Beyond Conflict, Toward Collaboration: The Korean American Arts Community in New York, 1980s–1990s

In February 1989, Monthly Art (Wolgan Misul), one of the major art magazines in South Korea, hosted a roundtable for Korean artists and art critics active in New York City to hear directly from Korean American artists about their experiences.¹ A transcript of the roundtable was published in the magazine under the title “A Conversation on the Reality of Korean Art in New York,” including comments by the artist Mo Bahc (1957–2004), now also known as Yiso Bahc, who shared insights on the structure of the New York art scene and the position of Korean artists in the United States.² Responding to an increase in the number of Korean artists moving to the United States for educational purposes, Bahc first emphasized the necessity of considering Korean artists in the United States as belonging to one of two groups—“Koreans in America” or “Korean American artists”—by taking into account their different immigration backgrounds, relationship to Korea, and fluency in English.³ Next, Bahc pointed out a common misunderstanding often found among “Koreans in America,” recent immigrants who came to the United States to advance their education or career. Many such Korean artists regarded their move from Korea to the United States as an entrance into the US mainstream art scene or as a relocation from the Third World to the First World. In fact, they remained marginalized in both US society and the US art scene. Furthermore, US-based Korean artists experienced (and continue to experience) multiple alienations due to their fractured relationship to contemporary art in Korea, the position of Korean art in relation to the western art paradigm, and, most importantly, their position as Asian people living in the United States.

Using this roundtable as a starting point, I raise the following questions surrounding the growth of the Korean American arts community in New York from the late 1980s to the early 1990s: How did Korean artists who moved to the United States for educational or career purposes develop an awareness of their identity and social position within US society? How did recent immigrants and members of the 1.5 generation⁴ and second generation of Korean American artists come to communicate with each other and organize collective activities based on their shared Korean ethnicity? What social and cultural events did these artists use for collective actions? And how were their experiences and consciousness of their ethnic and racial identities expressed via their artistic activities?

Several studies on Korean American art recognize the significance of the first Korean American artists’ network in New York, the SEORO Korean Cultural Network (1990–94),⁵ and their organization of the Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art in New York in 1993–94.⁶ However, the social and cultural conditions surrounding increased collaborative activities among Korean American artists during this period have not been discussed in recent studies. This essay explores the development of collaborative activities among Korean American artists in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s by mapping instances of social conflict and artistic collaboration that occurred around the time of SEORO’s organization. Specifically, I focus on these Korean American artists’ response to the Family Red Apple boycott of 1990—an event that exposed social conflicts between Korean Americans and African Americans—and examine the systems of communication and collaboration that developed between Korean American artists and other minority groups and cultural organizations. In highlighting and analyzing archival textual sources, this paper offers a thorough reading of some of the activities undertaken by major artists from the Korean American arts community in New York in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Korean American, Asian American, and New York Art Scene of the Mid-1980s

Although Korean American artists had been active since the 1950s, the years 1988 to 1994 represent a significant period in the development of the Korean artists’ community in New York. With the relaxation of regulations limiting study abroad by the South Korean government in 1981, hundreds of Korean art students moved abroad for diverse personal reasons, including better economic conditions, artistic freedom from the military dictatorship in South Korea, and more educational opportunities to study international contemporary art trends.⁷ The US Korean artists’ community expanded even more after travel and study abroad restrictions were lifted in 1989, when many art students came to the United States, particularly New York, to complete MFA degrees and further their careers.

