Titles, Dates, and Reconstructed Works: Four Documentary Histories of Korean Experimental Art

Museum of One working paper · Version 1.0 · 10 November 2026 · 16 pages · 21 references

A work can retain its title and historical date even when its materials, arrangement, or means of presentation have changed. This working paper examines four Korean archival and museum cases: Kim Yong-Ik’s Plane Object photographs and the history of “plain” and “place”; the differing production years assigned to Park Suk-won’s Jeok–Eungnyeok; the 1975 historical reference and 2016 materials of Lee Kang-so’s Untitled 75031; and Kim Kulim’s Mediator, used by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, to exemplify compound dating. MMCA’s acquisition narrative and publication guidance acknowledge remaking as part of collecting an experimental past. The paper reads that institutional practice alongside scholarship on the relations among images, material traces, and artwork identity. Aga Wielocha’s discussion of Danh Vo’s chandeliers provides a particularly revealing comparison: a title can date an object’s removal and transformation into art rather than its fabrication, just as a museum’s leading year can identify an earlier work rather than the age of its present components. These different histories require the event dated by each title or caption to remain explicit. Neither artist authorisation nor institutional recognition settles every claim about an earlier condition. The paper credits the overlapping demonstrations in the author’s Relational Archival Investigation papers and develops their implications for collecting, editorial preference, and historical inference. Its contribution is a comparative account of how names and dates sustain continuity without making the evidence for that continuity interchangeable.

Evidence limits. The source base is documentary. Physical artworks, original versos, complete printing proofs and object-specific acquisition and conservation dossiers remain unexamined. Park’s two published dates establish a discrepancy without determining the original year or a sequence of database changes. A shared series title cannot identify an individual Kim Yong-Ik work. The eight- and ten-image accounts do not establish a sequence of additions to Lee’s work. Jung Eun Young is cited through the published abstracts. The four selected cases establish no national rate of discrepancy. This working paper has not undergone independent peer review.

Relationship to Relational Archival Investigation. The RAI main paper, Documentary Supplement and Extended Case Studies already report the shared naming and date comparisons, the limits of series-title identification, and the difference between Lee’s photographic accounts. This paper extends that work through MMCA’s acquisition narrative and compound dating of Mediator, a sustained comparison with Korean scholarship and conservation research, and analysis of what later objects and records establish about earlier works. Its bibliography points to the cited OSF file versions.

김용익(평면 오브제), 박석원(적-응력), 이강소(무제 75031), 김구림(매개항)의 사례를 통해 한국 실험미술에서 작품의 제목과 연대, 재제작, 소장 기록이 어떤 역사적 주장을 뒷받침하는지 살핀다. 작품의 역사적 정체성과 현존 구성 요소의 제작 시기를 구분하며, 네 사례의 자료 범위와 기존 RAI 연구와의 관계를 명시한다.