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59 S crolling through Dirk Fleischmann’s portfolio of work, you wouldn’t be far off in mistaking the German conceptual artist for an ambitious, al- beit arbitrary, businessman. In fact, his artworks are businesses, and over the past 15 years he has been the proprietor of several capitalist ventures. Starting off with a candy kiosk in 1998, he has since owned and run a bistro, a free-range egg farm, a trailer rent- al, a game show, a solar power plant, a fashion label, a virtual real estate business and a carbon credit farm. So what is his art, exactly? In Fleischmann’s own words, he explains, “What I explore in my art are fundamental questions like ‘What is capital?’” Although all in unrelated industries, what each of these business ventures above have in common is that they are powered by economics, and the nature of economics is what drives both Fleis- chmann’s thinking and his art. In a nutshell, Fleis- chmann uses the capitalist model — people buying products — to distribute commentary about some of the hypocrisies he observes in the system. At present, Fleischmann is working as a profes- sor of fine art at Cheongju University, and previously taught in the same department at Hansung Universi- ty in Seoul. Academic opportunities aside, he admits that employment isn’t what brought him to the Korean Peninsula. “I was drawn to Korea by the chaebol (conglomer- ates) like Samsung, LG and Hyundai, which dominate the markets,” Fleischmann says. “I grew up with this naïve idea that if you have a business, you become an expert at that one thing, but then you look at these huge conglomerates … I just simply can’t understand how one corporation can have so many unrelated businesses.” Now with a bevy of his own unconnected business titles, Fleischmann continues to explore the driving, transformative force behind all these multinational Story by Remy Raitt / Photos courtesy of Dirk Fleischmann The artistic entrepreneur German artist Dirk Fleischmann takes inspiration from economics ‘My art inhabits economic forms and sneaks into given capitalist structures. The art projects intend to create financial profit, which I have been continuously reinvesting completely.’ — Dirk Fleischmann