The increase of Asian immigrants and emergence of the Asian American movement also influenced US arts communities. Due to the 1965 passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act, which abolished the national-origin quota system that restricted immigration to non-northwestern ethnic groups, the number of US immigrants from Asian countries dramatically increased, from 9 percent in 1960 to 44 percent in 1980.⁸ Given the volatility of sociopolitical circumstances during the 1960s—including the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left movement, and anti-Vietnam war activism—a generation of college-age Asian Americans adopted a heightened social and political awareness of their “Asianness” and became a driving force in the Asian American movement.⁹ As Margo Machida has noted, foreign-born Asian immigrants from diverse countries and migration backgrounds surpassed the number of natural-born Asian Americans and took a significant role in Asian American arts communities.¹⁰ A younger generation of Asian visual artists and cultural activists from diverse ethnic backgrounds used art and visual culture to affirm their ethnic and racial pride, explore the self-identification and expression of “Asian American” as a means of challenging the stereotypical “orientalist” perspective on their identity, and share Third World solidarity. Several Asian art and cultural organizations, including the Basement Workshop (1970–86), the Asian American Arts Centre (founded in 1974), and the Alliance for Asian American Arts and Culture (later Asian American Arts Alliance; founded in 1983), were established in New York City. These arts organizations made Asian Americans’ sociocultural, assertive acts visible and enabled inter-Asian collaboration and communication among visual artists, writers, and musicians.

Initially, these Asian arts organizations featured the heavy participation of artists and activists from China, Hong Kong, or Japan; Koreans were barely involved. This disparity reveals the relatively small proportion of active Korean artists and lack of awareness and experience of collective activities with different ethnic groups among recent Korean immigrants. Korea was one of the world’s most ethnically homogeneous countries, and its national identity was constructed based on a belief in Korean ethnic nationalism. Therefore, Korean-born artists who immigrated to the United States or came to the United States for educational and career reasons would need opportunities to learn about the multiethnic and multiracial character of American society. However, following the mid-1980s influx of Korean-born artists and art students into the United States, and the simultaneous increase in the visibility of collective activities of Asian American artists and activists, Korean artists and cultural activists became associated with these Asian American arts organizations and participated in collective practices.

In 1985, the Korean American artist Yong Soon Min (b. 1953)—who had just moved to New York—became the first administrative coordinator of the Alliance for Asian American Arts and Culture.¹¹ Founded to provide central services to the Asian American arts communities, the Alliance enhanced the visibility of cultural activities by Asian artists. Min assisted in the development of the Alliance’s first multidisciplinary arts event, Roots to Reality: Asian Americans in Transition (1985), co-sponsored by the Henry Street Settlement (fig. 1).¹² Roots to Reality notably incorporated an array of works from the visual arts, literature, performance, and dance by young Asian American artists, creating a forum for multidisciplinary communication within the Asian American arts communities. As the selection of artists and essays published in the catalogue show, this multidisciplinary event, organized well before the boom of Asian American art exhibitions in the early 1990s, attempted to present diverse perspectives on the lives of Asian Americans by challenging Asian American stereotypes that dominated US society and media in the 1980s.¹³

Roots to Reality provided a chance for Korean American participants and audiences in New York to consider future collaborations within the Korean American arts community and their identity in relation to the larger Asian American communities. Four Korean American visual artists—Sung Ho Choi (b. 1954), Mo Bahc, Yong Soon Min, and Young Hee Han—were invited to exhibit alongside fifteen other Asian American artists.¹⁴ This was the first opportunity for Choi, Bahc, and Min to consider artistic communication as a means of overcoming different immigration backgrounds; it was also the first time their works were deliberately framed as “Asian American art.” The Alliance’s second arts event, Roots to Reality II: Alternative Visions (1986), not only exhibited the work by Ku-lim Kim (b. 1936), who was a major figure of the Korean experimental art movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, but also hosted a performance by Binari.¹⁵ Binari is a Korean American cultural troupe whose routines drew from Korean traditional music, instruments, and dances and who worked to facilitate communication and networking among young Korean Americans (fig. 2).¹⁶ By bringing together contemporary art by a Korean visual artist and a Korean American cultural group rooted in Korean folk tradition, the Alliance set the stage for interdisciplinary communication within the Korean American arts community. As a result, Binari was invited to perform at Minor Injury, an art space founded by Mo Bahc, for the South Korean visual arts exhibition Min Joong Art: New Movement of Political Art from Korea (1987). They were also invited to perform at another Minjung art exhibition held at Artists Space in 1988.

