Reviving 1980s Nonconformist Art Groups at Total Museum’s 50th
Creatrip Team
4 months ago
Seoul’s Total Museum in Pyeongchang-dong marks its 50th anniversary with “Nanjido·Meta-Box 40: All Solidity Melted,” reexamining two fringe 1980s art groups—Nanjido and Meta-Box—formed by five Hongik University graduates who worked experimentally against the dominant monochrome abstraction (단색화). Active from 1985 into the late 1980s, the groups used everyday materials and narrative sources to challenge modernist absence of story and critique industrial society. Nanjido (named after a landfill) repurposed scrap and straw into works like Park Bang-young’s straw “Myth – For You” and Shin Young-sung’s motorized, wounded-fan piece “Korean Dream.” Meta-Box sought narrative through language, form and myth; member Ha Min-su (the group’s only woman) used cloth, needles and thread to make a fish‑shaped work reflecting women’s complex lives. The exhibition’s title, taken from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, signals the breakdown of fixed modern structures—echoing these groups’ attempts to dismantle conventions and restore narrative. The show runs through the 23rd.
