Since the 1990s, the Hindi film industry has undergone several transformations in response to socioeconomic and political changes in India. This is particularly a result of how the Indian nation-state and its film industries have entered into the global market. Though popular Hindi cinema has always circulated internationally through informal, ad hoc networks, during most of the twentieth century what was then known as Bombay cinema catered mostly to local audiences in India where it was central to producing a national identity. However, changes to production, financing, exhibition practices, and aesthetics from the 1990s onwards turned Bombay cinema into a globalized cultural industry in a process that film historian Ashish Rajadhyaksha refers to as “Bollywoodization.”¹ To emphasize this transformation, today’s Hindi film industry is often referred to as “Bollywood” or, for films produced in the 2010s and later, “New Bollywood.” For many, New Bollywood likely conjures up images of song, dance, and melodramatic excess, but as a global cultural industry, New Bollywood addresses audiences across multiple different media and discourses that circulate on a variety of global, digital platforms, and in everyday, local visual culture. In this way, New Bollywood continues to play a crucial part in producing a commodified, national, cultural identity that can be easily consumed both nationally and globally. 

A notable aspect of New Bollywood cinema is that it has created a space for gender and sexual identities that have traditionally been absent from mainstream Bombay cinema. In Indian society, nonnormative sexual and gendered subjects have a long history of stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization because they were framed as “morally degenerate” – a view that was in large part shaped by the colonial era origins of many laws in India’s penal code that are still in use today. Concurrently with the changes in the film industry, the Indian state’s entrance into the global market has led to a de-territorialization of the nation-state. As a result, geographical location is no longer sufficient to produce a coherent national cultural identity for the state’s subjects. For this reason, as feminist scholar Rupal Oza has argued, cultural expressions of gender and sexuality have become subject to increased surveillance in recent years because they serve as crucial sites for demarcating and policing normative, national values at a time of intensified global cultural flows.² In this context, New Bollywood’s foregrounding of nonnormative gender and sexual identities seems to be in direct contrast to culture’s role in policing gender and sexuality, yet attending to New Bollywood’s diverse local and global entanglements will illustrate how this global cultural industry sutures together heterogenous narratives of social inclusion, consumer citizenship, and national development.

In this essay, I examine the processes that allow New Bollywood to integrate seemingly subversive subjects and topics within a modern Indian cultural identity. For my analysis, I draw on examples from actor Ayushmann Khurrana’s filmography, his global brand as a star, and his participation in advertisements. Khurrana’s career largely overlaps with the rise of global, digital streaming platforms on which New Bollywood cinema can now be watched worldwide. Moreover, Khurrana’s filmography singularly highlights how New Bollywood has positioned itself as a nexus for grappling with anxieties about shifting gender and sexual identities in globalized India through social-message films. In an industry frequently critiqued for its nepotism, Ayushmann Khurrana is also notable for entering cinema as an outsider. In fact, much like the characters he plays, he hails from an ordinary middle-class family. As a result, Khurrana has developed an image, nationally and internationally, as a socially progressive man who at the same time is representative of an aspirational modern, middle-class subjectivity. 

By using Khurrana and his filmography as a case study, I map New Bollywood’s wider entanglements with commodity culture and argue that New Bollywood plays a key role in developing a globally and locally meaningful image of the modern, Indian nation-state as technologically, economically, and socially advanced. My analysis further illustrates that this is made possible by framing the citizen as a socially responsible individual who takes charge of their own and the state’s development through consumption, a category that can encompass historically marginalized sexual and gendered subjects provided they have the financial means to do so.

New Bollywood and the Social-Message Film

From the last decade (2010s) onward, New Bollywood has demonstrated a rising commitment to telling stories centering subjects and experiences that have previously been absent from mainstream cinema. No filmography demonstrates this more completely than Ayushmann Khurrana’s. Since his screen debut in 2012, Khurrana has become known for playing male characters who find themselves in unorthodox situations or who behave in nonnormative ways. His comedies highlight anxieties about shifting gender and sexual roles in India through themes such as sperm donation, infertility, erectile dysfunction, the performativity and fluidity of gender, geriatric pregnancy, premature balding, colorism, same-sex desire, and female health care. In Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (2017), a young man discovers that he has erectile dysfunction when he tries to have sex with his fiancée (fig. 1), whereas in Dream Girl (2019), Khurrana’s character vocally cross-dresses as a woman to work in a call center where his clients are mostly lonely men (fig. 2). Stories like these dramatize a meeting between imaginary, ordinary Indian subjects and new subjectivities and expressions of desire, gender, and sexuality. Narratively, the films negotiate these encounters within familiar vocabularies such as the family melodrama familiar from earlier Bombay cinema. In this way, New Bollywood allows audiences to understand historically marginalized subject-positions in relatable, humanizing terms, and it offers these subjects access to the imaginary of modern India through a shared cultural identity. 

