fixed as the name of a historical period.

A term that had initially referred to the new art of a particular present gradually became an institutionalized category. As time passed, the art that had once been “contemporary” in the ordinary temporal sense became historical Modern Art. Yet the Korean term hyeondae misul remained in use.
 
 
The distinction between geundae and hyeondae as relatively separate historical concepts became clearer only after Korea’s liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Artists working after liberation sought to distinguish their period from that of the preceding colonial generation.

From the 1950s onward, hyeondae misul became widely used in contrast to geundae misul, or the art of Korea’s modern period. This development was also influenced by Japanese translation practices, and scholars have noted that these terms became established without their conceptual implications having been fully examined.[3]
 
In summary, hyeondae misul was introduced in the early 1920s as a translation of Modern Art. After liberation, particularly from the 1950s onward, it was generalized as the name of a new period distinguished from colonial-era geundae misul.
 
The original translation need not be condemned according to present-day standards. The more fundamental problem is that the historical meaning of Modern Art changed, while the Korean terminological system was not sufficiently reorganized.
 
Modern Art became an art-historical category belonging to the past. Contemporary Art subsequently emerged as a distinct category. Yet hyeondae misul continued to be used for both.
 
 
 
When Both Modern Art and Contemporary Art Become Hyeondae Misul
 
When hyeondae misul first began to be used as a translation of Modern Art, the conceptual problem confronting us today had not yet fully emerged.
 
At that time, Korea was primarily receiving Western modernism and avant-garde movements after Impressionism. Contemporary Art had not yet been established as an independent art-historical category in the sense in which the term is used today.
 
During the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the need to distinguish the art that came after modernism from established Modern Art became increasingly apparent. With the rise of Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, performance, installation, video, and multimedia practices, it became difficult to explain modernism and subsequent artistic developments within a single historical category.
 
In English, a distinction gradually developed between Modern Art and Contemporary Art.
This distinction does not mean that the ordinary adjective modern ceased to signify something new, current, or adapted to the present. It continues to carry those meanings today. The crucial distinction is between the general adjective modern and the institutionalized art-historical category Modern Art.
 
The phrase “modern design,” for example, may still describe something contemporary, innovative, or suited to present conditions. Modern Art, however, has become the proper name of a historical field associated with the development of modernism.
 
The Korean term hyeondae misul does not clearly register this distinction.
 
Books on modernism have been published as histories of hyeondae misul, while books, exhibitions, and institutions concerned with Contemporary Art have also been described using the same term. A single Korean expression has consequently come to denote two distinct English concepts.

 
The structure of the confusion can be summarized as follows:

Modern Art = hyeondae misul
Contemporary Art = hyeondae misul

 
At the same time, when geundae misul is translated into English, it is generally rendered as “modern art” or “modern Korean art.”
 
 
This creates a second overlap:

Geundae misul = modern art
Hyeondae misul = modern art

 
Thus both geundae misul and hyeondae misul can become “modern art” in English, while both hyeondae misul and dongshidae misul can become “contemporary art.”
 
This is not a minor problem of linguistic duplication. It obscures the distinction between different historical periods and different concepts of art.
 
If Modern Art refers to the historical art formed through modernism, and Contemporary Art signifies the artistic conditions that emerged after the limits or dissolution of modernism’s dominant historical narrative, calling both hyeondae misul inevitably blurs the art-historical transition between them.
 
In his 2018 essay “How Should ‘Contemporary Art’ Be Translated?,” Kim Ki-soo begins from the premise that Modern Art and Contemporary Art are conceptually distinct. He argues that their Korean translations should be established within a coherent system that avoids internal contradiction.[4]
 
Rather than declaring a single Korean term to be the absolute answer, Kim emphasizes that the translation of Modern Art must also be reconsidered in relation to whichever term is selected for Contemporary Art.
 
