by Kyunghee Pyun (Author)

Postmodernism and Aesthetics: Collide or Steer presents twenty-two artists who were awardees of the contemporary visual art competition by the AHL Foundation. All of them spent their youth in the 1990s as immigrant artists or as fine art students studying-abroad in the United States. While postmodernism gained momentum in South Korea during an economic boom in the 1990s, a milieu of fine arts departments at major universities as well as art markets in Seoul, still maintained a purity of high modernism in abstract painting. Organized by curator and professor Kyunghee Pyun at the Fashion Institute of Technology, this exhibition overviews the current status of twenty-two artists from Korea living and working in the United States. The show divided artists and their works into most popular binary themes of postmodernism and high modernism such as appropriation/originality; local/ international; simulacra/real; banal/avant-garde; and personal/universal.