Though topics pertaining to sexuality, gender, and desire are openly discussed in New Bollywood cinema, the social message in such conversations is framed as a challenge to conservative norms and normative gender identities that exist in ordinary, middle-class Indian families while offering a model for reconciliating these seemingly opposing values. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020) addresses a gay couple’s struggle to be accepted by their families. The narrative frames LGBTQ+ experiences and desires as unfamiliar to most ordinary Indians. In a scene that is also featured at the start of the trailer, the explicit reference to male, gay sexuality is paired with the incomprehension of a family member whose conception of same-sex desire is so diffuse that he has no words for it (he consistently refers to it as “yeh” or “this”). In this scene, the Anglophone term “gay” as a label for same-sex desire is introduced to both characters and audiences in a comedic way that counters the medicalized language of queer desire and the prohibition against public discussions of sex and sexuality (figs. 3–5). The story of Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan addresses anxieties about how queer subjects might pose a challenge to the institution of the heterosexual family and to normative male identities. The male patriarch no longer has the same authority as the younger, gay male subjects who wear earrings and flaunt their sexuality through public kissing and rainbow flags (fig. 6). But despite the novelty and the potential controversy of the topic, the narrative serves to illustrate how LGBTQ+ subjects can be integrated into the social world of the film. In fact, the plot treats “homophobia” as the “disease” that threatens modern Indian society (fig. 6). 

Generally, New Bollywood cinema has demonstrated a concern with social-justice issues. For instance, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan is significant for being one of the first mainstream Hindi pictures with an explicit LGBTQ+ plot, and it was the first to be both produced and released after the decriminalization of homosexuality in India in 2018—a historical event that garnered extensive coverage in international newspapers and by global LGBTQ+ movements. This judgment is also cited directly, and repeatedly, in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan’s promotional material and in its dialogue. In the last few decades, a country’s ability to guarantee its LGBTQ+ subjects equal citizen rights has become an important way to build a positive image as evidenced by the discourse around pinkwashing by nation-states and during mass-mediatized, global cultural events like the Olympics and Eurovision. Both the landmark ruling and its invocation in a globalized screen text serve to publicize modern India’s progressive sexual politics.

Globally, perceptions of national development are often connected with a state’s ability to guarantee vaguely defined “liberal values” and “human rights.” India’s claim to be a modern, well-developed state hinges on its ability to address the stigmatization attached to these taboos and desires while integrating historically marginalized subjects into the modern nation-state. In this context, New Bollywood’s capacity to fold diverse subjects and topics into its vision of modern India through publicity, narrative, and aesthetics plays a crucial part in shoring up India’s global image—even more so as New Bollywood cinema, now frequently financed by multinational companies, often becomes accessible to a broadly conceived liberal, cosmopolitan audience on digital platforms like Netflix, Amazon, and Disney+ after playing in multiplexes in malls in India.

The global significance of New Bollywood and its orientation toward social-justice narratives is further illustrated by considering the labor of its stars who are mobilized to perform cultural diplomacy at events in India and abroad. In 2023, Ayushmann Khurrana was recognized in the American news magazine TIME’s list of “100 Most Influential People” for the second time in less than five years. TIME’s rationale for including Khurrana stresses the actor’s history of playing characters that run counter to gendered stereotypes and his commitment to stories that push middle-class social mores by explicitly addressing societal taboos. Furthermore, the magazine highlights how Khurrana’s filmography is complemented by his off-screen social-justice work, such as his appointment by UNICEF India as a national ambassador to support children’s rights.³ Extending the brand of the star to the nation, Khurrana’s global persona thus underwrites the image of a socially progressive India.

New Bollywood and Commodity Culture

The emphasis on progressive social values, both the actor’s and as expressed within the films, discursively vanish New Bollywood’s entanglements in a commodity culture that nevertheless permeates both screen texts and wider visual culture. The setting of New Bollywood cinema is often deeply localized, with stories taking place in named suburbs of metropoles or bigger cities in northern India: Chandigarh, Haridwar, Bareilly, Allahabad, etc. The diverse geographical locations are supplemented by scenes in call centers, marketing offices, and glossy malls housing national and international brands that produce a cultural imaginary of a nation fully integrated into global financial and technological systems. The stories also illustrate the entanglement between local spaces and the global economy through snappy, intertextual dialogue that invokes imaginaries of a global India that is technologically, socially, and economically advanced. To take three examples from Khurrana’s filmography: in his debut film, Vicky Donor (2012), Khurrana’s character’s usefulness as a sperm donor is contextualized through his enjoyment of shopping, and on two separate occasions, he is stalked at a mall; in Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Khurrana’s character encourages audiences to look up the rating of his gym on the search engine Just Dial; and in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, the main characters work in a mall, where they promote toothpaste. Service-oriented jobs and real, recognizable brands embedded in the storylines reconfigure commodity culture as a realist aesthetic that undergirds the social worlds of the characters in the film. 

