Minjung art (Korean: 민중미술, romanization: minjung misul) emerged during the 1970s and 1980s democracy movement in South Korea widely known as the Minjung movement. Minjung artists utilized a wide array of media, including oil painting, woodblock print, collage, photomontage, banner painting, and readymade, in order to respond to the political and social climate of the time. A number of artworks were produced for and used in protests, and thus led artists to use reproducible mediums like print. The artists generally embraced a figurative or narrative style in order to represent the plight and reality of the working class.
Artist collectives played a large role in minjung art, exemplifying the tendency of minjung art to deemphasize individual authorship and maintain a publicly minded ethos. Among them, Reality and Utterance was critical of dansaekhwa's turn away from reality, endeavoring to engage reality and expand the boundaries of art. The group is thus considered to precede the later development of hyeonjang misul (art of the site), which became a crucial part of the democracy movement in the 1980s. However, ideas and concepts central to hyeonjang misul were already present in the Korean art world by the late 1970s. The Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists deployed the notion of “situation” instead of reality, creating situation-specific placards for distribution to activists, for example. In addition to these two major groups, Dureong (Levee) pioneered the use of geolgae geurim (banner painting), which spread to other collectives. Later collectives, such as Ganeunpae and the Institute of Social Photography, expanded strategies of “art of the site” by producing banner paintings and photobooks and deploying the mass media both in the form of print and film.
In the early 1990s, "post-minjung" artists took up the mantle to revisit and draw on the movement's legacy. A number of shows both at home and abroad have sought to present and historicize minjung art in spite of its long marginalization in Korean contemporary art history. Recent scholarship has sought to reevaluate minjung art's relationship to the minjung movement, expand its history to consider its presentation abroad, and chart its historical linkages with realist art, as well as more recent contemporary art.
Terminology
Minjung Minjung can be literally translated to mean “People/Populace,” but there was never a conclusive consensus of meaning between artists and critics even to this day about which “people” constituted minjung.Lee, Jiyoon. “The Impact of Globalisation on Korean Contemporary Art since 1989.” Dissertation, ProQuest LLC., 2014. The word minjung is made up of two Chinese characters and was first used in Korea during the late 1800s to refer to the resistant force against Japanese occupation. In the late 1960s, the term referred to the oppressed social class and pro-democracy protesters during the military dictatorship.Jeong, Boram. “The Concept of Minjung: Inventing ‘a People to Come.’” Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies 13, no. 2 (2014): 9–12 . Below are a selection of different scholars' takes on who artists were referring to when creating minjung art.
Beck Jee-soo: considers the minjung as people who are the exploited and oppressed masses while also being the revolutionary subject of social/ political change. She goes further to connect the parallels between the minjung theology of the 1980s to the liberation theology in Latin America which both understood the minjung to be analogous with Jesus’ suffering.Beck, Jee-sook. “Minjung Art in the Year 2005, of the Year 2005 in Minjung Art.” Essay. In Climatization: Field Notes from the Short 10 Years (2000-2010) of Art and Making Things Public in Korea, edited by Binna Choi, 22–49. Seoul: KOREA ARTS MANAGEMENT SERVICE (KAMS), 2016.
Han Wan-sung: defines minjung as people in a society who are economically, culturally, and politically deprived of power.
Park Hyun-chae: uses Marxist distinction between bourgeoisie/proletariat and defines minjung as a byproduct of Korean proletarianization. Park sees the minjung to be the economically oppressed (laborers, armers, poor). He also takes into account how the pre-existing class delineations influenced by Confucian philosophy expedited the proletariat formation during Korean industrialization.
Kim Hyung-a: sees minjung as a historically specific class that encompassed oppressed peoples sticken by economic struggle and limited personal freedom. To Kim, the idea of minjung coalesced around an emotional response to nationalism, anti-imperialism/capitalism. Like Park, Kim sees minjung as a concept born out of Western philosophy.
