The Misaligned Body: The Fourth Group and Performance Art in Cold War South Korea

This paper examines the Fourth Group, a performance art group from 1970 that was forcibly disbanded by the authoritarian regime in South Korea. Thus far, the scholarship on artistic production in Cold War Korea has concentrated on monochrome painting, largely neglecting performance art. Focusing on the Fourth Group, then, this paper interrogates how performance became a particular aesthetic register for artists to contend with the competing ideologies of the Cold War and the ascendant global economy. Specifically, the Fourth Group sought to challenge the biopolitical regime, which enforced bodily regulation and coerced participation in the economic production to gain independence from the American neocolonial rule. In demonstrating the self-alienated body in public spaces, the Fourth Group sought to reckon with their "misaligned bodily structure" and reunite their body and consciousness in transcendence. Foregrounding the Cold War in Korea as not only a temporal, but also a structural nexus between colonialism and the world economy, the paper analyzes the Fourth Group’s manifesto and its two major works, Condom and Carbamine and Street Mime Shop. It addresses how the public staging of the works relied on notions of interactivity and participation. It also contextualizes the group's operation within the state-sponsored hegemony of gestural expressionism. The history of the Fourth Group reveals not only the extent to which global powers have latched onto the remnant structures of colonialism in South Korea, but also the complicated extension of this force by the formerly colonized country in its attempt to counter neocolonialism.