The Bollywoodization of Bombay cinema into a global cultural industry in which identity is commodifiable has enabled an aesthetic shorthand for representing these new subjects in a way that risks flattening the radical political possibilities of New Bollywood’s new representational practices. Specifically, by attending to the emphasis on commodity culture in the films, we recognize a flattening effect as historically marginalized subjects and family patriarchs are addressed equally as middle-class subjects, united by their capacity to participate in commodity culture. Queer subjects move through spaces just as frictionlessly as non-queer subjects because access to malls, cafes, and white-collar jobs are all conditioned on the ability to buy access. The commodified approach to identity representation means that difference is simply something that is “named” rather than an occasion for coalitional, intersectional politics as feminist scholar activists like Sharmila Rege have called for.⁴ Taking Khurrana’s social-message filmography as an example highlights how New Bollywood’s additive approach to diversity is often only skin-deep.

Moreover, the emphasis on commodity and consumption in the cultural imaginary of New Bollywood extends from the cinematic screen into a broader, everyday visual culture in which New Bollywood’s brightest stars advertise consumer goods and—sometimes—developmental government campaigns. For instance, if you had visited India in the latter half of the 2010s, you might have been greeted in the airport by signs and billboards of actor Akshay Kumar advertising tiles by Kajaria. Notably, Kajaria’s tagline promises that tiles made from the soil of the land will build the country (“desh ki mitti se bani tiles se, desh ko banate hai”).⁵ Similarly, train stations and urban roadsides were covered with advertisements featuring then-newlywed actress Anushka Sharma and cricketer Virat Kohli promoting bridal wear and steel for building a “home.” Pictures of yet another acting couple, Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone, promised domestic bliss through choosing the right washing machine. Likewise, Khurrana is among these stars. Indeed, you might see his face plastered along the length of buses as he endorses the right shaving cream (fig. 7) or on buildings (along with actress Bhumi Pednekar) selling affordable fashion to the young and hip (fig. 8), and his ads for the smartphone brand realme (fig. 9) might be screened in the multiplex before the start of the film and during the intermission—a place only accessible by passing through a security check that bars those less likely to have money from entering. 

The cultural imaginary of New Bollywood cinema and its stars participates in a larger political project of modern India in which the middle-class subject is mobilized to perform citizenship through consumption. Whereas the cinema activates consumption in conjunction with social messages as a way to promise citizenship and a stake in the cultural imaginary for all who can afford it, in the ads, commodity culture equates individuated social and economic development with the prosperity of the nation. By thinking of New Bollywood as a global cultural industry that operates across screen texts and diverse local and global star-driven discourses that circulate in everyday spaces, we can understand how diverse vectors come together to produce a cultural imaginary in which new gender and sexual identities are integrated into the vision of the modern nation-state through a vocabulary of middle-class commodity culture. But so long as belonging is conditioned on flattening lived experience into a commodifiable identity, this acceptance is not only superficial but also risks foreclosing more radical political possibilities. 

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Bombay cinema looms large over media and cinema studies in India even though the history of the Bombay film industry is more recent than the history of film culture in the Subcontinent. The Bombay film industry as we know it today consolidated during the 1950s in the wake of the massive political and economic restructuring that followed the Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Much before erstwhile Bombay became the prime filmmaking hub of independent India, film marketing, spectatorship, and criticism were already thriving practices in late colonial India (Fig. 1).

The rich history of pre-Independence film culture in India, however, remains understudied, and this has a lot to do with the difficulties of tracing non-textual and ephemeral popular-cultural forms through predominantly textual institutional archives. Recent film-history studies have drawn attention to the limitations of relying on sparse and badly preserved film archives, and scholars have instead begun to draw on a patchwork of sources, leaning particularly into the vast “parallel archives of paper” across vernacular languages to write deeper and more connected histories of print and cinema publics in India.¹ Adding to this web of scholarship, I examine three early twentieth-century Urdu film magazines published during the 1930s—The Film Review, Film Star, and Filmistan—as gateways into early film culture in India.² It was during the 1930s that film culture took off in earnest in the Subcontinent as the decade heralded the rise of the “talkies,” which introduced sound and, therefore, spoken language to Indian cinema (see Fig. 1). The decade thus marks a crucial moment of transition not only in film history but also in the trajectory of Urdu in twentieth-century India, which had by then become the subject of a reactionary language politics led by literary elites that was shrinking the boundaries of the Urdu public. Circulating in this sociopolitical context, film magazines bring into focus how Urdu was instrumental in cohering regionally diffused early film production into a shared and mutually legible film culture, and cinema, in turn, widened conceptions of the twentieth-century Urdu public by animating modes of viewing, listening, and speaking that blurred binaries of “high” and “low” culture in different ways.

