Mo Bahc’s Third World Postmodernism and Korean Contemporary Art

This is a study of the works and writings by artist Mo Bahc (1957~2004) in relation to the discourse of Korean postmodernism. Despite the untimely death, Bahc is acknowledged to have found the discursive framework of Korean contemporary art, which overcame the decades-long split of art world between “Korean modernism” of Dansaekhwa and the politically radical artistic movement of Minjung Misul. In the late 1980s, in tandem with the grand socio-political changes, including the collapse of the Eastern European block and Korea’s democratization, Minjung Misul was losing its ideological battle ground, while Dansaekhwa’s claim of Eastern spirituality became increasingly irrelevant. Postmodernism arrived Korean shore at that moment, and a fierce debate between the modernist/conservative critics and the leftist/Minjung artists followed over the nature of modernism, the condition of postmodernism, and its plausibility in Korean soil. Bahc, who was running Minor Injury, an alternative art space for immigrants and the ‘minorities,’ in Brooklyn, actively supported the critical principle of Minjung Misul, by way of translating, or better, transforming postmodernism into a highly political language for speaking the Korea’s specific ‘third world’ status. Oriental, Minority, Exotic, one of Bahc’s works at the time, reveals both the artist’s strategic appropriation of Asian identity and his sense of frustration and anxiety as a minority living in America. This paper discusses the conflicting aspects of postmodernism in the context of a third world, where anti-essentialism, anti-representaionalism, and anti-dualism were challenged by a specific political and cultural condition of the society.