Transboundary Aesthetics in Korean Women Artists

Abstract

As C. Korsmeyer has remarked (Gender and Aesthetics, 2004), there is a deep level in the gendered condition of traditional Western aesthetics that has to do with general philosophical and epistemological frameworks, characterised by dualistic and hierarchical oppositions between philosophical terms, where one pair is usually associated with males and the other, in a subservient position, with females. In the same vein, the rejection of non-western art and aesthetics by the modern Western mainstream thinkers such as Kant and Hegel, has traditionally relied on similarly polarized epistemological patterns hiding power relations. Besides, it is the case that most East Asian traditional philosophies (taoism, buddhism, confucianism), do not share a similar dualistic oppositional framework as the Western one does. Departing from these three broad premises, this paper aims at focusing on the works of two contemporary Korean female artists and will try to show how their proposals variously share a transboundary aesthetics through which some dychotomies and tensions denounced by feminist Western aesthetics are questioned, particularly the arts / crafts divide, the self-subject /other-object divide which is traditionally linked to the male/female divide in the Western European tradition. In the series selected for exploration in this paper, Kimsooja and Yeesookyung use materials belonging to the feminine realm of crafts and house-ware (bedding cloth and ceramics) and through their intervention, create messages aiming at transcending hierarchical values of domination, praising instead fragility and multiplicity.