The AG Group's foundation has been contextualized within South Korea's modern and contemporary art history following the various attempts of artists engaging in new and experimental modes of expression.
[2]: 29 [1]: 243 The term avant-garde was introduced to Korea when the country began to embrace and accept Western art and culture at the turn of the twentieth century.
Sinheung (신흥 新興) and Jeonwi (전위 前衛) had been terms employed during the 1920s to signal the most novel form of expression, generally understood as abstract painting, and later to the work in advocacy of certain social values, especially of the proletariat.
[3] Performance art gained significant traction during this period, becoming increasingly suppressed going into the Fourth Republic and president Park's intensified military regime.
Artists adopted this genre of art that could interject into everyday life and in public, especially in the form of happenings, to satirize conventional social values and culture in Korea.
[4]: 77 The Fourth Group (제4집단 jesajipdan), formed in 1967, began staging public happenings that led to debate and commotion within and outside of the Korean contemporary art scene.
[5]: 59 Held at the Central Public Information Center between May 1–7, 1970, the 1st AG Group Exhibition was titled after critic Lee Yil's landmark essay, “Dynamics of Expansion and Reduction (확장과 환원의 역학).”[6]: 40 The 1970 issue of the AG Journal included a special section dedicated to the group exhibition, which was printed in time for the show to act as an accompanying catalog.
[2]: 35 [6]: 40 The 12 participating artists and their presented works were: The second group exhibition, Reality and Realization (현실과 실현), took place at the Gyeongbokgung Palace location of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 1971.
[6]: 43 The group exhibition is particularly noted for having produced an early and rare instance of a post-exhibition catalog, including installation photos of all works in their temporal and site-specific final versions.
[14]: 83 The AG group originally conceived the Seoul Biennale to take place every 2 years, as explicit in its name, and serve as a platform for fostering long-term relations between Korean and foreign artists.
[14]: 89 [16] Despite the Korean avant-garde scene's continued efforts in exploring various mediums of art, most of the works presented at the Biennale were "flat" that hung on walls.
[14]: 89 Ha Chong Hyun, Kim Han, Shin Hak-Chul, and Lee Kunyong were the only four artists of the association that participated in the final exhibition, signaling the group's ultimate dissolution.
[2]: 39 Scholar Sooran Choi, however, argues for a reconsideration of such apolitical characteristic to be in fact the group's “implied association with Western avant-garde art itself functioned as a form of subterfuge that protected them from censorship and persecution” since the anti-Communist, pro-American, authoritarian military regime aimed to rapidly industrialize and catch up to more developed countries in the global stage.