Art as freedom and power

This chapter explores Kim Tongin’s (re-)invention of Western aestheticism in colonial modern Korea in his literary and literary-critical works from the late 1910s to the 1930s. I relate Kim’s notion of the autonomy of art to the prevailing ideological concepts of the day—that is, the East Asian versions of the liberal concept of freedom and the social Darwinist ideology of power. The second part of the chapter considers the enduring legacy of Kim’s aestheticism in the later entrenchment of the opposition between pure art and engaged art during the authoritarian era. It argues for the potential of aestheticism in deconstructing this dichotomy and in differently politicizing art, a la Ranciere, by further diversifying and broadening the meaning of politics in/as art.