★The power of art must be beauty.

What kind of culture and system does art exist within today? A culture overflowing with art for the image-laundering benefit of international oil and energy companies, a system where people compete to win tickets to prestigious art fairs, a system where money and desire sweep the earth.
In today's world, where "global franchise business under an ideal central control system" has become the new name for art, what should we call art? Professor Sim Sang-yong, in "What Should We Call Art?", examines the true nature of the currents and power of art in this era and discusses other forces that "de-sacralize" that power.
In this way, we seek to find the starting point of beauty, freedom, and liberation, which are the true power of true art.

According to Bernard Cassen, professor at the Institute of European Studies at the University of Paris 8 and editor-in-chief of Le Monde diplomatique, the urgent priority is to reassess the magnitude and depth of the loss we face.
In a world driven by money and markets, what we have lost is humanity.
That is why the one who must be quickly recovered must also be human.
People just want the market boom to return.
We hope that high-yield, collateralized art will overcome the recession and once again lead to a magical rise in added value.
If only that could happen, the art would shed the light of grace upon humanity in its absence.
But the order was wrong.
Generating immediate high profits is just a variable that has nothing to do with rescuing humans from the garbage dump.
They want art to become myth, but it is the job of art to break myths.
---From "Everyone Just Wants a Piece of His Cake"

Despite its success in the market, questions remain unanswered: whether monochrome truly represents Korean beauty; if so, how should the aesthetics and traditions of Korean colors, such as the Palsaekjo, be explained; and how, as modern art, it digested and reflected the zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s, a period of great historical transition.
The monochrome craze, in its haste to portray itself as possessing a powerful inner force, committed the error of mixing the various branches of modern and contemporary Korean abstract painting with commercial thinking and perpetrating a historical dislocation.
The harm will not end with merely stifling discussion about the dynamic genesis of Korean art.
---From "Colorful Monochrome"

December 16, 1999, 4:00 PM.
There was an unusually long line to see the exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.
It was to see the exhibition “Sensation,” which was planned based on the collection of Charles Saatchi, a British department store magnate and art dealer.
At the end of the line stood Dennis Heiner, a retired math teacher in his seventies.
As soon as he got his ticket, he headed straight to the exhibition hall on the 5th floor.
Then he stopped in front of Chris Ofili's painting, "The Holy Virgin Mary," took out a can of white paint from his coat pocket, spread it over the painting, and began to scribble something.
It was a text like 'Don't' or 'Stop'.
First on the face, then on the chest.
Within a quarter of the painting was covered with brushstrokes.
It was around 4:30 in the afternoon.
A security guard came running in a hurry and stopped him, and the police arrived later and arrested him.
When the police asked him why, he could barely manage to repeat in a trembling voice, “Blasphemy...”
---From "They just want advertising!"

Art has become something magical that can be accomplished in an instant.
However, side effects that even Duchamp could not have predicted appeared one after another.
Above all, it is the radical disappearance of the concept of artistic creation.
Without even leaving a will.
As art became an idea, all perceptions of dreams and imagination, of history and transcendence, of nature and society became meaningless.
It has become a lonely thing, unrelated to the temporal event of life and the spatial event of this land, without any signs of life or people.
It is a total break from mental ideals, moral nobility, and empathy with others.
Is this evolution? But humans cannot survive even a single moment in this state.
---From "Marcel Duchamp's Country"

When is prolonged contemplation possible? When there is inherent power in the unity of opposites.
In that sense, the agreement of opposites and the long gaze are like two sides of the same coin.
The beauty of the harmony of seemingly contradictory things and the long contemplation of them, when these two conditions are met, leads to art, which Weil likened to 'a picture that would not be terrible to hang in the room of a squire.'
---From "A Picture That Wouldn't Be Terrible Even If Hanged in a Weaponist's Room"

It is not art, but the art of beauty that has power.
Only with that power can we resist the various forms of violence that the current civilization, which is running wild, considers normal, and not retreat from the fight to move beyond the "wrong way of seeing" to the "right way of seeing."
'Proper Spring' is a vision that awakens our souls from a long slumber, allows us to intuitively approach truth, and advance to the essence of beauty.

---From the "Epilogue"