The Critical Theories for Korean Contemporary art: The post-colonialism and beyond in Sooja Kim's art works

Abstract

Korean contemporary art, one of the leading/central subjects for the post-modern art making, still displays the formal and conceptual " closeness" to the others, lending itself to a post-structuralist analysis of some of Korean artists' works. The study examines layers of desire, resistance, and ambiguity. This paper explores the theoretical basis for interpreting similarity, using Homi Bhabha's notion of 'mimicry' in order to demonstrate how Korean artists' works reveal the disruption and discrepancy between the Korean subject and the "other." In particular, Sooja Kim and Nikki Lee are to be discussed as reflective of this complicated circumstances.