His 2019 article, “The Problem of Reestablishing the Periodization of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art,” further proposes that the periodization of Korean art history should be reassessed in light of international discourses on Contemporary Art that developed through the 1960s and 1970s and became particularly prominent after 1989.[5]
 
The issue has therefore already been raised within Korean scholarship. Yet changing a single translation cannot resolve the entire problem. The historical criteria by which geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae are distinguished must also be clarified.
 
 
 
A Translation Problem and a Problem of Periodization
 
Two different questions are often combined in this debate.
 
The first is a problem of translation.
How should Modern Art and Contemporary Art be translated into Korean?
 
The second is a problem of Korean art-historical periodization.
When did Korean geundae misul begin and end? What defines hyeondae misul? When did Korean dongshidae misul emerge?
 
Had Kim Chan-young translated Modern Art as geundae misul rather than hyeondae misul, the later terminological conflict might have been reduced.
 
The basic correspondence could have developed as follows:
Modern Art = geundae misul
Contemporary Art = hyeondae misul or dongshidae misul
 
This would have avoided at least one major source of confusion: the use of hyeondae misul for both Modern Art and Contemporary Art.
 
Alternatively, Kim might have used a more explicitly relative expression such as “the new art of the present,” “the art of the day,” or “the new art of the age.” Such a phrase might have remained a description of artistic newness rather than becoming fixed as the permanent name of a historical period.
 
Yet it would be historically reductive to treat Kim’s choice as a simple mistranslation.
 
In the early 1920s, Modern Art was genuinely the art of the present. The later distinction between an already historicized Modern Art and a separate Contemporary Art had not yet been established.
 
The decisive failure occurred not at the moment of the original translation, but later, when the Korean art world did not sufficiently revise its terminology in response to changes in art history.
 
Once Modern Art had become a historical category and Contemporary Art had emerged as a distinct concept, the Korean translation system should have been reconsidered.
 
Instead, hyeondae misul continued to operate simultaneously as:
 

1. a translation of Modern Art;
2. a designation for post-liberation Korean art;
3. a translation of Contemporary Art;
4. a general expression for art currently being produced or exhibited.

 
The accumulation of these meanings transformed a once understandable translation into a structural conceptual problem.
 
 
 
The Unclear Boundaries of Geundae, Hyeondae, and Dongshidae
 
The question of where Korea’s modern period in art begins has long been debated.
 
The answer changes depending on whether the decisive criterion is identified as the opening of Korea’s ports and the introduction of Western culture, the formation of modern art education and exhibition systems, the introduction of Western-style painting, or the establishment of “art” as an autonomous institution. The evaluation of colonial modernity is inseparable from this question.
 
The beginning of hyeondae misul is also explained differently depending on whether the principal criterion is liberation and the transformation of the state system, postwar abstraction after the Korean War, Informel in the late 1950s, or the modernism and Dansaekhwa of the 1970s.
 
The beginning of Korean contemporary art in the more specific sense of dongshidae misul likewise varies according to whether the crucial transition is located in the experimental and conceptual practices of the 1970s, the postmodernism and Minjung Art of the 1980s, or the globalization and biennial system of the 1990s.
 
It may therefore be methodologically inverted to establish the beginning of Korean contemporary art first and then simply position geundae and hyeondae before it.
 
Unless the formation of geundae and the character of hyeondae are properly defined, it is impossible to explain precisely what contemporary art departed from, transformed, or superseded.
 
What is required is not the declaration of a single year as the definitive answer. Political transformations, the formation of art institutions, changes in visual language, shifts in the concept of art, and Korea’s relationship with the international art world must be examined separately.
 
Only then can the dominant character of each period be described.
 
 
 
Outdated Terminology and Distorted Historical Perception
 
Terminology is more than a system of labels. Scholarship thinks through concepts, and concepts are communicated and accumulated through language.
 
When Modern Art and Contemporary Art are both called hyeondae misul, the distinction between the two becomes difficult to perceive. Modernism, postmodernism, and contemporary art are subsumed under one category, while the distinction between an art-historical period and an artist’s current activity is also blurred.
 