Film Culture and the Urdu Public

The cover pages often offer the first clues about the audiences Urdu film magazines were addressing. The Film Review, established in 1930 in Calcutta, defined itself as the film magazine of mashriqi (eastern) India (Fig. 2), but this strong regional claim did not restrict the cinema public it was addressing. Publicity material across the magazines shows that the pre-Independence film-production business during the 1930s was scattered across a range of locations: Calcutta, Lahore, Bombay, and to some extent Delhi were the cities where noteworthy production companies were based (Fig. 3).

There is no indication of regional insularity in the way that the films were presented in Urdu magazines since, regardless of origin or language, they were framed as part of a wider market of “Hindustani” cinema—a collective imagination that overlapped with Urdu’s transregional spread as a lingua franca. Both the pseudonymous stylings of Filmistan’s editor as “Hindi” and the title dedication of the magazine evoke this transregional “Hindustani” imagination that is woven together by Urdu (Fig. 4).       

Moreover, the magazines themselves originated from regions just as disparate as the film industries they marketed—ranging from Calcutta (The Film Review and Film Star) to Lahore (Filmistan)—drawing attention to the expansive regional spread of the Urdu-speaking cinema-viewing publics being addressed. For instance, an advertisement in The Film Review alerting readers to the publication’s vast circulation network lists not only the Indian and foreign agencies but also the railway book stalls selling the magazine. These extended from Dhaka (Dacca) in the east which comprises present-day Bangladesh all the way up to Peshawar on the northwestern reaches of what is now Pakistan (Fig. 5).

The frequent and generous use of English across Urdu film magazines—with advertisements, film publicity material, and even cover pages of Urdu film magazines often appearing entirely in English—suggests a substantial transnational and multilingual audience. The tagline at the bottom of the page shown in Fig. 5 urging buyers to pick up a copy for their journey indicates that the magazines were largely ephemeral objects meant to be consumed as quick, on-the-go, pulpy pleasure reads. Finally, the ad’s emphasis on railway stalls as primary nodes of distribution and the explicit framing of consumers as travelers pointedly evokes an Urdu cinema public that was just as mobile and regionally porous as it was multilingual.

Advertisements targeting emerging middle-class interests were certainly not features unique to film-oriented magazines, as Urdu literary publications carried eclectic and visually evocative advertisements for new commodities and technologies that were visually keyed into the cosmopolitan character and consumerist impulses of Urdu periodical culture (Fig. 6).

Participating in the same consumer-aware print culture, Urdu film magazines displayed a much more direct and transparent understanding of their audience as consumers, and at the same time, films tended to be presented explicitly as commodities. This can, for example, be seen in a recurring ad template for Calcutta’s Krishna Film Company in The Film Review that extols the good quality of its film products to potential exhibitors, while also playfully evoking the mazah (pleasure) of a crowd mobbing the theater’s ticket window (Fig. 7). By evoking filmgoers as unruly masses, the ad also encapsulates thematic tensions in film-culture discourse, examined in the following section, which show that even as film magazines leaned into cinema as a trade and business, the way they imagined cinema-viewing publics was laden with both excitement and anxiety about public cultures derived from the bazaar, street, and quotidian life.

Gender, Urdu, and the Film Bazaar

In Filmistan’s 1932 afsana (story) issue, a regular opinion column by an anonymous critic vehemently derides filmmakers for including unnecessary bazaari (commercial songs) to ensure their films’ success.³ The column exemplifies how textual discourses on twentieth-century Urdu film magazines played into and perpetuated respectability politics by deriding the corrupting influences of the bazaar. Their visual culture, however, simultaneously undercuts this moralizing by magnifying the bazaar-associated sensibilities that had been absorbed into films. Relying heavily on cinema’s visuality, film magazines made generous use of glossy film stills, which is most evident in the great emphasis the publications put on being ba-tasveer (illustrated), that is, on including image supplements that usually carried half-tone photo blocks. The Film Review’s aforementioned full-page advertisement for its distribution agencies leads with the availability of half-tone photographic stills, establishing the inclusion of pictures as a key attraction and selling point for the magazine itself (see Fig. 5).

The most notable element of Urdu film magazines’ visual culture are the subjects of these images: female performers (dancers, singers, actresses, etc.) who are featured variously, in staged studio photographs, film stills, and illustrations (Figs. 8–10).

The illustrated cover of a 1931 issue of Filmistan’s special afsana issue (Fig. 8) depicts a provocatively dressed and sensuously postured woman as the literal conduit between literature and cinema. This imagery captures the sharply classed and gendered anxieties that films triggered by steadily blurring the boundaries between literary/“high” and popular/“low” cultures. The image underlines the contradictory impulses of Urdu print culture through the 1930s, when ideas of competitive nationalisms and social reformism awkwardly jostled for space with depictions of vanity, indulgence, leisure, and consumerism.

The ubiquity of feminine imagery attests that films made women, who in general had thus far been reduced to passive subjects of reformist and nationalist agendas, increasingly and dramatically more visible in the public sphere. Since the actresses of early Hindustani films usually came from courtesan lineages, they were socially marginalized, but cinema enabled them to craft something akin to professional identities.

