Kim Tchah-sup, Kwak Hoon, Lee Seung Jio, Park Suk Won, Park Chong Bae, Suh Seung Won, critics Lee Yil and O Kwang-su, and journalist Lee Yil Hwa. The issue lists Ha Chong Hyun as the publisher and O Kwang-su as its editor. In Lee Yil's essay, “Avant-Garde Art Theory,” the critic explores the concept and role of avant-garde art by quoting French critic Pierre Restany: “Today's avant-garde is not an art of resistance, but an art of participation.” Critical Reception Contemporary critics and many later scholars observed that the group and its activities lacked a clear objective of resistance to particular institutions or established art systems, which questioned the group's identification as avant-garde. Recent studies offer various reasons as to why the group seemed to steer away from responding to sociopolitical issues, including its elitist tendencies that gravitated toward their interests in intellectual and theoretical explorations of artistic issues. 39 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. 78 A universally agreed-upon significance of the AG Group, on the other hand, is its organized effort to back its artistic practice by publishing. Enabled by the group's membership between artists and critics and their close collaboration in publishing theoretical texts in the form of exhibition catalogs and journals. Inspired by the Paris Biennials, in which Korean artists began to participate in 1961, the AG Group also differentiated from other associations for its ambitious goal of creating a platform for young avant-garde and experimental artists at an international scale. South Korean artist groups and collectives