In October 2012, an American artist named Jess Hinshaw printed 200 copies of a free art magazine in Daegu, South Korea's fourth-largest city and not exactly the first place most people think of when they think of the Korean art world. That world, as far as international attention goes, belongs almost entirely to Seoul. Hinshaw's premise was simple: there were talented, active artists working all across Korea who were not yet established, and nobody was paying attention. So he made a magazine to fix that.
[b]racket was free from the start and stayed that way for its entire life. The printing costs were covered by local advertisers, and the artists submitted their work voluntarily. Hinshaw, together with co-editor Chris Cote, distributed the magazine by hand across Daegu, then expanded to Gwangju, Daejeon, Busan, and eventually Seoul. Within two years, the print run had grown from 200 to 1,000 copies, and the magazine had featured 144 artists across 24 monthly issues — Korean and international, emerging and mid-career, working in everything from photography and sculpture to installation and street art.
What made [b]racket more than a zine was the ecosystem Hinshaw built around it. There was Gallery [t.], a rotating exhibition space inside T. Morning café near Daegu Station, where past [b]racket artists could show and sell their work. There were group shows at Keimyung University. There was a blog that doubled as a guide to the art scene of a city that most English-language media ignored entirely — reviews of exhibitions at Bongsan Culture Center, tips on the Daegu Photo Biennale, coverage of the Bangchun Art Market. It was community journalism in the truest sense: made by the people it served, for the place it loved.
The magazine attracted enough notice to be profiled by The Korea Herald, and it received a grant from a government-funded design organisation that helped it grow. But growth has a cost when your staff are all volunteers. In December 2014, after 24 issues, Hinshaw pulled the plug. Key team members were moving on, and the workload of producing a monthly magazine on top of his own art practice had become unsustainable. "It was still run by a very few," he told The Korea Herald, "and I was neglecting my own artwork."
It is a familiar story in indie publishing: a passion project that burns bright and fast, built on enthusiasm rather than infrastructure. But [b]racket left something behind. For two years, it was the only English-language publication seriously documenting the art happening outside of Seoul — in the studio apartments, the university galleries, the café basements, and the art streets of a city that had plenty to show and no one to show it to. A hundred and forty-four artists got their work into print, many for the first time. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, exactly what an indie magazine is for.
Explore the archive of [b]racket at <a href="https://www.bracketmagazinekorea.com/" target="\_blank">bracketmagazinekorea.com