Disappearing Artists, Unrecorded Legacies

In contemporary Korean art, one fact stands out: despite countless exhibitions and projects held every week, very few artists have an official website that documents their practice in a structured and lasting way.

Even Lee Ufan, one of Korea’s most internationally recognized artists, has no personal website and no Catalogue Raisonné of his work. Neither Park Soo-keun nor Lee Jung-seop—two of Korea’s most revered modern masters—have one. This absence is telling.
 
Search online, and you will find fragmented gallery pages or old press clippings, but rarely a coherent system through which one can read an artist’s body of work.

The few websites that do exist are typically limited to exhibition schedules or short bios, with low-quality images and little to no critical or research material.

As a result, many artists’ practices are reduced to “image fragments” floating through SNS feeds, eventually fading without a trace.
 


SNS Is Ephemeral, the Web Endures

Many Korean artists are now active on Instagram. They post new works, share studio scenes, and interact with audiences in real time.

But this visibility is surface-level and short-lived. Feeds flow endlessly, algorithms forget, and yesterday’s post becomes invisible. SNS shows the present, but a website preserves the continuum.

These two platforms are not in competition; they must exist in tandem—social media for immediacy, and the website as a foundation for permanence.
Only when SNS activity is anchored on a robust web platform does an artist’s message transcend exposure and evolve into influence.


 
The Website as a Creative Medium of Lifelong Record

A website is not a marketing tool. It is a creative medium through which an artist documents their world and situates themselves within time.

A strong website is not a gallery of images but a system of language—one that reveals the artist’s thinking, evolution, and aesthetics at a glance.

It should include complete image archives, exhibition histories, artist notes, critical texts, installation views, interviews, and contextual information that traces the making of each work.

When this documentation is sustained, the website transcends the portfolio and becomes a <b>living Catalogue Raisonné—a framework that not only demonstrates artistic excellence but naturally leads to recognition, research, and promotion.


 
The Absence—and Meaning—of the Catalogue Raisonné

A Catalogue Raisonné is a scholarly, chronological record of all known works by an artist, including dimensions, materials, provenance, exhibitions, and literature.

It is not a list, but a proof of existence—a document that anchors an artist’s authenticity and secures their place in art history.

Artists like Paul Cézanne, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons, and Gerhard Richter have built online catalogues that do far more than display images. They establish a system that allows for research, verification, and transmission.

Because these structures exist, their art continues to live—beyond markets, beyond generations, beyond mortality itself.

Korean artists, by contrast, have works but lack the records to prove them.

This absence makes Korean art appear transient—“existing only in the present.” It shortens the perceived depth of its history on the global stage.

In South Korea, not a single artist has produced an officially recognized Catalogue Raisonné.

This is a shocking fact, and it reveals not a lack of funding or institutional support, but the deeper absence of a recording culture—a failure to see documentation as an integral part of creation itself.
  


Structural Deficiency in Korean Art

Korea’s art ecosystem remains exhibition-centered. A few catalogues, postcards, or press releases often constitute the entire record of a show.

Once the exhibition ends, materials scatter or lose meaning. Even public institutions lack standardized artist databases.

Within a market-dominated system, artists have little digital sovereignty and no stable channel through which to document their own narratives.

Korean art thus continues to be consumed as a sequence of isolated events, rather than a connected continuum. This is not a matter of publicity—it is a structural flaw that threatens the historical continuity of Korean art itself.
 

 
Digital Infrastructure Is the Starting Point of Global Reach

For Korean art to take root globally, building a recordable, standardized infrastructure must come before international exhibitions.

An artist platform that meets global standards—where data, metadata, and archives are reliable and verifiable—is no longer optional but essential.

With such foundations, artists can articulate their worlds proactively and intelligibly, and their work will remain accessible to future scholars. This is the true beginning of global presence.
 

 
Art Begins in Creation, but Is Completed Through Record

Art is born in the moment of creation, but it achieves permanence through record. Social media may testify to the present, but only a website preserves history.
A website is not a repository of works; it is the linguistic and historical map of an artist’s existence—a structure that verifies, preserves, and extends their art through time.
 
For Korean artists to survive, evolve, and truly engage with the world, they must first build the language and infrastructure that allow them to record and interpret their own universes—a platform that stands as both archive and agency, replacing the functions of gallerists, managers, and promoters.

A person leaves a name; an artist leaves their work. But unrecorded art disappears.

An artist’s website is not a digital accessory—it is the most fundamental and ultimate medium through which a life in art endures, transmitted to history and to the generations that follow.