The confusion appears on three levels.
 

The first is a confusion of translation. Different source-language concepts are rendered through a single Korean term.
 
The second is a confusion of periodization. The historical boundary between Modern Art and Contemporary Art becomes unclear.
 
The third is a confusion of classification. Art belonging to an earlier historical period may be categorized as contemporary merely because it continues to be exhibited or traded in the present.

 
Outdated terminology produces conceptual confusion, and conceptual confusion distorts historical perception. When imprecise concepts are repeatedly reproduced through education, translation, exhibitions, publishing, museums, and the art market, they solidify into institutional convention.
 
This phenomenon may be described as conceptual anachronism.
 
The problem is not simply that an old term continues to exist. Nor is the problem that modern still carries the ordinary meaning of something new, current, or suited to the present.
 
The problem arises when a relative temporal expression and a historical proper name are not distinguished.
 
The modern in “modern technology” remains open to the present. Modern Art, however, has become an established historical category.
 
The Korean term hyeondae misul has been made to carry both meanings without consistently distinguishing between them.
 
The term was initially capable of referring to the new art of a particular present. It later became the fixed name of a historical period. It was then reused for the art that followed that period.
 
A language that does not change even as the historical structure it describes changes eventually produces anachronism.
 
 
 
Is Dansaekhwa Modern or Contemporary?
 
Dansaekhwa offers a representative example of this confusion.
 
Dansaekhwa emerged as a major tendency in Korean art during the 1970s and has generally been studied within the context of Korean modernism. Its emphasis on the flatness and materiality of painting, repetitive physical action, the investigation of materials and supports, and the minimization of representation connects it to central concerns of modernist art.
 
This does not mean that Dansaekhwa should be understood as a simple repetition of Western modernism.
 
It incorporates Korea’s material culture, embodied modes of practice, conceptions of nature, and the specific conditions of postwar society and art institutions. Nevertheless, there is no need to deny that modernism constituted the primary art-historical framework within which Dansaekhwa was formed and developed.
 
Despite this, international exhibitions, galleries, art fairs, and art-market platforms frequently place Dansaekhwa within the category of “Korean Contemporary Art” or “Contemporary Korean Art.”
 
In such cases, “contemporary” may function less as a precise art-historical period designation than as an inclusive term meaning “Korean art currently exhibited and traded within the international art world.”
 
In exhibition and market classifications, living artists, currently circulated works, postwar art, and contemporary art may all be grouped within a single contemporary sector.
 
However, the practical classifications used by exhibitions and markets should not be equated with art-historical periodization.
 
Not every work becomes contemporary art simply because it is exhibited today. Nor does the fact that an artist remained active until recently mean that every phase of that artist’s work belongs to the same art-historical period.
 
A single artist’s practice may contain a modernist phase and subsequent transformations.
 
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between “Korean art currently in circulation” and contemporary art as an art-historical concept.
 
Dansaekhwa demonstrates that currentness and contemporaneity are not necessarily synonymous.
 
 
 
Modernity, Modern Art, and Contemporary Art
 
Part of the confusion results from the fact that several related but distinct concepts are often treated as interchangeable.
 
Modernity refers broadly to the social, historical, intellectual, and cultural conditions associated with modernization: industrialization, urbanization, new forms of subjectivity, secularization, capitalism, and transformed experiences of time and space.
 
Modernism refers to the artistic, literary, architectural, and intellectual movements that responded to or emerged from those conditions.
 
Modern Art is the art-historical category associated with the development of modernism.
 
The adjective modern, however, continues to function in ordinary language as a relative term meaning new, current, progressive, or adapted to the present.
 
Contemporary Art does not simply mean any art produced at the same time as its audience. It has also developed into an institutionalized and theoretical category associated with the transformations that followed modernism, Conceptual Art, postmodernism, globalization, and the pluralization of media and artistic practices.
 
