Consciousness Revolution in Triangulation: The Avant-garde in South Korea, The United States, and the Author in Perspective

My paper traces rebellious subcultural activities of artist collectives in South Korea of the 1960s-‘70s when pro-American and anti-Communist SK military governments pursued rapid economic development under the façade of democracy, severely undermining basic human rights. Cold War ideology and the South Korean political and military alliance with the United States are the complex backdrop against which my paper explores the South Korean artistic consciousness revolution. When the KCIA (South Korean Secret Intelligence Agency, created in 1961) was operating in likewise fashion to the FBI and CIA in the United States shutting down political dissent by dissent as communist, the South Korean artist collectives utilized different modes of Euro-American avant-garde art, in order to mask their critical political messages. The Western import of the style of avant-garde art allowed these artists, in fact, to deliver their coded political resistance under the shield of the exoticism and aura of Western art, under the premise of art being separated from reality. In addition to a historical comparative study of Consciousness Revolution between the United States and South Korea as seen through radical art activities, my analysis also includes how the author’s own consciousness was elevated writing about these historical periods due to the scarcity and nature of distortion in primary sources. It explores how altered views in scholarship may change and raise the consciousness of society. A revolution in consciousness may be begun by an author as they interject alternative views on the historical subject, whose “facts” are often distorte d .