O one from this humble earth, where is your destination?

Do you come from within four walls (home) or the market?

If you are honorable, then you are a beacon of beauty without question;

and if not, then get off the stage, for you are simply without shame.⁴

Apart from invoking the gendered private-versus-public divide that is typical of nineteenth century nationalist-reformist discourse, the poem specifically shows that the bazaar emerged as the lynchpin for anxieties about cinema in general and performing women in particular.

Conversely, conservative attitudes were also satirized in Urdu film magazines that gave voice to a range of opinions and commentary, including expressions of the new indulgences and pleasures that films afforded. A frequent satirical column titled “Gulabi Urdu” (Garbled Urdu) in The Film Review in 1931, penned anonymously under the moniker “Mulla Rumuzi,” plays with notions of adab (refinement) and sharafat (respectability) and mocks elite perceptions of cinema as the bawdy circus for the gawars (uncultured masses).⁵

Another article by an anonymous author in Filmistan expresses the exciting new modes of sociality that films were shaping through the trope of tafrih (enjoyment).⁶ Adopting the perspective of a young male flaneur enjoying the big city, the article describes the distinct pleasure of watching thrilling adventures in a cinema as part of a crowd. Cinema here is characterized as a form of tafrih for a rangeen pasand tabqa, or a colorful (leisure-loving) social group, a mildly derisive descriptor identifying the typical cinemagoer as a city slicker with money to burn. In addition to being a specifically urbane pastime, cinema-going is also cast by the article as a gendered activity that imagines the cinema theater as a space occupied exclusively by men.  

At the same time, the vision of film viewing as an avenue for male homosociality conjures tropes of early modern literary traditions like rekhti poetry, particularly the shahr ashob genre, which describes a young urbane dandy exploring the city and romancing young male paramours. Immersed in sensuality, rekhti poems express all manner of bodily and sensory pleasure with witty abandon, and they explicitly evoke homosexual desire.⁷ Such transgressive themes were derided by male literary elites whose views channeled Victorian ideals on gender and sexuality and sealed off Urdu literary genres into separate silos of “masculine” and “feminine.”⁸ Despite the mapping of these notions and attitudes onto early Hindustani cinema, cinema and film culture went a long way in allowing Urdu to transgress and transcend text-centered discourses in the twentieth century.

These examples show that Urdu film magazines, in both form and content, offer considerable insights that deepen the history of both film and Urdu in late colonial India and also highlight how they intersect and influence each other. The tensions in textual-visual discourses in Urdu film magazines reveal that cinema’s embrace of the bazaar in particular—as a space of social, cultural, linguistic, and gendered mixing and as a site of tafrih—animated uses, arenas, and publics for Urdu beyond the literary at a time when dominant discourses advocated for excluding entire vocabularies, registers, and indeed non-elite social worlds from the Urdu public. Early Urdu film magazines and other remnants of popular-culture ephemera therefore deserve to be analyzed more closely. Rather than simply folding its postcolonial history into totalizing narratives of national language politics and institutional erasures, Urdu film magazines have the potential to throw open discussions on the alternate lives of Urdu in twentieth-century India.

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I. Progression

When did “experimental art” emerge and spread in Korea? Why did I specifically use the general term “experimental art” in my doctoral dissertation? Why was this art form alienated from and treated harshly by the inner circle of the Korean art world? How were Korean artists able to foster their own distinct identity and find a solidly grounded attitude and way of thinking despite external influences from Western and Japanese avant-garde artists, a fortiori under Korea’s military regime?

“Experimental art” was never truly considered a component of mainstream art, nor was it perceived to bear any real historical significance until 1999, when I presented my doctoral dissertation, “Experimental Art and Society in Korea in the 1960s and 1970s,”¹ which provided the foundation for the exhibitions Korean Contemporary Art from the Mid-1960s to the Mid-1970s: A Decade of Transition and Dynamics² in 2001 and Performance Art of Korea 1967–2007³ in 2007, both held at Korea’s National Museum of Contemporary Art.

After the Korean War, a strong avant-garde movement in Seoul offered momentum toward nurturing experimental art in Korea. The artists wended their way beyond the conventional meanings and parameters of acceptance deeply ingrained in the Korean art world with their specific conception of time and space. It is widely agreed in Korea that the Korean Informel movement emerged in the 1950s and that what I would like to term “Korean Monotone Art”⁴ began to take hold in the 1970s. The ascendancy of these two art forms resulted in the marginalization of certain types of experimental art, including performance art. Nevertheless, Korean experimental art succeeded in laying the foundations for self-identification and expression during this era, which were viciously dampened by military repression and extreme imbalance in wealth distribution, social upheaval, and economic strife.