The difficulty in Korean arises because hyeondae can carry the ordinary temporal sense of “present-day,” the historical sense of “modern,” and the institutional meaning of “contemporary.”
 
Without distinguishing these layers, the question “Is this modern or contemporary?” cannot be answered with precision.
 
 
 
Danto and Osborne: Different Points of Departure
 
The differences among Western theories concerning the beginning of contemporary art provide important clues for understanding this issue.
 
Arthur Danto regarded Andy Warhol’s 1964 Brillo Boxes as a symbolic event marking an art-historical transition. Once artworks and ordinary objects could no longer be distinguished solely by their outward appearance, the question of what constituted art shifted from visual form to philosophical and conceptual interpretation.
 
Danto’s “end of art” does not signify the cessation of artistic production. Rather, it refers to the end of the modernist historical narrative in which one style overcomes its predecessor and advances the progress of art. What follows is a pluralistic and “post-historical” condition in which diverse styles and media coexist.[6]
 
Peter Osborne defines contemporary art as post-conceptual art. From his perspective, the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s, represented by figures such as Sol LeWitt and Joseph Kosuth, decisively dismantled the traditional identification of the artwork with a particular medium. Conceptuality is a necessary but not sufficient condition of contemporary art. An artwork includes both a conceptual dimension and its material and aesthetic realization.[7]
 
At the same time, Osborne draws attention to the global contemporaneity that emerged after 1989, as global capitalism, transnational networks, and heterogeneous historical temporalities became combined within a single present. For Osborne, therefore, 1989 is not so much the initial art-historical rupture separating art before and after Conceptual Art. It is closer to the historical condition under which post-conceptual art became organized as a global system of contemporary art.
 
Kim Ki-soo’s research similarly explains that the discourse of Contemporary Art developed through the 1960s and 1970s and became publicly established, particularly after 1989, as an art-historical discourse that displaced Modern Art.
 
It would be inappropriate, however, to reduce the difference between Danto and Osborne to a choice between the 1960s–70s and 1989.
 
Danto primarily explains an internal historical and philosophical transformation within art.
 
Osborne builds on that transformation while explaining both the mode of existence of post-conceptual art and the conditions of global contemporaneity.
 
In the periodization of contemporary art, transformations internal to art should be examined first. The subsequent reorganization of already transformed artistic practices within globalized institutions and networks can then be addressed at a second level.
 
 
 
The Problem of Establishing a Single Theory as Orthodoxy
 
Lectures such as Cho Joo-yeon’s “Three Concepts of Modern and Contemporary Art,” made publicly available by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, are significant in that they introduced distinctions among the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary within the field of public art education.
 
The museum’s lecture programs on contemporary culture and art have similarly attempted to broaden the understanding of modern and contemporary art by examining how changes in artistic style are connected to history and society.[8]
 
However, the fact that a particular lecture or publication presents Osborne’s theory of contemporaneity and the global transition after 1989 as major criteria does not make them the only authoritative account of contemporary art.
 
Osborne’s theory is an exceptionally influential model for explaining global contemporary art after 1989. Yet art-historical periodization must also consider Danto’s post-historical pluralism, the transformation produced by Conceptual Art, the dismantling of the traditional medium concept, postmodernism, and the distinct historical transitions that occurred in non-Western regions.
 
Korean art history, in particular, contains conditions that cannot be explained by directly applying Western dates.
 
Korea’s experimental art and Dansaekhwa of the 1970s, Minjung Art and diverse figurative practices of the 1980s, and the internationalization and biennial system of the 1990s each reflect different art-historical, political, and social transformations.
 
The year 1989 may therefore serve as an important reference point for interpreting Korean contemporary art, but it cannot function as an absolute criterion explaining every transformation in Korean art history.
 
 
 
New Criteria for Korean Art History
 
The periodization of Korean art history cannot be adequately explained by simply transferring Western chronologies or applying the divisions of political history.
 
