​In 1999, shortly after assuming the position of director at Hanwon Museum of Art in Seoul, I initiated the project Re-reading Korean Contemporary Art. The project began with two fundamental questions.

First, how might the historical framework of Western art be critically transcended rather than merely imitated or opposed?

Second, under such conditions, what could constitute a form of modernity specific to Korean art?

Until then, the history of twentieth-century Korean art had largely been narrated as a chronological sequence of artists and groups responding to trends in Western art. Within that narrative, the complex dynamics of cultural hybridity were rarely examined in depth. Instead, criticism often functioned to reinforce institutional hierarchies within the art world rather than to read the language and sensibility embedded in artworks.

Re-reading Korean Contemporary Art was an attempt to reconsider this inverted structure of criticism. Art should not be determined by institutional consensus or the power of factions; it begins with the act of reading the language that artworks themselves articulate. Re-examining the traces of cultural hybridity, the layers of sensibility within artworks, and the ethics inherent in artistic practice seemed to me the most basic yet powerful starting point for understanding Korean art.

Rather than following a chronological narrative, the project was designed as a non-linear structure that re-examines the dialectic between artists and institutions. Through this approach it sought to restore the tensions and dynamics between artistic practice, institutions, and the cultural field, while asking what conditions have made a distinct modernity of Korean art possible.