Is Cho Young-nam a fraud? Yes and no

By Kate Lim

The recent proxy painting scandal caused by Cho Young-Nam delivers us a revelation of the disagreement in views of art between the general public and contemporary art critics.

The general public simply sees Cho’s behavior as fraud, but local art critics remark that the artist’s employing of assistants in the studio is a conventional practice, which is another way of saying that the public furor raised over Cho’s act is based on their ignorance of the convention of art production. In particular, Chin Jung-Kwon, the art critic, remonstrated with the media and general public, saying: “The essence of painting is the artist’s concept.

As long as the work has a concept, the transaction is made all right … the accusation of fraud is invalid.” Through Chin’s comment came a cat tumbling out of the bag; the art critic’s strong support of the authority of the “concept” in a work of art. Chin represents the majority of critics on contemporary art subscribing to the idea of Conceptual Art in which shapes, colors, forms or materials are not important in a work ― art is about ideas and meanings.

However, the audience criticizes Cho’s Conceptual Art practice. It reveals that they uphold a belief that an artwork is not merely about a concept and that the artist’s direct involvement with the making process composes a key element of the work. I find it very strange that art critics are the least critical of Cho’s case whereas the ordinary masses display a very critical judgment that comes naturally out of common sense.

This tendency of art critics has been developed through the dissemination of the Conceptual Art discourse emphasizing that art should concern “questions” about art itself, the way we think about art, society and culture. In tandem with this so-called philosophical spirit, a variety of forms, like readymade quotidian objects, photographs, notes, videos and language itself, especially, became the conceptual works of art. The most notorious and admired conceptual artist at the frontier is Marcel Duchamp, who offered a urinal as a work of art at a 1917 exhibition in New York. A urinal could be offered as an artwork when it challenged the authority of art institutions. In other words, a urinal presents a concept and then it can be ipso facto art according to the Conceptual Art discourse. From this logic, a new definition of artist and art making is born: The artist as a concept-creating god, free from all human struggles against forms, mediums, styles. The conceptual artist is gleefully free to explain a concept or idea in words or written text (which itself is a work of art) in the museum or gallery, and simply let it be made into any type of form or shape by anyone else. Naturally, conceptual artists employ assistants who are very competent in incarnating the meaning into physical form. Their assistants are quasi-artists. Viewers are recommended to make the effort to understand the conceptual artist’s “questions and ideas,” not restricted by the visual qualities of the offered conceptual work and not to question the authorship of the physical form itself.

The majority of artists who take art seriously, however, know that the core of Conceptual Art is untenable; it is akin to an artistic fantasy. It is true that most artists do not want to just show the viewers definable physical forms as art. Of course, they desire to evoke something invisible or immaterial through the forms. But at the same time, they are clearly conscious that the actualization of an idea is a far more complex and difficult process than the cerebral “concept-making.” What fundamentally challenges the artist is the very process and method of “concept-realization,” which manifests an indescribable interplay of materials, the unexpected, the passage of time, the giving-up of the artist’s preferred method, painful re-coursings of original plans, and so on. Only at the cost of all this concept-realizing effort and pain does the artist deliver the desired impact of something immaterial to the viewers.

And what about the viewers? What the viewers feel in front of the artwork is far from a specific concept ― they are but diverse emotions, associations, metaphorical feelings or even a simple suspending of boring everydayness. Such a process is called “communication” between the work and the viewer, in which viewers are perceptually surprised, stimulated or fascinated by the actual configurations of colors, forms, textures and materials that were worked on by the artist. Communication in the context of art happens when viewers reach a delightful consciousness through the artwork that they see and feel human qualities trying to capture the ephemeral idea into a certain realization.

To my surprise, Chin holds a condescending view on the art public: “[…] some media who do not know anything about the logic of contemporary art instigated the situation, and the masses who are ignorant of the logic of contemporary art are being overexcited.” I think, to the contrary of his argument, the ordinary people who visit galleries or museums and play a crucial role in keeping the art scene alive are not attracted to the logic of contemporary art that focuses on the concept as substance. Critics live in their own ivory tower within which they build up their own conceptualization of art excluding the viewers and artists. In my opinion, general art-lovers had better observe “the reality”; the artist’s commitment to art making and the viewer’s sound judgment on the work. It will keep art as wholesome human creativity.

Kate Lim is director of Art Platform Asia, an independent curator and art writer. Contact her at kate.yk.lim@gmail.com.