Jung Kang-ja

Jung Kang-ja (; 1942–2017) was a South Korean visual artist. She was involved in the Korean avant-garde art scene in its formative years of the 1960s and early 1970s, during the repressive regime of Park Chung Hee. In this time she staged and participated in performances that challenged the contemporaneous artistic and cultural norms in South Korea.

Biography Jung Kang-ja was born in Daegu in 1942. Jung graduated from the College of Fine Arts at Hongik University. Park Seo-bo, a leader in the Art Informel movement and Dansaekhwa, was Jung's teacher at Hongik University. He encouraged her to explore various forms of art such as Pop Art, soft sculptures, conceptual art, and performance. Jung took inspiration from foreign art movements by looking solely at the images in art magazines available at the library such as Art in America and Mizue. was a founding member of the Shinjeon Group, formed in 1967, a collective made up largely of peers from Hongik. She had also run a private art school, but lost her clients due to social backlash. In 1977 Jung married and moved to Singapore where she stayed for 5 years and started to use a local technique called batik in her art. From this point on she primarily explored paintings and 2-D works that expressed her inner subjective experiences through surreal, exotic landscapes and figures. She returned to Korea in 1982. Upon her return, though, she was entirely forgotten compared to the prestige her colleagues had accrued. While she didn't label herself as a feminist, Jung used her body and identity as a woman to transgress the societal gender expectations for women of her time.

New Exhibition Group The New Exhibition Group [신전동인 Sinjeondongin] which Jung was involved with explored performances and happenings. This group was founded in 1967.

Transparent Balloons and Nude Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968) was put on by Shinjeon Group at the Young Artist's Coalition's 4th Contemporary Art Seminar entitled “Happening Show.” Chung Chan-Seung and Jung Kang-ja were the main authors of the piece. Chung Chan-seung had suggested the group to try Yves Klein's Nude Happening. This piece also held similarities to Yoko Ono's Cut Piece. The venue, C’est Si Bon music café in Suhrindong, was a famous place among young folk to watch singers perform. 350 audience members attended and were met with the music of John Cage playing on speakers and a tri-colored lighting system that flashed different colors. Jung came to the stage wearing white pants, a white shirt, and a white scarf. Once she sat on a chair, the male performers cut away all her clothes and left only her underwear. After that, the men blew-up clear balloons from a sticky adhesive plastic and then stuck them onto Jung's body. Once her body was totally engulfed in plastic balloons Chung Chan-seung, Kang Kuk-jin and some audience members pressed their bodies onto the balloons until they all popped or deflated, revealing Jung's body again. Silence followed the performance. Jung had been inspired to use the plastic adhesive balloons after watching children play with it. While the participatory aspect was meant to "pop" men's fantasies about the female body, the public reception seemed to only reinforce and double down on it. This time period was also shaped by government crack-downs on body politics such as the length of women's skirts and men's hair. She was negatively targeted by the press for her participation in Transparent Balloons and Nude (1968) which was the first semi-nude happening. This significant piece was later re-created in the 2016 an/other avant-garde Exhibition.

Initially, the group had agreed to hire a female model for the performance, but due to the shame associated with public nudity the model did not agree to participate. It's under this situation that Jung decided to step in. Also, Jung had the intentions of being completely nude for the performance, but the owners of C’est Si Bon asked the artists to hold back since the police officers were present at the time of the performance. Through this piece, Jung and the Shinjeon members were trying to present the body as higher in expressivity than any other art object and also complicate people's notions of artistic creation by presenting a temporal, participatory art. As opposed to the chaste image of the Korean woman's body which is never touched nor exposed, Jung's piece thrust the woman's body into the public eye. In the piece she is the artistic medium as well as the representative of all women, including herself as a subject. The press shamed Jung for her nudity and undermined the conceptual ideas the group had hoped to share.

Murder at the Han River Murder at the Han River (1968) was an outdoor performance staged to criticize contradictions of commercialism and hegemony of the established culture.

The Union Exhibition of Young Korean Artists Her work was included in the Union's 1967 exhibition, which she took part in organizing.

Kiss Me One of the pieces exhibited, Kiss Me, was an example of Jung's work challenging and resisting gender normalities in Korean society, a subject that appears across her artwork.

The Murderer The Murderer (1967) was an installation piece Jung made out of a mix of artistic mediums and domestic items: a Korean room partition that's been punctured to show a collage of a woman's shoes and legs. This sculptural scene illustrated a woman escaping the literal “frame” of gendered Korean customs that hindered women's sovereignty.

STOP STOP (1968) was another piece that highlighted the tensions Jung felt upon her female identity. She depicted a woman draped over a bench with a ticking clock hunf around the chest and a heart icon inside a comically enlarged buttocks.

The Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second She also participated in The Meaning of One Twenty-fourth of a Second (1969-1970).

Toilet Tissue Dress 1969 saw Toilet Tissue Dress, a collaboration with fellow Fourth Group member and fashion designer Sohn Il-gwang in which Sohn designed a dress made completely of toilet paper that Jung wore into a fountain. Muche, translated as incorporeality, was an idea influenced by Taoist thought that lay beneath the Fourth Group's work, being featured in their manifesto.

The Room in Singapore The Room in Singapore (1979) is an unsettling self portrait with the main subject looking frightened in a foreign interior. The business of the background and the scared facial expression showed her discomfort and inner conflict after her move from Korea to Singapore. She utilized a Singaporean fabric dying technique called batik to achieve a red canvas for her to paint on.