To consider the future of Korean contemporary art, we must first examine the structures and standards through which the global art world operates today.
 
Over the past century, Korean modern and contemporary art has developed by absorbing artistic forms, concepts, and institutions that originated in the West and transforming them within Korea’s own historical and social conditions. Today, however, the situation is different.
 
Many of the forms and institutions of modern and contemporary art that originated in the West have spread across the world, while art from Korea and other parts of Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa has become part of the international contemporary art world.
 
The issue, therefore, can no longer be understood through the old dichotomy of whether to embrace Western art or pursue something distinctly Korean.
 
Artists in Seoul, London, New York, Berlin, Beijing, Jakarta, and São Paulo work within different historical and cultural contexts. Yet their works are produced, interpreted, exhibited, and circulated through an international art system interconnected by biennials and museums, art schools and residencies, galleries and art fairs, criticism and publishing, media and archives.
 
Installation, video, performance, sound, archival practice, and research-based art can no longer be identified with any particular country or region. Concepts such as identity, memory, gender, migration, borders, decolonization, ecology, and community are likewise shared across contemporary art in different parts of the world.
 
A common set of forms, institutions, discourses, and languages has emerged, enabling art from different parts of the world to encounter one another within a shared international field.
 
This essay examines this common framework through what we will call the “global standards” of contemporary art.
 
The purpose of discussing global standards is not to learn and conform once again to criteria already established by the international art world. Nor is it to define those standards simply as Western and reject them.
 
What matters is to determine where Korean art stands within an already globalized structure of contemporary art, and what it can produce anew within it.
 
The discussion of the post-contemporary begins here as well. Before considering what might come next, we first need to understand the conditions that made contemporary art as we know it possible.
 
 
 
What Are Global Standards?
 
The global standards discussed here do not refer to a particular artistic style or a single aesthetic criterion. They do not imply that every artist should make installations or adopt a particular philosophy or theoretical framework.
 
Rather, they refer to a shared structure and language through which art from different cultural contexts can be produced, interpreted, exhibited, documented, and circulated within an international contemporary art system.
 
Artists produce works and conceptualize their practices. Curators and critics provide contexts and interpretations. Museums exhibit, collect, and preserve works, while archives accumulate records of these processes. Galleries and art fairs connect artworks to markets, and publishing and media transmit them across regions. Art schools and research institutions study and teach the knowledge and methodologies that sustain this system.
 
Together, these interconnected processes constitute an international art ecosystem.
 
The globalization of contemporary art, therefore, was not simply the globalization of artworks.
 
It was the globalization of the entire system surrounding art.
 
The ZKM project “Global Art and the Museum (GAM)”, launched in 2006, similarly examined how globalization was transforming not only artistic production but also museums and biennial networks, contributing to the formation of new “art worlds.”
 
In this sense, global standards are better understood not as a fixed set of rules imposed by a single authority, but as a common grammar that emerged through the operation of globalized contemporary art itself.
 
 
 
From a Western Artistic Language to a Global Common Language
 
Many of the principal forms and institutional languages that we now associate with contemporary art were developed within the history of twentieth-century Western modern art.
 
Following modernism, the emergence of conceptual art, Minimalism, performance, video art, site-specific art, and institutional critique rapidly expanded the field beyond the traditional media of painting and sculpture. Later, postmodernism and postcolonialism, feminism and gender, identity, relational and participatory practices, ecology, and socially engaged art entered the central discourses of contemporary art.
 
These developments transformed not only the forms of art but also the ways in which art was produced, exhibited, and interpreted.
 
From the late twentieth century onward, these forms and institutions increasingly spread beyond the West. Growing international mobility, advances in information and communication technologies, the proliferation of biennials and residency programs, and the expansion of new museums and art markets reshaped the geography of the art world.
 
Paris, New York, London, and Berlin remain powerful centers, but the global art world can no longer be explained through a handful of Western cities alone. Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Sharjah, São Paulo, and numerous other cities have emerged as significant sites for the production, exhibition, and circulation of contemporary art.
 
As artistic languages developed in the West expanded globally, art from different regions of the world also began to participate in the production of international contemporary art.
 
 
 
1989: A Changing Map of the Art World
 
The year 1989 stands as one symbolic turning point in this transformation.
Held that year at the Centre Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, 《Magiciens de la Terre》 brought together 100 participants from Western and non-Western contexts within a single international exhibition.
 
The exhibition subsequently generated extensive debate over the criteria through which a Western curator selected and represented non-Western art and culture. This was also one of the central issues examined in the preceding series, “Asian Contemporary Art and Orientalism.”
 
Beyond these controversies, however, the geographical scope of the art world was rapidly expanding.
 
As biennials and international exhibitions proliferated around the world, and artists from Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa became increasingly visible in international museums, galleries, and art markets, contemporary art expanded beyond its predominantly Western institutional framework into what has come to be understood as the global contemporary.
 
Major art institutions also responded to this transformation. In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York launched C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), expanding long-term research on modern and contemporary art beyond North America and Western Europe and connecting that research to its collection, exhibitions, publications, and educational programs.
 
The map of the art world was changing.
 