Building on their experience with Roots to Reality, Sung Ho Choi, Mo Bahc, and Yong Soon Min—each of whom founded or were members of SEORO—became driving forces in the organization of events showcasing Korean American art in New York City. From around 1988, multiple programs on Korean American art—such as a symposium, an exhibition, a workshop, and an educational program—focused on collaborative works by several artists and curators, including Choi, Bahc, and Min. The first symposium on contemporary Korean art in New York, “Korean Art Today,” was held at the Asian American Arts Centre in 1988 and was a major achievement. Choi, Min, and Tae Ho Lee (b. 1951) co-organized the symposium, and Bahc, along with four other participants—an artist, a gallerist, a curator, and an art critic—gave talks (fig. 3). Although the symposium was spearheaded by several recent immigrants who had just finished MFA programs in the United States, John Pai (b. 1937), who immigrated to the United States in 1949 and worked as a professor at Pratt Institute, also participated in the symposium as a speaker. As the title suggests, this symposium attempted not only to discuss the issues and realities surrounding US-based Korean artists but also to explore the position of Korean art in the contemporary art world and to construct a relationship between Korean art and Korean American artists by utilizing the growing interest in Korea caused by the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.¹⁷ A Korean newspaper article pointed out that, as the first public discussion on this issue, the symposium contributed to cross-cultural communication between Korea and the United States, but it was not able to facilitate enough communication among participants due to its wide topical coverage.¹⁸ However, that the symposium included Koreans working in different parts of the New York art scene and offered a venue for speakers to share their diverse experiences and thoughts demonstrates the growing social awareness and interest—among these artists specifically, and Koreans in the art world more broadly—to explore how their identity and social position intersected with US and Korean society and culture in multifaceted ways. Lisa Lowe defines the “Asian American” group as a heterogenous entity when considering national differences as well as differences in education, class, gender, fluency in language, and relationship to a homeland. The common questions (rather than common answers) about their positions and roles in the US art scene that stemmed from individual experience and were raised during the symposium confirm the processes of social and discursive constructions of a “Korean American” or “Korean in the United States” ethnic and cultural identity at this time.¹⁹

The diverse voices and perspectives of Korean artists on the realities of living and working in the United States is also collectively represented and expressed through the Immigrant Show (1988), an exhibition at the Alpine Gallery in New York City, which was organized six months later by the central architects of the symposium. This was the first exhibition in New York to attempt an exploration of the Korean American immigrant experience (fig. 4). Four artists—Sung Ho Choi, Mo Bahc, Kiho Lee, and Tae Ho Lee—sent invitation letters to fifty Korean American artists, and twenty-nine responded.²⁰ The invited artists worked in diverse visual languages and mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation art, prints, and performance pieces, to delineate the idea of immigration and articulate the social and cultural realities of Korean immigrants. As explained in an introductory essay to the exhibition, these artists recognized both the challenges and possibilities specific to a group of immigrant artists who could, and indeed had to, construct a Korean immigrant culture, as well as articulate their own ethnic and cultural identity. This had to be situated within the confines of cultural specificity, international universality, an “original” Korean culture, and the dominant US culture.²¹ This point of view was also shared in an exhibition review written by Hyuk Um—an independent curator and speaker at the “Korean Art Today” symposium. Um explains the complicated situation encountered by Korean art students in the United States, who came to learn the “model” for their art in the “center” of the western art world but whose attitudes instead ran the risk of affirming their marginal position and alienation from the mainstream art scene. However, Um also argues that the exhibition was a way to accentuate the meaningful role played by artists who were trying to connect and mediate Korean and western cultures in their own concrete way.²²

Overall, the “Korean Art Today” symposium and the Immigrant Show exhibition reflect a growing social awareness of a distinct Korean ethnic and cultural identity in 1988 and ongoing attempts to find a position within US social and art scenes. Stimulated by the expansion of the Asian American movement and the growth of an Asian American arts community, Korean American artists explored Korean ethnicity and culture in a collective way and began to communicate and collaborate between broader social and cultural communities in order to strengthen the visibility of their art and identity.

