서문
비빔밥으로서 한국미술사 서문초안
The art of Korea has too often been treated as a peripheral footnote in global histories, reduced either to delicate fragments—celadon, white porcelain, calligraphy—or else overshadowed by the grandeur of neighboring civilizations. Yet this narrow lens misses the deeper pattern that has shaped Korean visual culture: a continuous, adaptive, and profoundly hybrid tradition that stretches from the megaliths of prehistory to the mediated spectacles of K-pop and contemporary cinema
Korean artists and communities rarely created in isolation. They drew from Chinese, Japanese, and later Western precedents, yet never simply imitated them. Instead, they recontextualized these “originals” within local philosophies, social structures, and ritual practices, transforming them into something uniquely Korean before sending them back into the broader currents of world culture.
Consider the gold crowns of Silla, which adapted Central Asian motifs into a ritual language of authority; or the subtle repetition of Dancheong colors and forms in Korean ceramics, which merged aesthetic refinement with everyday materiality; or the brushstrokes of Hangeul calligraphy, which combined Confucian discipline with a radical democratization of literacy.
What emerges is a visual culture defined less by empire or the demands of centralized authority and more by mediation, negotiation, and the voice of the peripheral or marginal, whether through folk painting, ritual masks, or community festivals. This is a culture of hybrid synthesis, where stone, clay, ink, and digital screens coexist as elements of a long, adaptive tradition. From Jeong Seon’s landscapes capturing the lived contours of place, to the abstraction of Dansaekhwa, to Nam June Paik’s global circuits of media art, to contemporary cinema and K-pop, Korea’s art constantly absorbs, transforms, and projects outward, speaking to publics far beyond its borders.
To understand Korean art is to appreciate a constellation that is always in motion. It is neither a single, fixed identity nor the product of a single center. It is a hybrid, dynamic, globally resonant field, capable of challenging assumptions about linear modernity, elite vs. popular culture, and the very notion of what counts as world art. By tracing these entangled trajectories, we see that Korea is not peripheral at all; it is a vital node in the ongoing conversation of global visual culture
The global narratives of art history still largely overlook, or else reduce to a footnote, the complex visual cultures that have shaped Korea’s transformation from prehistory to the present. Too often, “Korean art” has been cast as derivative of East Asian counterparts, or else compressed into a few decorative fragments stripped of the social worlds that gave them life.
Engaging with ancient dolmens, Silla gold crowns, Joseon literati painting, and contemporary media experiments, each work unfolds with echoing rituals, vernacular gestures, and global resonances. Here, local and transnational elements collide and recombine, materiality dances with abstraction, and historical memory pulses through modern installations.
This volume offers a new kind of survey, one that seeks neither a linear chronology nor a nationalist inventory, but a rethinking of Korea’s artistic traditions as a series of evolving encounters while revamping the conventional narrative of Korean art; presenting it not as a series of isolated achievements but as a bibimbap hybridity, constantly evolving with borrowing, remixing, and transforming
between the local and the transnational, the material and the metaphysical.
Challenging conventional assumptions that Korea is either marginal or imitative, this book proposes that Korean art is best understood as a bibimbap hybridity—a layered mixture of influences, traditions, and innovations, carefully balanced yet constantly recombined. At times it mediates between East Asian visual cultures, at times it generates radical experiments, and increasingly it engages global audiences across media and genres. Its history does not follow a single linear trajectory; instead, it forms a dynamic field of resonances, where ancient rituals and folk practices echo in minimalist ceramics, calligraphy, and contemporary installations, and where vernacular imaginations find new life in media art, cinema, and K-pop. In Korea, the local and the transnational, the elite and the popular, the ancient and the contemporary continually meet and transform one another, creating a visual culture that is as hybrid as it is globally resonant.
Only by tracing these entangled trajectories—stone, clay, ink, and screen—can we begin to understand how Korea’s art illuminates the broader contradictions of modern culture: the tension between empire and periphery, tradition and innovation, resistance and global integration. To follow this history is to discover that Korean art is not peripheral at all, but central to reimagining what world art history might mean.
목차
Chapter 1. Introduction: Between Periphery and Node
👉 한국 미술은 주변부가 아니라 교차와 재맥락화의 장소다.
Chapter 2. Stones and Spirits
👉 강화 고인돌 거석문화와 신라 금관은, 땅과 하늘, 권력과 신성의 결속을 시각화하며 한반도 특유의 기복신앙, 메시아주의와 신정주의적 샤머니즘에 대한 발로다
Chapter 3. Networks of Transmission
👉 불교미술은 인도-중국의 단선적 문화 수입품이 아니라 한반도에서 변주, 재창조를 겪은 후 2차 창작되어 일본에 전파되었다
Chapter 4. Clay, Glaze, and Everyday Abstraction
👉 고려청자와 조선백자는 흙과 불로 빚은 추상적 조형예술이며 일상적이면서도 초월적인 미학의 정수다
Chapter 5. Landscape and Lived Space
👉 정선의 진경산수와 사대부적 회화공간에서 소중화주의와 글로컬리티를 읽어내자
Chapter 6. Vernacular Imaginations
👉 민화, 꼭두, 하회탈과 같은 민중적 조형문화는 제의와 오락, 공동체적 삶 속에서 형성된 시각적 언어로 볼 수 있으며 엘리트회화와는 다른 차원의 생활미학으로서 주목해볼 필요가 있다
Chapter 7. Scripts and Surfaces
👉 한글의 창제와 서예는 문자와 조형을 하나의 미학으로 결합한 세계 시각문화사의 독특한 실험이라고 생각하며 조선 주자학적 질서 속에서 문자와 권위, 감성과 수행을 연결했다
Chapter 8. Colonial Modernities
👉 제국이 아니라 식민지가 더 보편적인 근대경험이며, 유화, 사진, 박람회 등의 식민지 모더니티의 시각문화는 근대가 단절이 아니라 충돌과 변형 속에서 형성되었음을 보여준다
Chapter 9. Material Monochromes
👉 단색화는 반복과 물질성으로 한국적 추상의 언어를 세계의 무대에 새겼다(해방후 남북의 미술체제, 아방가르드도 고민중)
Chapter 10. Media, Politics, and Global Circuits
👉 백남준의 전자 이미지와 네트워크 실험은 한국이 추후 글로벌 네트워크의 동심원 한가운데 존재하게 될, 먼저 온 미래를 예고했다
Chapter 11. Global Korea: Cinema as Visual Modernity
👉 영화는 근대 이후 한국의 움직이는 회화로, 식민지기의 기록영화부터 21세기 칸 영화제 수상작까지, 한국 사회의 서사와 미적 감각을 국제적 언어로 번역해왔다.
Chapter 12. Screens and Soundscapes: K-Pop as aesthetics of performance
👉 K-pop은 시청각과 몸짓의 연희문화를 통합한 총체적 미디어 아트로 접근할 필요가 있으며 무대 영상 패션 팬덤을 결합한 하나의 시스템으로서 오늘날 세계 대중문화의 문법을 다시 쓰고 있다.
Chapter 13. Korea in Larger Contexts
👉 한국미술은 돌에서 미디어까지, 고대 제의부터 K-pop까지, 늘 외부와의 접속과 내부적 재해석을 통해 자기정체성을 재구성해왔다.
동아시아와 서구, 민족과 세계를 가로지르는 긴장과 교섭 속에서 한국미술은 여전히 움직이는 목표물이며 세계사적 공명을 낳는 하나의 별자리이기에 세계 미술사의 재서술을 요구한다.