Culture and the State: From a Korean Perspective

Abstract

This chapter is intended to theorize the relationship between culture and the state in the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea) by looking into the historical development of, and the recent controversies around, its arts policy. There are two reasons for the chapter’s focus on arts policy: firstly, preserving and developing the arts has traditionally been the main concern of Korean cultural policy; and secondly, the country’s arts sector, which hardly survives without state funding and lacks society-wide support, has developed a very tight relationship with the state. The inquiry starts with an observation of the rise of political intervention in the cultural sector in Korea under the conservative government of LEE Myung Bak (2008–2013). One noticeable example is that, when the government was inaugurated in 2008, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (MCST) forced the heads of 15 public cultural institutions to resign, and dismissed some who refused to do so, in order to replace them with those deemed ideologically close to the government. It was argued by the opposition Democratic Party that such a political move was part of the government’s scheme to rebalance the power structure of the cultural sector: that is, to give power back to cultural practitioners and organizations with conservative traits, who were regarded as having been ignored by the previous two liberal governments (1998–2003 and 2003–2008).