Artists Against Racial Prejudice: Interracial Conflict and Artistic Collaboration

With the increasing activities of Asian American artists and organizations, these artists received invitations to participate in exhibitions for racial and ethnic minority groups organized around discussions of multiculturalism and identity politics.²³ The Decade Show: Frameworks of Identity in the 1980s (1990), co-organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, the New Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, was the largest such exhibition aimed at addressing questions of identity in visual arts, with more than two hundred works by ninety-four artists from Asian, African American, Hispanic, Native American, and European backgrounds.²⁴ While a number of artists of color participated in The Decade Show to promote multicultural America, with the institutional support of museums, The Mosaic of the City: Artists Against Racial Prejudice (1990) at the Skylight Gallery of the Center for Arts and Culture of Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York, was organized independently as a direct response to social conflict between Korean American and African American communities. Awareness of the interethnic conflict between Korean Americans and African Americans became widespread after the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but it began in the 1980s after the 1970s influx of Korean immigrants to several US cities.²⁵ With the rapid growth of Asian immigrant populations in New York City, many Korean immigrants opened small businesses in predominantly African American neighborhoods, including Harlem in Manhattan, Jamaica in Queens, and Bedford-Stuyvesant and Flatbush in Brooklyn. Under the racial and ethnic residential segregation endemic to US major cities, African Americans and Korean Americans occupied starkly different communities. Therefore, the presence of Korean businesses in African American neighborhoods was perceived as an invasion of territory or an exploitation of African American interests.²⁶ Differences in language, culture, and social behavior acted as a barrier for cross-cultural communication, intensifying prejudices, stereotypes, misunderstandings, and hostility between these two minority groups.

In January 1990, African American residents in the Haitian and Caribbean neighborhoods of Flatbush launched the “Red Apple boycott,” boycotting and picketing Korean-owned grocery stores. The boycott began when employees of Family Red Apple, a Korean American–owned market, allegedly beat a Haitian-born woman accused of stealing.²⁷ Neighborhood residents and leaders of Black community organizations tied to the Haitian community gathered to protest the alleged beating. The boycott and picketing campaign transformed into an organized program of sustained mass demonstrations, with the involvement of the Black Power movement. This thirteen-month-long boycott has been analyzed and discussed from various angles.²⁸

While the boycott was expanding, Korean American artists and other multi-ethnic artists gathered under the name “Artists Against Racial Prejudice” (AARP) and organized The Mosaic of the City (1990) to oppose racial prejudice and encourage interracial communication between these two ethnic groups (fig. 5).²⁹ Ken Chu (b. 1953), a multimedia artist who immigrated from Hong Kong in 1971 and relocated to New York in 1986, was invited by several Korean American artists to be an exhibition coordinator.³⁰ Chu contacted Theodore Gunn, director of the Skylight Gallery, to request an exhibition space. With Gunn’s enthusiastic response and support, The Mosaic of the City was realized.³¹ African American participants were selected from the Skylight Gallery’s roster of artists and residency program; invitees ran the gamut from those involved in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s to members from the younger generation active in the late 1980s. Chu and the AARP also invited artists whose works centered on political issues (fig. 6).³² Chu remembers the event as a “true joint effort” between the Asian American and African American arts communities.³³ Sung Ho Choi also emphasizes that participants of The Mosaic of the City exhibition shared a common interest in social justice and their roles in society, regardless of their different ethnic, racial, or immigration backgrounds, making their participation in the exhibition natural.³⁴

