KITSCH & POP: Korean Pop Art Now

Korean Pop Art has always existed in a space of contradictions—mass-produced yet deeply personal, playful yet critical, kitsch yet undeniably cool. KITSCH & POP: Korean Pop Art Now revisits this under-recognized yet essential current in Korean contemporary art, placing it within the global conversation shaped by the worldwide rise of K-culture and the digital age. Presented by the Seoul Museum of Art and the Korean Cultural Center as part of the Touring K-Arts project, the exhibition unfolds across Shanghai and Hong Kong in 2025, bridging two generations of artists who have defined—and redefined—what Pop Art means in a Korean context.

The show explores how Pop’s visual language has been reinterpreted through Korean history, local culture, and now, a post-internet reality. It brings together early 2000s pioneers like Kyoung Tack Hong, Son Donghyun, MeeNa Park, and Kim Shinhye with younger artists active since the 2010s, including Chu Mirim, Don Sunpil, Noh Sangho, Sim Raejung, Sungsil Ryu, and Jeongsu Woo. Together, they reveal how the genre continues to evolve in response to consumer culture, social media, and artificial intelligence. By centering on concepts like “cool-kitsch” and “individualized pop,” the exhibition reminds us that Korean Pop Art isn’t just Pop Art in Korea—it’s a living, shifting movement shaped by its own paradoxes.

Take Chu Mirim, for example. Her pixelated experiments turn the invisible world of web-based society into vivid images, reflecting the way the internet silently shapes our lives. Meanwhile, Don Sunpil dismantles otaku subculture by pulling anime-inspired figures—mass-produced and beloved by niche fandoms—into the fine art discourse, exploring what happens when obsession and aesthetics collide.

On a different note, Noh Sangho embraces the uncanny beauty of AI-generated images, framing their glitches—six-fingered hands, two-headed deer, burning snowmen—as digital “miracles” that blur the line between myth and machine. MeeNa Park brings a rigorous, almost scientific approach to Pop, dissecting how media, data, and cultural icons shape the way we consume images. And Jeongsu Woo bridges old and new, pairing Baroque-style still-lifes with apocalyptic comic book scenes, revealing how even disaster can spark new beginnings.

Together, these artists challenge and expand the very idea of Pop Art, showing how its core sensibilities—mass culture, repetition, irony—are constantly reshaped by technology and time. “Korean Pop Art isn’t a fixed genre,” the curatorial statement reminds us. “It’s an open field, still evolving and actively under construction.”

KITSCH & POP: Korean Pop Art Now invites viewers to see Pop Art in Korea not as an imitation of Western models but as a unique cultural language—rooted in local histories yet tuned to a global, digital rhythm. It’s a landscape where kitsch becomes cool, nostalgia becomes futuristic, and the contradictions themselves are the point.