Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s New York Performances

At Guggenheim Exhibitions in New York, “Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s–1970s” surveys a generation of Korean artists working amid rapid modernization and political pressure. The show traces how performance, happenings, film, and materials-based experiments broke with academic tradition and tested what art could be in public and private life. In the museum’s NYC context, it functions as a corrective, placing these works into the city’s broader postwar narrative of avant-garde practice. One clear takeaway is how history, not style, sets the stakes of the experimentation.