Organized as a response to the Red Apple boycott, the exhibition received significant political attention. During his 1989 campaign and his inauguration speech in early 1990, David Dinkins—the city’s first African American mayor—had described New York City as a “gorgeous mosaic” instead of a melting pot, indicating respect for cultural difference.³⁵ Only a few days after his inauguration, however, the Red Apple boycott began, and the Dinkins administration received criticism due to inaction and its inability to end the boycott, which lasted more than a year.³⁶ The Mosaic of the City provided the perfect chance for the Dinkins administration to promote racial harmony in a way that suited Dinkins’s original political agenda. The exhibition was supported by funds from New York City and changed its title from Monochrome, with the sign of a red circle crossed by a red line, to The Mosaic of the City: Artists Against Racial Prejudice, following the messaging of Dinkins’s campaign.³⁷

The exhibition not only elicited political support; it also reflected Korean American artists’ understanding of the social role of their art. Through participation in a study group formed in 1987 and related article-writing, several Korean American artists had already expressed interest in progressive, socially engaged art and cultural movements, which they learned about through encounters with the identity politics of American art and exposure to the Minjung art (people’s art) of South Korea.³⁸ For example, Hyuk Um co-curated the first major exhibition of Minjung art in the United States, Min Joong Art: A New Cultural Movement from Korea (1988), at Artists Space in New York City.³⁹ This exhibition provided an opportunity for several Korean American and Asian American artists to learn about political democratization movements from Korea and cultural and artistic engagement with the movements. Another member of the study group and the AARP, Mo Bahc, founded and ran a nonprofit art space, Minor Injury, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, from 1985 to 1989. This space provided exhibition opportunities to artists from “racial, cultural, political and social minorities.” For example, Yong Soon Min and the Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) co-organized Homeland: A Palestinian Quest (1989) in response to the intifada, a Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza (fig. 7). Through this art space, Bahc and his fellow Korean American and Asian American artists already met and communicated with artists from different minority groups and considered the social and cultural conditions surrounding minority artists.

The Mosaic of the City received attention and support from Korean American and African American communities. It could only be realized through the financial support of both Korean American artists and a variety of Korean American organizations across the country.⁴⁰ In addition to local media attention and mentions in US editions of Asian newspapers, the exhibition was featured in the Amsterdam News, which had the largest Black readership in New York and had reported several times on anti-Korean attitudes among African Americans, including the Red Apple boycott. In an article in the Amsterdam News, Gunn emphasized that The Mosaic of the City was one of the most “kaleidoscopic collections ever curated” for the center and marked a significant educational opportunity for African American residents and participants.⁴¹ The Amsterdam News also noted that this was the first time Blacks and Asians had come together for a group show. Several African American artists described their first experience collaborating with Asian American artists, according to Choi and Chu. African American artists and educators shared and supported the exhibition’s emphasis on the role of art in society, notably expressed during a TV interview with the African American artist Che Baraka.⁴² The actual impact of the exhibition is hard to evaluate. Nevertheless, the organization of the show by minority artists, their lively communications, and the mutual support of African American and Korean American communities set a precedent for minority artists to work across ethnic and racial differences. It provided a glimpse of how art and visual culture could engage with sociopolitical issues and promote communication among diverse identity groups, rather than foment opposition.

Given the exhibition’s meaningful contribution, a second exhibition, Public Mirror: Artists Against Racial Prejudice (1990), was realized only a few months later by the AARP at the behest of the Clocktower Gallery, a space dedicated to residencies and group shows for emerging artists run by the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center.⁴³ The AARP expanded its call for participation, requesting that potential participants submit “a self-portrait of [their] racial identity from a personal or public perspective.” The exhibition included artists from varied cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds—including Greek, Iranian, Russian, and European American artists—reflecting the character of the exhibition space in Manhattan and highlighting the diversity of New York City.⁴⁴ The exhibition demonstrated that the AARP’s ideas had achieved widespread recognition within larger arts communities. At the same time, the generalization of the exhibition concept—to celebrate the diversity of the city—did not relate to a specific social event, suggesting that previous efforts to address a particular social conflict (the Red Apple boycott) became flattened and institutionalized through the involvement of a mainstream art institution. In fact, the Clocktower Gallery invited the AARP to organize Public Mirror to fill an empty slot—not because the museum had a long-term vision about how to address ethnic and racial issues within the city art scene.⁴⁵ Ironically, the acceptance of the AARP in the mainstream art scene “mirrored” sociocultural circumstances whereby multiculturalism was transformed into an institutional and nonactivist rhetoric, a circumstance that was already in place by 1990.⁴⁶