II. Rereading “Experimental Art” in the 1960s and 1970s in Korea

The new experimental movements were never fully embraced or appreciated for what they were; experimental artists, because of their involvement in many social issues, constantly had challenged the repressive nature of government control.

II. 1. Rereading the Overlooked Pioneers

The First Exhibition of Objets of the group Mu (Zero), 1967

The very first exhibition of “objets” in Korea was held by the group Mu on June 20, 1967. The group neither sought to draw the public’s attention nor were its members regarded as pioneers at the time of their founding as the term “exhibition” predominantly stood for painting exhibitions. They were complete novices in the Korean art world, fresh out of university. Nevertheless, the artist Lee Tae Hyun alluded to the military government’s restriction through his use of objects such as a gas mask and a military backpack. Meanwhile Choi Bung Hyun’s evoking of a dead body and his self-confinement in a garment bag to suggest the death of his own freedom, which seemed like being dressed in a straitjacket, indisputably symbolized the restriction and death of society. I think these artists were regarded as rookies, and practically speaking “nobodies.” This meant that they passed largely unnoticed. I also feel that these young artists, practically unknown at the time, proceeded without much government intervention, at least in the beginning of their careers. This was largely due to the general public’s indifference and the casual attitude of government officials, who often looked upon Mu’s work as practical jokes or youthful mischief. Later, however, members of the group did have to endure physical attacks and arrests, as did many other experimental artists of that period.

Six months later the Chungnyun jakka yeunlipjun (Exhibition of the Young Artists’ Union) was held. Individual and group performances by members of Mu and Shin Jun and the street demonstration held at the time of this event are the first of their kind to be documented in Korean art history. Despite the significance of their initiatives, however, they had gone practically unnoticed until my PhD dissertation of 2000.

Vinyl Tube Spouting Out Watercolor, 1967

Vinyl Tube Spouting Out Watercolor was first performed by Kang Kuk Jin on the opening day of the exhibition. While there have been studies of the first group Happening in Korea, Kang’s performance, staged three days earlier, was relatively overlooked by the public and the critics. It consisted of a large vinyl tube, which was suspended from the ceiling and loosely held upright by a rigid circle-shaped base at each end. Suspended inside the large tube were smaller vinyl tubes filled with watercolor. The performer’s only action was to remove one of the bases, which triggered a spontaneous splattering of colors. The work became a sort of three-dimensional painting, untamed in its joyous release.

The First Group Happening, Happening with Vinyl Umbrella and Candles, 1967

It was also in the winter of 1967 that some young Korean artists staged Happening with Vinyl Umbrella and Candles, the very first group Happening to be performed in Korea. It was not until much later that it came to be understood by the public as a historic milestone.

Even though it had been nine years since Yves Klein had presented Le Vide (The Void) and seven years since he had staged the performance Les anthrophométries de l’epoque bleu (Anthropometries of the Blue Period) in Paris, the concept of the Happening was still in its infancy in Korea and being tested by only a very few avant-garde artists. In Happening with Vinyl Umbrella and Candles, members of the group Mu and Shin Jun (New Exhibition) moved slowly around in circles. The artist Kim Young Ja, a member of Mu, sat in the center while the rest of the participants sang “Bird Bird Blue Bird,” a well-known folk song attributed to Jun Bong Joon, who led the Donghak Peasants Revolution in 1894.⁵ Kim held an open vinyl umbrella while seated between two upright elements in Choi Bung Hyun’s installation Stovepipe. In the 1960s and 1970s, this type of stovepipe, a feature of the popular briquette stove, was standard heating equipment for the humble class. Choi used it in the installation to create a scene with a familiar folk ambience.

The circling performers decorated the top of Kim’s umbrella with small lit candles, which they then used to poke through the vinyl fabric. This was followed by another circular movement that culminated in a sudden but staged collective attack on Kim. During the faked scuffle, the candles were extinguished and the umbrella was torn apart. The choreographer of the performance, Oh Kwang Soo, explained later that the umbrella is a symbol of the nuclear explosion at Hiroshima, the candles represent pure human spirit, and the conjunction of the song and the performers’ actions represent chance of the kind presented in Dada performances.

It seems clear that the writers and artists who carried out this Happening believed that they were engaging in a form of artistic expression that resembled the avant-garde art of the West: a way of consolidating their legitimacy in Korean avant-gardism, perhaps ensuring the legitimacy of the avant-garde of Korea. However, I would argue that the juxtaposition of the song “Bird Bird Blue Bird” with the action involving the umbrella and candles must be compared to Dadaist concerns such as contingency and chance. It reveals the participants’ revolutionary conscience and their deep-seated will to resist governmental repression, which for so long had forced them down. In addition to Homi Bhaba’s relevant observation that when the colonized imitate their colonizers, the result is “almost the same [as the model], but not quite,”⁶ what stands out is the inseparability of art and society that was unique to Korean circumstances at the time.

