Space & Time Group

also: ST Group · Space & Time (ST)

school 1969-1980 South Korea Seoul

The Space & Time Group (ST) was an art and reading group active in Korea from 1969 to 1980, founded by Lee Kun-yong with classmates from Hongik University. Its shifting membership pursued an art beyond painting, reading European, American and Japanese theory — Kosuth, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Lee Ufan — and publishing it in journals to sharpen the local scene. The group's eight exhibitions divide into two eras: objects and installations (1971-1974), then carefully planned performances called 'events', or as Lee named them, 'logical events' (1975-1980). These terse, repetitive body actions foregrounded space, temporality and bodily agency under the Yusin dictatorship, whose pressures they quietly resisted. The most theoretically rigorous of Korea's avant-garde groups, ST disbanded after its 1980 exhibition.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • 'Logical events': controlled, repetitive everyday body actions staged as art
  • Time, space, body and subjectivity prioritized over the finished object
  • Theory-driven practice — journals, seminars and translated criticism alongside exhibitions
  • Early Dada and Surrealist object works give way to tightly planned performance
  • Covert political address: avant-garde form used to evade and critique the Yusin regime

Key figures

  • Lee Kun-yong — Founder and theorist of the 'logical event'; led the group from 1969
  • Kim Bok-young — Founding member who co-published the group's journal of translated theory
  • Sung Neung-kyung — Member whose work Newspapers (1974) turned censorship into a boxed record

Example works

  • Newspapers — Sung Neung-kyung (1974)
  • Logic of Place — Lee Kun-yong (1975)

Sources

← Back to the catalog