A pioneer of experimental art in the 1970s and 80s South Korea, Sung Neung Kyung revisits methodologies of artmarking and widespread ideas about what constitutes an artwork.
Read MorePerforming since the 1970s, Sung also creates photographic installations and newspaper-based works that question the boundaries of art and the banal.
Sung first studied painting at Hongik University in Seoul, working in the Informel and abstract expressionist styles that the academy favoured in the 1960s and 70s. By the early 1970s, however, the artist had moved away from painting, joining the avantgarde artist group Space and Time (ST) (1969–1980) to experiment with happenings, events, and performances.
Among the group's members, which included artists and critics Kim Chang Sup, Chan Sok Won, Kim Hong Joo, Kim Yong-Ik, and Yoon Jin Sup, Sung worked closely with the group leader Lee Kun-Yong and Kim Yong-min, performing mundane tasks such as counting money and reading newspapers.
Under military dictatorship, definitions of the ordinary were becoming increasingly unpredictable in Korea as did the simple acts that Sung and his collaborators performed in public. In 1976, the artists even received a phone call from detectives about what their 'event' meant the night before their exhibition three-Person Event opened at the Press Center in Seoul.
Newspapers were an indispensable medium for Sung, who approached them as the vehicle of knowledge in a pre-Internet world. His first event, titled Newspapers, After the 1st of June 1974, involved cutting articles from daily newspapers for two months leading up to The 3rd ST Exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, in 1974, where he presented the marred newspapers on the walls. During the exhibition, which lasted a week, Sung performed both the cutting and posting of newspapers in reference to government censorship of the press.
Sung's work with newspapers evolved over the years, from reading the articles as he cut them to focusing solely on the act of reading newspapers with empty slots. In No Relation to a Particular Person (1977), another commentary on censorship, the artist silkscreened yellow stripes over the eyes of people whose pictures he photographed from newspapers.
Sung continues to employ newspapers as a site of exploration into trivial gestures of daily life. For fifteen years between 2003 and 2018, the artist cut out serialised English lessons from daily newspapers and practised his English on them, which culminated in the large body of work Everyday English. On 6 September 2023, Sung staged Reading Newspapers, a participatory performance that invited 100 individuals of non-Korean nationality to bring newspapers or readings of their choice to read and cut out together.
In addition to his performances of ordinary acts, Sung employs his body to directly investigate the limitations and metaphoric potential of the physical body. The photographic documents of Contractions and Expansion (1976), for example, shows the artist bending and stretching his body. Placed against the backdrop of political turmoil of the time, the action evokes associations with suppression, both psychological and physical.
In Location, first staged in 1976 and documented as photographs and videos, Sung attempts to hold the arts magazine Space with various parts of his body from his head to his toes. The constantly moving magazine questions the place of art in society and, on a personal level, of Sung in the Korean art world, which often overlooked him because his work did not align with the more mainstream Minjung art or Abstract art.
Sung frequently uses the terms 'botched', 'ruined', or 'meanderings' to discuss the anti-systemic, anti-institutional nature of his work. The Descendants of Mr. S—A Ruined Photograph is More Beautiful (1991), for example, is a wall installation of candy wrappers and over 300 photographs that the artist took of his four children in 1979. Sung deliberately chose faulty photographs, locating beauty in the snapshots of the everyday.
Sung's work and performances have been presented at numerous solo and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: Botched Art: The Meanderings of Sung Neung Kyung, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2023); As If Nothing ... The Artistic Meanderings of SUNG Neung Kyung, Baik Art, Seoul (2023); I'm really up in the air! Eunam Art Museum, Gwangju (2022); SUNG Neung Kyung: Art is The Shadow of Delirium — The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation Solo Exhibition Series 2001, The Korean Culture and Arts Foundation, Seoul (2001).
Group exhibitions include: Only the Young: Experimental Art in South Korea, 1960s–70s, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023); Masquerade, MMCA Gwacheon (2022); Future is now, Seongnam Arts Center, Seongnam (2021); Awakenings : Art in Society in Asia 1960s-1990s, MMCA Gwacheon and National Gallery Singapore (2019).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2023