 
 
The Globalization of Form and the Localization of Content
 
The consequences of this transformation can now be seen in exhibitions across the world.
 
Artists in Seoul and Berlin both work with video. Artists in Indonesia employ archives, while artists in Brazil develop research-based projects.
 
Installation, video, photography, performance, sound, archival practice, research-based art, site-specific work, and participatory projects no longer belong to any single nation or region.
 
As international mobility, overseas study, and residency programs expanded, and as biennials, museums, art schools, galleries, art fairs, and media became increasingly interconnected, artistic forms and discourses also became internationalized.
 
Yet artists around the world do not all tell the same stories.
 
On the contrary, the globalization of contemporary art has made visible histories and experiences from different regions that had previously received insufficient attention within a predominantly Western-centric art-historical framework.
 
In Korea, colonial experience, war and national division, compressed industrialization and urbanization, democratization, and rapid social transformation provide important historical contexts. In China, socialism, the Cultural Revolution, and the transformations following Reform and Opening Up have shaped distinct experiences.
 
In Southeast Asia, histories of colonialism and decolonization, religion and ethnicity, and processes of nation-building intersect with artistic practice. In Latin America, the legacies of colonialism, military dictatorships, political violence, and memory have likewise informed contemporary art.
 
Globalization did not erase the local. Instead, it brought local histories and memories, societies and individual experiences into international contemporary art as significant forms of content.
 
One of the defining characteristics of the global contemporary thus becomes clear:
 
Forms have globalized, while content has localized.
 
Artists in different parts of the world increasingly work through internationally shared artistic languages while bringing into them distinct histories, cultures, and social experiences.
 
Different worlds have begun to speak through a shared artistic language.
 
 
 
Korean Contemporary Art within Global Standards
 
Korean modern and contemporary art has developed within this process as well.
 
Since the modern period, Korea has absorbed Western artistic institutions and languages. After liberation, international currents including Informel, abstraction, experimental art, and conceptual tendencies were received and transformed within Korea’s particular historical and social conditions.
 
From the 1990s onward, the emergence of international exhibitions such as the Gwangju Biennale, the expansion of overseas study and residency programs, and the growing presence of Korean artists in international biennials and museums brought Korean art into increasingly direct contact with global contemporary art networks.
 
Today, the media and concepts employed by Korean artists, as well as the ways in which their works are exhibited and articulated, cannot be separated from the shared languages of international contemporary art.
 
Korean contemporary art is already operating within global standards.
 
The question, therefore, is no longer whether Korea should embrace Western art or pursue something uniquely Korean.
 
Nor can Koreanness be located solely in materials and images such as hanji, ink, ceramics, or traditional motifs. Conversely, the use of video, installation, performance, or archival practice does not automatically make a work Western.
 
What matters is not the nationality of a material, but how the histories, experiences, sensibilities, and modes of thought accumulated within Korean society are transformed into aesthetic and formal languages.
 
The question of Koreanness must therefore move beyond subject matter toward a more fundamental issue: what kind of art is being produced?
 
 
 
From Reception to Production
 
Over the past several decades, global standards have connected art from different cultural contexts within a shared international field. The geographical scope of the art world has expanded, and histories and experiences once relegated to its margins have become important subjects of contemporary art.
 
Korea, too, has become part of this international contemporary art world.
 
Yet operating within an established global framework and helping to shape that framework are two different things.
 
Expressing Korean history and experience through an already established international contemporary art grammar is not the same as producing new aesthetic and formal languages in Korea that open new possibilities for art globally.
 
The next task for Korean contemporary art is therefore clear:
 
to move from reception to production.
 
This does not mean rejecting the West or withdrawing from the shared languages of international contemporary art. It means fully understanding those globalized languages without remaining confined to their repetition, while developing the capacity to produce new works, aesthetics, discourses, and values from Korea.
 
Such production cannot be the responsibility of artists alone.
 
Artists must create new aesthetic possibilities; criticism and scholarship must interpret them; curators and museums must construct new contexts around them; archives must preserve their histories; publishing and media must communicate them internationally; and galleries and markets must provide structures for their sustained circulation.
 
For Korea to become a site of production within the global art world is to build an ecosystem capable of sustaining this entire process.
 
It is here that the question of the post-contemporary re-emerges.
 
The post-contemporary does not mean rejecting the contemporary or prematurely declaring the arrival of a new artistic style. It begins by understanding the conditions that made contemporary art possible and considering what might follow from both their achievements and their limitations.
 
Global standards have been one of those conditions.
 
Now that the art world has become thoroughly globalized, however, the global standards themselves must also become an object of inquiry.
 
Forms have globalized and content has localized. But has art itself truly become more diverse, or have different worlds simply begun to speak through a shared international grammar?
 
This question does not negate the achievements of global standards. Rather, it asks where and how new artistic possibilities might emerge from the conditions they have created.
 
The same question now confronts Korean contemporary art.
 
The question is no longer how successfully Korean contemporary art conforms to global standards, but what it can newly produce and contribute to the global art world.
 
The conditions of the post-contemporary—and the future of Korean contemporary art—begin with this question.

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.