Abstract:
The interests of this thesis began with the frequent encounters of Zen references in studying Asian contemporary art. Orientalism and Subaltern theories were the points of departure in shaping the discourses of this thesis. This thesis investigates the European gaze on Asian contemporary art, mainly looking at Korean minimalist movement Dansaekhwa and Lee Ufan’s oeuvre.
The Dansaekhwa movement that flourished in 1970s South Korea is a localised aesthetics of broader minimalist and conceptual art forms. Lee Ufan was one of the pivotal figures in developing discourses for Dansaekhwa and Mono-ha. Asian contemporary art is often understood in the light of Zen and other Eastern religions, seemingly based on their Asian heritage but without any other supporting evidence. When it comes to European understandings of Asian contemporary art, socio-political history and artists’ statements—each crucial aspects of art history as a discipline— are often not considered worthy of attention and even entirely omitted. Instead, Western scholarship on Asian contemporary art is often filled with Orientalist assumptions.
This thesis investigates Dansaekhwa and Lee Ufan’s oeuvre, analysing the socio-political contexts in South Korea at the time, as well as the artists’ statements that are ubiqoutously present but nevertheless silenced in the existing scholarship on Lee’s works. The thesis explores a few pivotal postcolonial studies on the European gaze towards the Other. It analyses how the void of the artists’ voices and socio-political contextual analysis in Western scholars’ readings of Dansaekhwa and Lee Ufan’s artworks, inevitably contributes
in misunderstanding. It critically analyses that the default lens of Orientalist Zen reading of Dansaekhwa, Lee Ufan’s works and other Asian contemporary art, only further orientalises the Orient.