Incomplete Collaboration: Asymmetrical Responsibility in Art and Society

Incomplete Collaboration: Asymmetrical Responsibility in Art and Society examines how artistic collaboration unfolds under unequal social, institutional, and temporal conditions. Challenging idealized notions of participation, collectivity, and shared authorship, Sunyoung Oh argues that collaboration is rarely sustained through equal labor or equal consequence. Instead, it is shaped by asymmetry: uneven access, uneven recognition, and responsibilities that remain differently with those involved long after the visible event has ended.
Drawing on curatorial practice and field-based research in South Korea and Indonesia, the book rethinks collaboration not as a stable model or ethical good in itself, but as an unfinished relation structured by negotiation, vulnerability, and differential consequence. From socially engaged art and participatory discourse to questions of postcoloniality, institutional framing, and the afterlives of collective work, Incomplete Collaboration offers a rigorous and timely account of how art enters social relations-and what remains after it does.
Bringing together contemporary art, curatorial practice, and critical theory, this book will be of interest to readers in art history, visual culture, curatorial studies, cultural theory, and social criticism.