The First Semi-nude Happening, Transparent Balloon and Nude Happening, 1968

The first nude Happening in Korea was performed in 1968 by Jung Kang Ja at the C’est si bon music hall, which was widely known as a venue for young folk singers. Dressed only in underpants, Jung stepped onto the darkened stage accompanied by a recorded track of rhythmic percussion. She sat down, and several artists inflated small transparent balloons with adhesive surfaces and then stuck them on her body. When she stood up, the artists (Kang Kuk Jin and Shim Sun Hee, Jung Chan Seung, and Kim Mun Ja) and a few spectators sprang at her, slapping her and bursting the balloons. Here, the subject was the destruction of the stereotypical concept of beauty, embodied by a fragile female figure ornamented with transparent balloons. In the aftermath of the violent splattering of the objects covering her body, she is in the midst of brutal exposure, and becomes the symbol of the destruction of the stereotype. It seems strange to me that the Happening was not interpreted in this way even in later years, when feminism first arose in social debates during the 1990s. The ideas of feminism and feminist art seemed to operate under the assumption of Western archetypes.

Staged during a period when feminism was hardly recognized in Korea, Transparent Balloon and Nude Happening was decidedly Korea’s first Happening in which body, performance, light, music, performer, and audience were brought together in the context of feminism. Here it is important to note that the conceptual stance of Jung Chan Seung differs from that of Yves Klein, who used the female body as an aesthetic instrument directed by the male artist, notwithstanding the idea of Jung’s plan, which can be summed up by her statement, “Let’s do it like Klein.”⁷

It turns out that the reception of Jung’s work resembles that of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece of 1964. Cut Piece has been interpreted in a variety of ways: it has been considered as an exploration of sadism and masochism, of violence and victimization, and it has also been discussed in terms of feminist discourse on the female body and the male gaze.

Untitled, Performed in the Name of Environmental Art, 1969

Before they officially banded together in 1970, the 4th Group staged an untitled performance in the name of environmental art. Dressed in white bodysuits, the artists served as moving projection screens. Countless images, including the pupil of a huge eye, a girl’s face, and a desert landscape, were projected onto the human screens as well as onto the walls, ceiling, and floor. They countered the received notion that the screen or canvas should be fixed to the wall.

The Backstory of the First Experimental Film, The Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second, 1969

On July 21, 1969, the day of the satellite broadcast of the first lunar landing, Korea’s first experimental movie, The Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second, was released at Seoul Academy music hall. Made by Choi Won-Young (director), Jung Chan Seung, Kim Ku Lim, Jung Kang Ja, and Ban Dae Gyu (cameraman), the film, which is silent, was intended to express the existential conditions of modern life. It was shot in the rapidly developing city of Seoul: on the streets and in other public places. The shifting scenes flow at varying speeds in order to convey impressions of tediousness, fast-paced life, simple happiness, and cruelty.

The artists thoughtfully aimed to produce Total Art, in which body, space, and film are fused together. Their efforts were met with sneers by the art world.

Shockingly, this work—Korea’s very first avant-garde film—lay in obscurity for almost thirty years in the archives of the Osaka Art Center in Japan, while Kim Ku Lim was in exile there.

At present, Kim Ku Lim holds the copyright to the film, despite the fact that there are three other artists involved in the process. When I interviewed Choi Won Young and Jung Kang Ja in 2010, they insisted that the film was edited by splicing tapes after shooting, using only the positive film. Later on, the film was reedited and altered by Kim Ku Lim, the last participant to join the filmmakers’ team in 1968. When originally shown, the work was played at a far faster speed, its images distorted by separate projections that were partially obstructed by objects including cubes and triangular pyramids. Moving human screens and noisy music were also integral parts of the initial screening.

II. 2. The Spirit of Resistance under the Military Regime in Korea

As the 1960s generation was becoming increasingly allured by potential economic growth, the Korean government resorted to seeking economic help from outside, mainly from Japan. The result brought about the bilateral summit in 1964. Citizens of Korea were enraged and subsequently organized anti-Japan demonstrations, which took place across the nation. The reason for their anger is easy to understand: from 1910 to 1945 unthinkable acts of brutality had been committed in Korea by the Japanese colonial government. Now, while Japan was thriving after a relentless postwar reconstruction effort that culminated in the country’s hosting the Olympic Games in 1964, much of Korea was still struggling at a subsistence level.

Murder at the Han Riverside, 1968

Less than five months after performing in Transparent Balloon and Nude Happening, Jung Chan Seung, Kang Kuk Jin, and Jung Kang Ja dug deep holes under the second bridge of Seoul’s Han River. Then they entered the holes and had spectators pour water over them. After climbing out of the holes, the artists wrote critical phrases on long vinyl tabards: “cultural swindler” (pseudo-artist), “cultural blind” (culture phobia), “cultural shirker” (idealist), “illicit fortune maker” (pretended great master), “cultural peddler” (political artist), and “cultural acrobat” (artist jumping on the bandwagon). Finally they screamed and shouted each phrase and proceeded to burn the tabards, an act of destruction, urging disenchantment from the depravation of the ancien régime.

