SEOUL.- Conceptual art is an approach that emphasizes the artist’s ideas and concepts over the outward appearance or material results of the artwork. It first appeared in Western art in the mid-1960s, raising fundamental questions about what “art” meant as it brought words and language—areas that had been excluded from visually focused modernist art—into the artistic realm. Through around 140 works by 28 artists, the exhibition This is (Not) Conceptual Art explores the conceptual shift that occurred in Korean contemporary art amid its transition from the visual (the eye) to language and thought.

Rather than completely eliminating materiality or reducing the artwork to a purely linguistic system, Korean conceptual art pursued an approach that treated language and concepts alongside materials and form. In Korean art, the tendency to place greater emphasis on thought (language) and concepts than on visuality or materiality began to emerge within the context of experimental art in the late 1960s. The linguistic and logical experiments of the 1970s and 1980s represented an intellectual effort to interrogate the essence and existence of art, while the period from the 1990s onward saw conceptualism invoked to question institutional spaces, history, and reality through linguistic structures and rhetoric. This shift also coincided with the changing understanding of conceptual art, as its focus shifted beyond the West toward a more global conceptualism operating within the social, political, and economic contexts of regions such as Latin America, Eastern Europe, and Asia. In this respect, the exhibition offers an opportunity to explore the contemporaneity of Korean conceptual art within a broader process of international diversification. As the title suggests, the exhibition explores the possibility of interpreting conceptual art not as a single reductive category, but as a broader field encompassing multiple forms manifested in diverse artistic practices.





This is (Not) Conceptual Art consists of four chapters: “Language, Logic, Performance,” “Objects and Language,” “Mapping and Measuring,” and “Manipulators of Signs.” The first chapter, “Language, Logic, Performance,” explores how artists between the 1970s and 1990s attempted to shift art toward structures of thought rather than sensory representation by combining physical actions, language, and logic. The second chapter, “Objects and Language,” traces how Korean conceptual art between the 1970s and 1990s revealed the imperfect relationship between objects and language, encouraging viewers to pose new questions about familiar, accepted systems of meaning. The third chapter, “Mapping and Measuring,” examines how Korean contemporary art since the 1970s has questioned the objectivity and rationality of standard systems that impose order on the world, including maps, measuring devices, and timepieces. Lastly, the fourth chapter, “Manipulators of Signs,” exhibits conceptual works that rearrange and reedit pre-existing systems of symbols—from sources such as newspapers, advertisements, magazines, and statistics—in ways that shift the direction of their meaning. By triggering ruptures in our ocular-centered modes of perception and, in the words of Bahc Yiso, traveling “through the vast and limitless gap between established meanings and realms,” This Is (Not) Conceptual Art encourages viewers to contemplate human beings and the world in new ways.

Artists: Ahn Kyuchul, Bahc Yiso, Choi Byungso, Chung Seoyoung, Cody Choi, Gim Hongsok, Hong Myung-Seob, Inhwan Oh, Jo Kyungsook, Joo Jaehwan, Kim Beom, Kim Kulim, Kim Sora, Kim Soungui, Kim Yong Chul, Kim Yong-ik, Kim Yongmin, Kong Sunghun, Kwak Duckjun, Kyojun Lee, Lee Kun-Yong, Lee Seung-taek, Park Hyunki, Sung Neung Kyung, Tchah-sup Kim, U Sunok, Yoon Dongchun, Yoon Jin Sup (28 artists).