• Korean Association of Arts Management
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• no.51
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• pp.5-34
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• 2019

This study is a qualitative study conducted to identify environmental factors that impede emerging artists' ongoing creative activities, focusing on the local cultural ecosystem that they are part of. By doing so, we tried to understand the dynamics between key stake holders in the ecosystem that these young artists interact with and how they build and perceive their own, local cultural environment. The central research question of this study is: what factors impede the continuous creative activities of young artists and what causes them to leave local art scenes? The research was conducted thoroughly on the basis of emerging artists' experience and perspectives and applied to Creative Sector Holistic Model for analysis. The data of this research were collected based on two national-funding projects to support young artists from 2016 to 2018. The main research method of this study was interviews: official and casual interviews were executed with 29 young artists aged 20-34 who work in the fields of painting, literature, sculpture, video, korean traditional music, visual design and crafts. For the analysis of the data, the Creative Sector Holistic Model(Wyszomirski, 2008), which had applied the ecological logic to the creative industries, was applied. The result of this study shows that economic difficulties were not the only hindering factor in their sustainable art-making process. Various impeding factors derived from the local cultural ecosystem have been identified within the Holistic Model, demonstrating that these factors are all intertwined and connected. Thus, analyzing and understanding one's local cultural ecosystem can provide keys to long-term and lasting impacts when a local authorities wish to support young artists for the future of local cultural environment.