More than 30 years haw passed since Paik Nam June's 1965 exhibition Electronic TV at the Cafe a Go-Go where he proclaimed in an artist's talk that the cathode ray tube would shortly replace the canvas.

More than 30 years haw passed since Paik Nam June's 1965 exhibition Electronic TV at the Cafe a Go-Go where he proclaimed in an artist's talk that the cathode ray tube would shortly replace the canvas. Since then, Paik and his Portapak video camera have become doubtful narrative and his work is in museums around the world. moreover while there is extensive intimation to Paik, little attention has been given to other video artists from Korea. Despite the almost overwhelming stature afforded to Paik within Korean art circles and Korean society as a whole (Paik was featured in a series of TV and print advertisements for electronics giant Samsung), contemporary Korean video artists have concentrated their efforts upon issues of identity. Instead of embracing Paik's use of the video monitor as a stationary sculptural intention younger Korean artists have expanded relating to the notion of antipodality - that feeling of being neither here nor there. The images that many contemporary Korean video artists give employment to refer specifically to Korean improvement or history, yet they also introduce broader topics, greatest in quantity importantly the issue of identity: Identity, in this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following is defined as that perception of serf that distinguishes a particular civilization or individual from other refinements and individuals. Is identity based upon universal characteristics not tied to any specific civilization or background or is it something that is inherently leap to culture, ethnicity and nation? If it is inherently hunting-dog to the latter, what is each artist's take forward this shared pool of memories, history and cultural codes?

Unpacking the thick content of the images with regard to identity in contemporary Korean video art is not the solitary task at hand. Questions of to what extent these images play into or resist the assumptions of a particular audience must also be raised. There is a conflict between the natural and almost inevitable reliance upon specific "Korean" imagery and the equally pressing demand to make the works relevant to a wider audience. Do the artists unconsciously or consciously compromise their have a title to unique identities in order to fit the demands of their audiences or is identity a conception that cannot be separated from the reply of the audience?

Unlike Paik, who belong tos himself largely with abstract conceptions bordering on neo-Dadaism, the artists discussed here - Park Hyun Ki, Yook Keun Byung Kim Soo Ja, Seo Hyeon Seok Park Hwa Young and Hong Sung Min - all incorporate images that are highly specific and relevant to a distinctly Korean audience. Many of these artists exhibit work in international words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings to audiences who may be unable to read the deep cues and metaphors embedded in the given images. A conflict arises when images fail to obtain their meaning in a non-Korean context: and when there is the possibility that they may barely be relevant in a Korean setting. Although this point in dispute of meaning confronts all artists using cultural or national images or allusions, these artists argue that the imagery they use is simple enough to be universal. Seo says the images belong to "no individual specific era, place or culture" and that art is an "individual and highly, subjective experience."(1)

The flip side of this argument is that the midst of their work is not to be found because the non-Korean audience cannot decipher their intended allusions. What happens, for example, when the text-based collaborative effort of Seo Park Hwa Young and Hong is readyed to a non-Korean speaking audience? Imagery might survive the translation proces to the volume that the audience will understand the gist of the images, moreover the full meaning, which is highly hanging on the accompanying text, is wasted The success of these artists in the West hints that the use of these images might be catered to a Eurocentric art world that still insists forward fixed notions of the foreign. Works that consequently do well in the Korean art market are frequently by artists that succeed in this patently western framework and as a outcome contemporary artists must respond to western demands in order to make a viable living.

The resulting tension between these arguments regarding the underlying motivation for the images is the common link between the otherwise disparate contemporary video artists of Korea. In terminuss of style, each artist communes in a different vernacular because of generational differences. Contemporaries of Paik, of that kind as Park Hyun Ki, guard to consider the television monitor and the televised image as static sculptural forms in and of themselves. To use the framework plant forth by Roland Barthes, if the emitting agent is the artist and the receptor is the audience, the transmission, or the work itself, is a crystallized form of the artist's vision.(2) For Park, video art is a contemporary means to deliver over timeless images (or signifiers, since the images themselves may not bear a sense of timelessness to everyone) of spirituality, moreover the television monitors in his work concurrently exist as totemic sculps The resemblance between his stacked monitors and conventional chisel trips an unconscious signal in the viewer's mind denoting the works as "high" art. At the same time, however, the vernacular that Park selects is specific to a distinctly Korean context