The galleries today are eager to get MZ-gen artists into contract. Their efforts to mine the gems in the art market are certainly focused on MZ generation, the generation in their 20s to 30s now. I haven’t seen the other way around in the galleries’ business today. The MZ-gen artists are lucky as their time is hailed enthusiastically.
Disappointingly, however, the best recognized MZ artists in the art market now, especially in Korea, have been those who make the outmoded pop arts in the manners of combining pre-existing images or parodying the masterpieces of the golden times. Especially, a lot of those MZ artists make their artworks by simply coupling a serious painting of the old times with a funny cartoon of their parents' era (such as Disney characters and Simpson Family). Bluntly speaking, it appears that the MZ generation, as a generation, lacks the serious artistic minds of their own that can create the images of their own time, so that they are simply regurgitating the pre-existing images of the old days.
Otherwise, the arts of the recently promoted young artists are mostly decorative, design-oriented, and even purely illustrative. Most of them look like the paintings intended for the purposes of interior ornaments.
The price of this typical parody painting by Sun-Woo KIM, a MZ-gen artist in Korea, soared 21 times to 1 00,000 USD between 2019 and 2021.
This cheap computer-aided like pop-art painting was sold for the crypto-currency worth 600,000 USD at the first ever NFT auction in Korea in March 2021.
The Korean pop artist Seung-Chul Ok's paintings borrow the motifs from the Japanese cartoons. This paintings are so popular in Korea that, around 2021, it was said that there were no more works of this artist available in the market.
Things are not that different in Japan the country famed for the cartoon and anime traditions. The popular Japanese pop-artist Hosokawa Maki (born in 1980)'s paintings are seldom anything else than the typical cartoon-style parody paintings of the masterpieces of the old times.
Can we say that the MZ-gen art nowadays represent the spirit of the age of the Millennium? Sorry to say this, but I haven’t figured out anything that can intimate the morale and the vitality of the new era in their arts. Many observers in the art market predicted, when the stock market and Bitcoin began to collapse this year, that the time of the pop-based MZ arts today would be short-lived. Their prediction was based on the fact that the buyers of these MZ artworks are mostly the MZ collectors who accumulated quick wealth with the rise of the stock market and the crypto-currency. As their wealth declined with the plunge of the stock market and the crypto-currency, the sudden boom of MZ-gen art would implode soon. And their prediction seems to be right. As of October 2022, when the roar of the abnormal rise in the stocks and the coins is no longer heard, the names of those MZ artists who joined the 100,000 USD club are less and less heard.
In 2007, too, where there was sudden boom of the art market, the overheated market crazed for the then young artists. But, with the collapse of the market in 2010, those young artists were not heard again.
It is regrettable that, the art scene has been fully prepared for MZ-gen artists now, but their arts still have not grown out of the banal mannerism of rehashing the by-gone styles and contents. Their arts are appreciated mostly by their same age group MZ-gen buyers, and are directly vulnerable to boom-crash cycles. This is not the true art representing the spirit of the age, and this is the reality of MZ-gen art in Korea. As one veteran critique in Korea has remarked recently, many MZ-gen artists, despite their unusual popularity now, are not acceptable to the national/public galleries of the nation, and until then, serious appreciation of their arts would be pre-mature.
In the recent show of KIAF-FRIEZE in Korea, held in September this year, I was able to confirm that the trend of MZ art in Korea is indeed a phenomenon shared by the MZ generations in other Asian countries, too, including Japan and China (interestingly, in the Asian sections of KIAF-FRIEZE, pop arts were easy to find, whereas pop arts were rare in the European sections of the same exhibition).
This is regrettable. This trend is very shallow in the aesthetics and the philosophy. This trend seems to be locked in the boom-crash cycles. While the art market is flustering itself with these transitory movements, the best time for MZ artists to explore the truly meaningful directions of the age would be wasted.
Thankfully, though, there are a few MZ artists that I have found to be truly amazing, whose arts I believe have the potential to lead the new era of art in the Millennium. I will deal with the arts of these MZ artists in the coming posting.
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