The SEORO Korean Cultural Network and SEORO Bulletin: Cooperative Networks and Cross-Cultural Dialogue

The SEORO Korean Cultural Network was founded in August 1990, after The Mosaic of the City closed and before Public Mirror opened. The often-fraught experiences of the Korean American immigrant community and the growth of artistic collaboration led to the organization of a progressive artists’ collective whose purpose was to expand their activities in a unified way. Sung Ho Choi, Mo Bahc, and the independent filmmaker Hye-jung Park founded SEORO at a meeting in Choi’s studio. SEORO intended to invite US-born Korean Americans and recent immigrants to develop an artistic network. Initial members tended to be recent immigrants who were comfortable speaking in Korean, but its membership expanded to include 1.5-generation and second-generation Korean American artists.⁴⁷

SEORO was founded to enhance communication among Korean American artists from various immigration backgrounds, but the network did not always adhere to an ethnically oriented perspective in their activities. Another major goal of SEORO was to cooperate with cultural organizations beyond Korean American society;⁴⁸ this goal was reflected in members’ activities, especially in their interest and participation in projects organized by other Asian arts organizations, including Godzilla: Asian American Art Network. Founded by Ken Chu, Bing Lee (b. 1948), and Margo Machida (b. 1950) in 1990—the same year as SEORO—Godzilla was a pan-Asian and pan-Pacific Islander American artists’ collective that included Korean American artists.⁴⁹ Its activities covered a wide range of needs and issues important to the Asian visual art communities.⁵⁰ Yong Soon Min participated in both Godzilla’s and SEORO’s activities, sharing discussions and activities from Godzilla with SEORO members.⁵¹ This exchange did not simply go one way. Before the foundation of Godzilla, Ken Chu and Bing Lee participated in The Mosaic of the City, and Bing Lee participated in Roots to Reality.⁵² After the foundation of both collectives, Sung Ho Choi, Mo Bahc, and other Korean American artists joined The Curio Shop (1993) at Artists Space, which was the first collective installation project by Godzilla.

SEORO published a quarterly newsletter, SEORO Bulletin (later SEORO SEORO), from fall 1991 to summer 1994. This newsletter enabled cross-cultural communication and learning (fig. 8). Published in English and Korean, issues included articles by artists, curators, and writers; features on South Korean contemporary art; news from Asian American arts communities across the country; and opinion pieces on social and political issues associated with Asian immigrants’ life. In addition to members’ writings, the newsletter republished news and articles from other sources deemed helpful to the Korean American arts community.⁵³ For example, the winter 1993/spring 1994 issue published papers from a panel organized by Yong Soon Min for the first national Asian American conference, Beyond Boundaries, hosted by the Asian American Arts Alliance. In addition to Min’s paper, “Imag(in)ing Ethnicity: Its Impact on Cultural Discourse and Production,” three papers by an artist, a curator, and a writer were included in the same issue.⁵⁴ Among them, the paper by curator and art critic Alice Yang, “Asian American Exhibitions Reconsidered,” is considered a significant essay that critically discusses the increase of group exhibitions dedicated to specific ethnic/racial groups.⁵⁵ The readership of SEORO Bulletin suggests SEORO’s goals and significance. It was sent to and read by SEORO members and their close friends, Korean American artists, researchers on Korean art, and patrons of Korean art across the country.⁵⁶ SEORO members also published outside the newsletter to share their thoughts with larger communities. Mo Bahc participated in a Godzilla survey that collected opinions from artists, curators, and writers about the increase in group exhibitions dedicated to contemporary Asian American artists. In the survey results, published in Godzilla’s 1993 newsletter, Bahc described his ambivalent feelings of having more opportunities to show work while seeing it framed primarily by his ethnic and racial background.⁵⁷ SEORO’s mission was to produce supportive and cooperative networks with other cultural organizations, and the publication was one of the best ways for participants to share their own voices and produce cross-cultural dialogues with other organizations.⁵⁸