Any new system of periodization must consider at least four levels.
 
 
First, it must examine changes in the concept of art.
This means tracing the process through which art moved beyond representation and traditional genres toward autonomous form, conceptuality, action, installation, and multimedia practices.
 
Second, it must consider changes in art institutions.
The formation and restructuring of art education, exhibitions, museums, criticism, galleries, markets, and international exchange must be examined.
 
Third, it must analyze changes in artworks and visual languages.
It is necessary to identify the moments at which established styles and aesthetics within Korean art were substantially dismantled, transformed, or replaced by new artistic questions.
 
Fourth, it must examine changes in world-historical conditions.
The effects of colonial rule and liberation, war and national division, industrialization and democratization, globalization, and digital transformation on the production and circulation of art must all be considered.
 
 
When these criteria are applied, geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae can be explained not merely as chronological segments divided by years, but as historical phases structured by different artistic conditions.
 
Korean geundae misul may be understood as the process through which Western concepts and institutions of art, new models of artistic identity, and modern exhibition culture were formed.
 
Korean hyeondae misul may be described as the period in which postwar abstraction and modernism brought the autonomy of art and formal and medium-related investigation to the foreground.
 
This category, however, should not automatically be translated as “modernist art,” because not every artistic practice produced during the period belonged to modernism. Hyeondae misul is partly an art-historical category and partly a Korean historical designation for post-liberation art.
 
Korean dongshidae misul may be understood as the process through which modernism’s singular historical narrative was dismantled; conceptual, installation, video, performance, and socially and politically engaged practices became pluralized; and Korean art was subsequently connected to the global art system.
 
The precise starting points and detailed criteria of each period require further examination.
 
What matters is the recognition that these three terms do not designate the same concept and that consistent art-historical criteria are required to explain the formation and transition of each.
 
 
 
Toward a New Periodization
 
What the Korean art world must reconsider is not merely whether contemporary art began in the 1970s or in 1989.
 
Before that question can be answered, geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae must each be redefined in art-historical terms.
 
Without explaining the formation of geundae misul, it is difficult to understand what hyeondae misul inherited and what it sought to overcome.
 
Without clarifying the character of hyeondae misul, it is impossible to explain which artistic paradigm Korean contemporary art emerged after.
 
To discuss the post-contemporary or the future of art without first defining the conditions of the contemporary would merely add new terminology to a conceptual void.
 
The use of hyeondae misul as a translation of Modern Art in the early 1920s was a product of the historical conditions of the time.
 
At that moment, Modern Art was indeed the newest art of the day. The adjective modern carried—and continues to carry—the meanings of the new, the current, and the up-to-date.
 
There is therefore no need to judge Kim Chan-young’s translation itself as an obvious error from a contemporary perspective.
 
Had Modern Art been translated as geundae misul, or described more provisionally as “the new art of the present,” some of the later confusion might have been avoided.
 
Yet the decisive problem lies elsewhere.
 
Modern Art subsequently became a historical category. Contemporary Art emerged as a distinct concept. Korea developed its own division between geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae. Nevertheless, the terminology was not systematically reorganized in response to these changes.
 
A relative expression meaning “the art of the present” became fixed as the name of a historical period. The same expression was then applied to the art that followed that period.
 

As a result:
 
Geundae misul and hyeondae misul may both become “modern art” in English.
 

At the same time:
 
Hyeondae misul and dongshidae misul may both become “contemporary art.”
 

This double overlap is the central terminological problem in Korean art history.
 
The problem is therefore not simply that a mistaken translation was made a century ago.
 
It is that a historically understandable translation was never sufficiently revised after the conceptual structure of art history had changed.
 
When the language used to explain an era fails to change even as the era itself changes, historical understanding remains confined within an inherited classificatory system.
 
This is the conceptual anachronism that the Korean art world must reconsider today.
 
What Korean art history requires is not merely the selection of a new translation.
 
