Authoritarianism, Gender, and Experimental Art in South Korea: A Case Study of Jung Kangja’s ‘Janusian Woman’ (1971)

In 1968, during the military dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee’s Yushin Restoration in South Korea, the artist group Association of Young Korean Artists staged Transparent Balloons and Nude, a performance featuring Jung Kangja (1942–2017) with balloons covering her semi-nude body. The work prompted sensationalist responses from right-wing media, targeting Jung as one of the few women involved in Experimental Art (silheom misul) during the 1960s and 1970s.

While silheom misul has recently gained attention in Anglophone scholarship, studies have largely focused on the dominant androcentric movements of dansaekhwa and minjung art. This paper argues that the pre-existing bifurcated analysis of Jung’s practice eclipses critical analysis of her artworks and rareifies androcentric narratives of South Korean art history. Firstly, existing research positions her within the male-dominated group of the Association of Young Korean Artists. Secondly, any serious study of her works has been obscured by the ‘victimhood’ narrative of her vilification by the media and subsequent censorship of her artworks.

This paper addresses that gap through a focused study of Jung’s 1971 sculpture Janusian Woman, contributing to the nascent feminist study of South Korean art history. I argue that the work critiques biblical sin in ways that reflect the rise of Protestant conservatism under Park’s regime, which had aligned with the Protestant Church as a moral arm of state control during the Yushin era. By interpreting Janusian Woman in this context, the paper repositions Jung as a critical agent engaging with the era’s biopolitical control of gender and morality.