The Across the Pacific Exhibition and Its Aftermath

As a part of the collective’s activities, SEORO began work on an exhibition for Korean American art in 1991 at the Queens Museum. Across the Pacific: Contemporary Korean and Korean American Art (1993–94) included Korean American art and South Korean contemporary art together (fig. 9). Although SEORO members served as advisors and participants rather than curators, Across the Pacific nevertheless reflected and synthesized interests and discussion that had developed collectively within the Korean American arts community. The exhibition evolved out of the Immigrant Show, and the Korean American art section, curated by Jane Farver, proposed similar concepts by inviting artists whose work explored issues of identity, the immigrant experience, and artists’ relationships with Korean tradition and American multiculturalism. The South Korean art section, overseen by Korean curator Young-chul Lee, focused on politically charged Korean art, represented by works of Minjung art. Both sections were designed to overcome the center-periphery structure, which marginalized Korean identity and art in relation to American and western society and culture, through the presentation of multidimensional Korean identities.⁵⁹

Across the Pacific was the most significant achievement of SEORO.⁶⁰ Ironically, it was also their last major event. SEORO disbanded a few months later in September 1994 when Mo Bahc returned to Korea and Sung Ho Choi temporarily suspended his artistic career. The dissolution of SEORO demonstrates that its foothold was neither stable nor systemic enough to survive on its own. Rather, the existence of the network relied heavily on the commitment of a few major members. Its breakup also indicated social, cultural, and ideological changes taking place in the United States and Korea around 1994. With the increase of group exhibitions centered on race and ethnicity, there were growing concerns about being labeled “Asian American artists”—a designation that some feared would repeat social stereotypes and reinscribe cultural difference. Such concerns were equally evident in Mo Bahc’s answers to the Godzilla survey and Alice Yang’s essay on Asian American exhibitions, both from 1993. Several Korean American artists also began to show works individually at major art institutions. Under the globalization policy promoted by South Korea’s first civilian government, the Korean art scene also made significant efforts to overcome the center-periphery structure by hosting international art events such as the Gwangju Biennial, founded in 1995. Korean American artists encountered both challenges to the development of their individual careers and artistic styles and chances to move beyond an emphasis on their collective identity.

As the only documented Korean American artists’ collective in New York City, SEORO has been discussed in both Korean and English scholarship, primarily in terms of its organization of Across the Pacific or the role of a specific artist within it.⁶¹ SEORO’s activities, however, must be explored in a broader context. As this essay has shown, the growth of the Korean American arts community in New York from the late 1980s to the early 1990s operated beyond the framework of a single nation-state. A consideration of the differences between members of the Korean American arts communities, their diverse social and artistic interests, their interests in sociocultural conflicts, and their efforts to collaborate with other minority groups can bring a multifaceted perspective to our understanding of Korean American art of this time. Korean American artists in New York aimed to find their place in US society and culture through cross-cultural dialogue and solidarity within the larger arts communities. As Stuart Hall has observed, identities are not only a matter of being but of “becoming,” and they go through constant transformation based on their positions. Korean American artists’ continuous struggles and activities in New York City from the late 1980s to the early 1990s delineate the process of becoming “Korean American” and of constructing a new immigrant culture that intersected social, cultural, and discursive spaces, past and future, of Korea and America.

Cite this article: Eunyoung Park, “Beyond Conflict, Toward Collaboration: The Korean American Arts Community in New York, 1980s–1990s,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7, no. 1 (Spring 2021), https://doi.org/10.24926/24716839.11629.

PDF: Park, Beyond Conflict, Toward Collaboration

Notes

About the Author(s): Eunyoung Park is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Art, Case Western Reserve University