It requires a reconsideration of geundae, hyeondae, and dongshidae within a continuous historical trajectory and the reconstruction of the art-historical criteria by which each period is distinguished.
 
Accurately distinguishing historical periods is not merely an exercise in organizing the past.
 
It is the necessary point of departure for understanding the present correctly and discussing the future of Korean contemporary art.
 
 

Notes

[1] Kwon Haeng-ga and Kim Youngna, “Examining The Arts of Korea: From the Opening of the Ports to Liberation through a Dialogue with the Author.” The dialogue explains that during the Japanese colonial period, the English term “modern” was used interchangeably in Korean as both geundae and hyeondae, and that Kim Chan-young translated the “Modern Art” he encountered while studying in Japan in the early 1920s as hyeondae misul.
[2] In the early 1920s, Kim Chan-young introduced new Western artistic movements, including Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism, through journals such as Pyeheo, Changjo, and Yeongdae. See the entry “Kim Chan-young” in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.
[3] According to the dialogue between Kwon Haeng-ga and Kim Youngna, geundae and hyeondae began to be more clearly distinguished as historical concepts only after liberation. The widespread use of hyeondae misul after the 1950s was influenced in part by terminology introduced through Japan.
[4] Kim Ki-soo examines possible Korean translations of Contemporary Art and argues that the translations of Contemporary Art and Modern Art must be established within a conceptually coherent system that does not produce internal contradiction.
[5] Kim Ki-soo’s 2019 article raises the need to reconsider the periodization of Korean modern and contemporary art in light of the discourse of Contemporary Art.
[6] For Arthur Danto, the “end of art” does not mean the disappearance of art itself. It signifies the end of the narrative in which a single historical style monopolized the direction of art’s development. Art after this point enters a pluralistic condition in which no particular style possesses an inevitable historical superiority.
[7] Peter Osborne defines contemporary art as post-conceptual art. Conceptuality is a necessary but not sufficient condition of contemporary art, and the artwork encompasses both conceptuality and its material and aesthetic realization.
[8] Cho Joo-yeon’s “Three Concepts of Modern and Contemporary Art,” made publicly available by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, is an example of distinctions among the modern, the postmodern, and the contemporary being introduced within Korean public art education. Rather than evaluating the lecturer’s theoretical position as a whole, this essay examines the possibility that a particular theoretical explanation may be simplified into an established orthodoxy.
 

 
References

Arthur C. Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press, 1997.
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, 2013.
Kim, Ki-soo. “How Should ‘Contemporary Art’ Be Translated?” Journal of the Association of Western Art History, no. 48, 2018, pp. 211–237. KCI.
Kim, Ki-soo. “The Problem of Reestablishing the Periodization of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art: From the Perspective of the Discourse of Contemporary Art.” Journal of Contemporary Art Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2019, pp. 35–62. KCI.
Kwon, Haeng-ga, and Kim Youngna. “Examining The Arts of Korea: From the Opening of the Ports to Liberation through a Dialogue with the Author.” Journal of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art History, no. 47, 2024, pp. 413–430. KCI.
Kim, Youngna. The Arts of Korea: From the Opening of the Ports to Liberation. Workroom Press, 2024.
Kim, Youngna. Korean Art after 1945. Mijinsa, 2020.
Kim, Chan-young. “On the Prospects of Contemporary Art—‘Post-Impressionism’ and ‘Cubism’ as Expressed in Painting.” Changjo, no. 8, 1921.
Lee, Seung-hyun. “How Should a New History of Korean Modern and Contemporary Art Be Written?” Art History Forum, no. 40, 2013, pp. 35–69.
Academy of Korean Studies. “Kim Chan-young.” Encyclopedia of Korean Culture.
John Rapko. “Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art.” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, December 7, 2013.
National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. “Three Concepts of Modern and Contemporary Art.” Lecture by Cho Joo-yeon, Contemporary Culture and Art Lecture Series.

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.