Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology · Artery. A podcast on art, authorship and anthropology

Lee Ki-Yeon with Kim Yoonha

·33 min·3 clips

Lee Kyung secretly made woodcut prints of the Gwangju massacre and mailed them while hiding from the authoritarian regime.

The conversation begins with authorship as relation. Yoon Ah Kim frames the exchange through Korean sartorial heritage, contemporary technological imagination, and helim, meaning enlivening. Translation is part of the texture here. The artist's practice comes across less as solo studio work and more as a way of making things with people, materials, clothes, and public feeling. Factory workers matter. When art arrived under the name art, they held back. When drawings appeared on clothes, they had something to answer, correct, and wear. That change lands hard. Clothing lets authorship move around in a way a formal art object often does not. The 1980s press on the whole conversation. During Korea's nationwide democratization movement, the artist sees dress as a way expression can move when speech is constrained. A slogan can travel quietly. A hundred people in the same marked clothing can become a shout without anyone speaking. Heritage is not treated as nostalgia. Wearing Korean clothes connects to earlier work by students and intellectuals trying to recover cultural forms damaged by colonialism and industrialization. Rural culture was disappearing, so research into agricultural culture, folk dance, and farmers' clothing became part of the search. The body makes the case. Western-style pants tear during traditional mask dance; older clothing expects different movement. Museum recognition is still uneasy. A painting held by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, may look like one piece unless someone patiently explains what it carries. The artist ends by wondering whether style itself could do more of that work.

As heard by us

Clothing becomes a public language here, linking 1980s slogan T-shirts, farmers' clothes, and a museum-held painting to Korean cultural recovery.

Artery brings together anthropologist Yoon Ah Kim and artist Mrs. Lee Kyung in a conversation about clothing as public expression, moving from slogan T-shirts in the 1980s democratization movement to the longer effort, after colonialism and industrialisation, to look back toward…

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Why you'd press play

You want a T-shirt story that turns into Korean democratisation, heritage, and public speech.

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