Pantomime on the Street, 1970

Two years later Jung Chan Seung and Go Ho suggested that the sincerity of human relationships be regained in modern society to lessen the prevailing sense of alienation. Bang Tae Soo, the representative of the theater group Ee, Jeo, Tto (Hmm, Well, And) can be seen laughing in the photo as a passerby ridicules their act. In a scene that followed, Jung Chan Seung gets locked in a shop behind a display window, crying out from thirst and hunger. All of Go Ho’s efforts to deliver bread and wine to his locked-up friend inevitably failed because of the obstruction of the shop window. A passerby, refusing to remain a mere spectator, entered through the back door of the building and compassionately handed Jung a morsel of bread and some wine. Immediately afterward, a policeman arrested Jung Chan Seung and Go Ho. No one realized that this was a piece of street art. They were later arrested and investigated by the police.

Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture, 1970

The 4th Group formed on June 20, 1970, the twenty-fifth anniversary of independence of the Republic of Korea. Nearly all of the group’s members were antiestablishment activists and experimental artists. Before being forced to break up less than a year later, using the slogan Muche (無体, zero state, non-constitution) and the symbol of the white flag, they decried military repression and called for change that would integrate all aspects of society (economic, cultural, and social) under the banner of art. The group, led by Kim Ku Lim and Bang Tae Soo, both before and after its dissolution, resisted government pressure and criticized the negativity posed by the reality of Seoul. Bang was also a leader of the underground theater group Ee, Jeo, Tto, named after a satirical phrase that grew out of the prohibition against uttering a word on the subject of social control, where the only utterable words under the extreme scrutiny of the government were “Hmm (Ee), Well (Jeo), and And (Tto).” Kim Ku Lim went into exile in Japan after the 4th Group was forced to disband. This happened after they carried out the project named Funeral Ceremony of the Established Art and Culture, which members say was a critique of conventional art and culture in Korea, not as a demonstration against the government.

On Gwangbokjeol (National Liberation Day) of 1970, the members of the 4th Group gathered in Sajik Public Park, where they read aloud their decree calling for the independence of Korean culture. Then they marched down the main street nearby. Kim Ku Lim led the procession. He and Jung Kang Ja each waved the Korean national flag and the 4th Group’s white flag, symbolizing purity, sunlight, the universe, traditional white Korean clothes, and spirituality. Behind them, Jung Chan Seung and Son Il Kwang carried a coffin decorated with flowers and the Korean national flag.

Starting from Sajik Public Park, the march was planned to proceed to the Gwanghwamun Gate, then over the first Han River Bridge, and finally along the white sands of the riverbank, where the funeral would be performed. However, as many feared, the marchers were arrested near the Gwanghwamun Gate for violating traffic laws, and the short-lived funeral came to an abrupt end.

Along with the Wind, Non-sculpture in Space

Among the thoughts of the Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu are the following: “Things are not as they seem,” and “Being, in coming into being, is produced by nonbeing.” It is precisely when Lee Seung Taek’s long strips of cloth were set in free motion in the natural wind that the “coming into being” of the strips happened. The artist calls the works “non-sculpture.” The fabric and the wind create continuously fluctuating shapes that are constantly “in the making,” forever “coming into being.” I recall the scene of traditional Korean fish banners at an annual ceremony alongside rural altars where fishermen and farmers invoke spirits whom they implore to grant them an abundance of fish and crop yields in the coming year. In this event we can see the flags or cloth strips flutter.

Ⅲ. Conclusion

The level of maturity of a country’s artistic culture and cultural consciousness is often measured by its freedom of expression. If judged by such a standard, Korea in the 1960s and 1970s would definitely score low. Before the advent of democratic freedom, the country’s atmosphere was grim. Artists who responded critically to government proposals or actions were arrested and often tortured harshly.

It is commonly thought that the main culprit in curtailing underground experimental art in Korea was the lack of public understanding as well as cohesive power in artists’ communities. But the most devastating blow to be dealt was the combination of government repression and the society’s fundamental lack of support and negative attitudes.

The willingness to accept the coexistence of different kinds of art is what brings us to cultural maturity. It is the source of a formidable inner power to be able to understand that a certain sort of art is “art for art’s sake” and that another sort of art engaged with social issues. Korea, far from such a level of maturity, was home to many underground groups studying and deliberating in isolation. Their experimental art practices, rooted in resistance against certain social and political forces, started to fade out in the second half of the 1970s, when the military government’s proclamation of martial law clamped down still further on human rights and freedom. This sequence of events ultimately drove Korea’s divergent forms of experimental art into the camp of Conceptual art. Despite all these adversities, experimental artists were able to show humor, sanity, and, above all, their will for freedom.

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