Envisioning the Eastern Bloc: Nordpolitik, sport and the visual arts at the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games

Abstract

This essay explores the presence of Eastern Bloc artists at the Olympiad of Art in Seoul (1988) at a time when there were no diplomatic relations between South Korea and the socialist/communist states in Europe. In the wider geopolitical context, the promotion of Eastern European arts was in line with Nordpolitik (Northern Policy): the South Korean government brought Eastern Europe to its side and isolated North Korea from its allies. The essay discusses the political uses of the 1988 Olympic Games and the Olympiad of Art as a groundbreaking event that contributed to the establishment of bilateral cultural relations between South Korea and the countries of the Eastern Bloc. Both the Olympic Games and the Olympiad of Art (1988) also contributed to a refreshing image of Eastern Europe in South Korea. Moreover, they foreshadowed a commencement of the new line of artistic exchanges when diplomatic relations between both regions in 1989–1991 were established.

Keywords:

• Olympic Games
• Global Cold War
• global exhibitions
• artistic exchanges
• Eastern Bloc

Acknowledgements

I express my gratitude to the Korea Foundation for a three-month fellowship from September-November 2022 to support my research on the Visual Arts and the 1988 Olympic Games. I want to express my gratitude to Prof. Jong Sung Lee from Hanyang University for the weekly meetings and his advice on the subject of my essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The official catalogue Olympiad of Art, edited by Ante Glibota (1988), lists three international events, while the official booklet Olympiad of Art: Seoul Olympic Arts Festival adds the fourth event, the Korean Contemporary Arts Festival, which opened simultaneously at the National Museum of Contemporary Art.

2 The official number of artists is not clear. One of the exhibition booklets, Olympiad of Art, published by Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee includes two artists, “Sadikov” and “Vgetceslan” from the Soviet Union, who do not appear in the official catalogue by Glibota. I was not able to verify if all artists listed in Glibota’s catalogue exhibited at the Olympiad of Art.

3 The catalogue, however, included some misunderstandings. For example, Hans Bellmer, a German Surrealist, was considered Polish (he was born in Kattowitz and a part of Germany, which after 1945 became a Polish city, Katowice).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Korea Foundation: [KF Ref. 1023000- 1982].

Notes on contributors

Przemysław Strożek

Przemysław Strożek is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences and an Associate Researcher and curator at the Archiv der Avantgarden, Dresden. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Georgia, a fellow at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome and recipient of a Korea Foundation fellowship in Seoul. He is the author of several dozen academic articles, and published extensively his research on sport and the avant-garde, as well as on sport and contemporary art. Together with Andreas Kramer he has co-edited Sport and the European Avant-Garde (1900–1945) (2021), and published a monograph Picturing the Workers’ Olympics and the Spartakiads: Modernist and Avant-Garde Engagement with Sport in Central Europe and the USSR (1920–1932) (2022).