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영어

If the fine arts based on the European Existentialism after the Second World War had started saying‘ no’ about all that is humane, asked the meaning of ‘existence’ from the‘ no’, and expressed‘ essence and reality’ of human, the Korean fine arts accepted psychological responses about the absurd situations being the reality of the times of the 4․19 revolution and the 5․16 military coup in the 1960s after the Korean War as the universal dimension of the human spirit. The Korean artists started to accept Existentialism from the 1950s, which appeared actively in the early 1960s, and especially intellectual-oriented Existentialism was a representative of the times.
In those days, younger generations gained their experience of the Korean War at first hand, and revealed political and social negation and challenge of all existing values with the oppressed mood. Their essential expressions began with the existential question and rebellious violence which were shared with the writers of younger generation who tried to correspond existential situation and consciousness of heated lives on their own art. If Europeans after the Second World War had found the answer about serious question like "Who Am I ?" in the form of Existentialism, the Koreans tried to find the answer about their own lives in absurd situation of the times after the Korean War.
The Sculptures of Oh Jongwook also changed in the 1960s through his selfconsciousness of the social situation and war experience. The tragedy of the human death appearing remarkably among his sculptures was expressed as a part of the heated lives of the absurd social conditions in those days. His main style was iron-welding. Because of his sensitive response on the condition of the times, the works of molding expressing the death appeared in those of Choi Manlin, Ko Youngsoo, and Shin Sukpil. In Europe, the absurdity of the humanbeings in the sculptures of Germaine Richier and Ce'sar Baldacchini was symbols of pain, isolation and fear.