For a long time, I have emphasized the importance of issues and debate. This was never about keeping up with trends, but about how an artist disciplines oneself. Criticism and art history have always moved forward through argument. The opposition between Ingres and Delacroix, Courbet’s Art Vivant, the heated discussions at Café Guerbois among the Impressionists, the controversy sparked by an artist’s contribution to The Blind Man in 1917, and the debates between Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd—all of these moments mattered not because of their outcomes, but because of how they reshaped the sensibilities and attitudes of artists.

​

The New York art world from the 1950s through the 1970s was likewise defined by continual friction between opposing positions. Criticism functioned less as an explanation of artworks than as a destabilizing device. Artists encountered discomfort, and within that discomfort discovered the questions that led them forward. I do not hesitate to regard this period as the peak of modernist art—not because it was a moment of completion, but because it was a time in which tension was sustained.

​

There is, however, an inherent risk. When issues and debates cease to function as a means of sharpening the artist and are instead consumed directly as motifs for work, art may respond quickly—but it is depleted just as quickly. Art history offers countless examples of practices that lost their force once the external issues on which they depended were exhausted. Some artists achieve striking persuasive power at the center of a controversy, only to find themselves unable to move beyond it once the debate subsides, settling into repetition or stagnation.

​

This is why I often speak of the distinction between the artist and the artisan. The line between them is not drawn by technical skill or passion. An artisan refines mastery through repetition and reproducible forms. An artist, by contrast, must first possess the ability to recognize a problem as a problem—and then the sensibility and resolve to pursue it relentlessly. What matters is not the capacity to solve problems, but the strength to endure unresolved conditions. When this capacity is depleted, the artist inevitably shifts into the position of the artisan.

​

It may feel awkward to cite my own work, but doing so allows this distinction to become more concrete. The problems I engaged with in my object installations from the mid-1980s reappeared in my photographic and video works of the 1990s through entirely different formal languages. Yet this was not a change in direction; it was a migration of problems. While I adopted the forms and issues of contemporary art, this was not a matter of borrowing. It was a way of pushing questions that already existed within me into the specific conditions of another medium.

​

Within the Korean art world, this distinction was rarely recognized. My work was largely perceived in terms of formal novelty or contemporaneity—as a matter of trend—rather than through an understanding of how a problem persisted and moved across forms. By contrast, the museum professionals I encountered in New York through P.S.1 in 1996 grasped this point immediately. From that moment, my work was no longer understood as the adoption of new forms, but as the acceleration of a transition—relocating a single problem into different arenas. I remember that period as a crucial turning point, because it was then that I experienced, firsthand, what it meant for criteria of judgment to function accurately.

​

Issues and debates remain important. But they should not become the subject matter of artworks themselves; they should serve as tools for honing the artist. Debate sharpens perception, brings problems into focus, and alters the criteria by which forms are chosen. Yet if no questions remain once the debate has ended, the work will be exhausted along with the issue that sustained it. What ultimately allows an artist to endure is not the issue itself, but the density of the problems that persist after it.

​

Only now do I see this with greater clarity. The many examples left to us by art history demonstrate that, for an artist, sustained questioning and endurance matter far more than swift responses or fleeting moments of spotlight. The difference between the artist and the artisan emerges precisely at this point.(Jan. 2026)