Space & Time Group

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.

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

• Space & Time Group - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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