Sung Neung Kyung

Sung Neung Kyung (; born 1944) is a South Korean contemporary artist best known for his performance art created during the authoritarian period under president Park Chung Hee. This period was marked by extreme censorship and violent suppression. The extreme political conditions of this period facilitated the emergence of a distinct culture of performance art mainly centered around The Korean Avant-Garde Association (AG) and the Space and Time Group (ST), founded by Lee Kun-Yong, a close collaborator of Sung. Sung’s work is characterized by the dissection of ubiquitous parts of daily life and an exploration of the symbolism of routines. He continues to make art prolifically and was featured in a major 2023 exhibition of Korean Avant-Garde art at the Guggenheim Museum (originally shown at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul ) titled Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, 1960s -1970s

Early life and career Sung Neung Kyung was born in Yesan County, Chūseinan Province, Korea, Empire of Japan (now in South Korea) in 1944. His early life was dominated by the shadow of the 1950–1953 Korean War. His older cousin, Sung Chan Kyung, left his studies at Seoul National University and returned to Yesan right before the onset of the war. While Sung Chan Kyung was living with Sung Neung Kyung’s family he shared the poetry, classical music, literature, and knowledge of art he had acquired at university. This relationship was pivotal to Sung Neung Kyung’s artistic development and inspired him to be an artist at the age of seven.

Sung studied art in school starting in 1963. Later on, he completed mandatory military service from 1970-73.

The Park administration heavily promoted western inspired oil paintings showing scenes of Korean industry and patriotism. Artists making other types of work were heavily censored and monitored. Sung Neung Kyung and many of his peers had to carefully consider the implications of their practices, understanding that the government would retaliate against any criticism.

Apple (1976) Apple is another performance work that dissects a commonplace act and turns it into a study of control. In Apple, which is documented across seventeen photographs, Sung eats an apple. As the shape of the fruit changes in his hands, the artist outlines what remains of the apple after each bite in blue pen. The frame is tight and controlled and establishes a sense of intensity to the scene. The narrowness of the frame establishes the relationship between the artist and the apple as the sole focus of the images, referencing the rareness of acts of autonomy amidst authoritarian conditions. A photograph of Apple was selected as the cover image for the exhibition catalogue for “Only The Young,” the massive retrospective of Korean avant-garde art at the Guggenheim Museum in 2023.

Newspaper (1974-ongoing) In 1974 Sung Neung Kyung produced Newspaper: From June, 1, 1974 On, his first foray into using newspaper as a primary material. His Newspaper works involve laying out a page from a newspaper, reading out headlines and blocks of text, then using a razor blade to carefully cut out the blocks of text that have been read. What remains after the initial performance is only the negative space in the newspaper and the images and advertisements. This practice formed out of Sung’s fear of censorship and punishment. In the early period of the Newspaper series, Sung recounts being approached by a reporter from Kyunghyang Shinmun looking to write about his work and emphatically declining, feeling certain that he would be arrested and tortured if his work became widely publicized.

Sung used The Dong-A Ilbo, a popular newspaper that was censored by the government at the time, in his early Newspaper performances. This choice of newspaper allowed him to use the performances to criticize government censorship under the guise of examining the materiality of journalism.

Since the 1970s, Sung has continued the Newspaper series but adapted it to contemporary issues and increased the scale of his performances which are no longer closely scrutinized by law enforcement. Recent iterations of Newspaper have incorporated up to 100 people reading newspapers in their own languages while acting out the same subtraction of text with razor blades.