Namhee Lee (born 1960): The professor of modern Korean history at UCLA argues that while the term "minjung" can be translated as "common people," it is an abstract and elastic term that "required a constant shoring up of the counterimage of the forces considered to be inimical to minjung: the military dictatorship, corporate conglomerates, and foreign powers."Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009). Therefore, while factory workers and farmers were presented as the face of minjung during the 1970s and 80s, the term later included small business owners and segments of the military.
Minjung art Minjung misul, meaning "people's art," was used interchangeably with terms like minjok misul (national art), minjok minjung misul (national people's art), and saeroun misul undong (new art movement). It was only in 1985 that minjung misul became the standard term when a national newspaper wrote about the government censorship of the exhibition "Power of the Twenties (20 dae eui him)." Some artists associated to the movement pushed back against the use of the term.Sohl Lee, "Images of Reality / Ideals of Democracy: Contemporary Korean Art, 1980s-2000s" (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2014).
History
Groundwork (late 1970s – early 80s)
Political context President Park Chung Hee was assassinated in 1979, and what followed under the military government of Chun Doo-Hwan was a period of political, economic, and social strife,Lee, Jiyoon. “The Impact of Globalisation on Korean Contemporary Art since 1989.” Dissertation, ProQuest LLC., 2014. exemplified by the Gwangju Uprising, where over 2000 students and protestors lost their lives.(Park, Ki-woong. “Korean Art and the Avant-Garde Dilemma.” Dissertation, ProQuest LLC., 2012. Under these fraught conditions, minjung art of the 1980s began to take form within these protests in the form of ephemeral banners, posters, and pamphlets. Minjung art formed in spite of political repression during the late 70s and 80s, and can be connected to a longer history of art centered on realism in Korea since the early twentieth century. Developing concurrently in literature and art, realism dominated cultural production during the time in response to the political climate.Chunghoon Shin, "Reality and Utterance: In and Against Minjung Art," Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction (London, New York: Phaidon, 2020), 98-115.
While the original intent of minjung art was to critique the institutional academic art system, it evolved into a political avant-garde that was active in the pro-democracy movement.Kang, Kyoung-Lae, and Hyejong Yoo. “‘Sindoan’: Dissident Memories of Modern Korean History in a Cinematic Revision of Korean Minjung Art*.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 44.2 44, no. 2 (September 2018): 295–324. . Thus minjung artists often saw themselves in contradistinction to dansaekhwa, seeking to counter what they considered to be the latter's distance from the public and lack of overt political engagement.Young Min Moon, "Situating Contemporary Art of South Korea, 1980 to 2016," in A Companion to Korean Art (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 465-496. Art historian Chunghoon Shin argues that minjung artists' anti-formalist rhetoric against abstraction was a response to the growing institutionalization of the art world that drew art away from the public.
Origins While there were a vast array of reasons as to why artists were invested in the minjung art movement, there was an overall consensus that art should apply a figurative or narrative style in order to represent the plight and reality of the working class.
Reality and utterance During the first meeting of Reality and Utterance in 1979, members criticized what they saw as dansaekhwa's turn away from reality. This interest in how to define and engage with reality and thus expand the boundaries of art led Reality and Utterance artists to declare their intentions through a manifesto, refer to mass media and consumerism through material and form in their work, and organize group shows beginning in November 1980. By the mid-1980s they organized an umbrella organization in response to government censorship of realist art, exemplified by the cancellation of the 1985 "Power of the Twenties" show at the Arab Art Museum in Seoul due to their inclusion of images of the Gwangju Uprising, but faced accusations of elitism.
Art historians have typically considered Reality and Utterance's anti-modernist work as preceding the later development of hyeonjang misul (art of the site) made for and used at protests.
The Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists The Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists (Gwangju Jayu Misulin Hyeophoe) demonstrated a concurrent vested interest in creating work reacting to and functioning in particular situations—belying the art historical claim that anti-modernist artistic practice in 1979 laid the necessary groundwork for hyeonjang misul (art of the site). The Gwangju artists favored the term sanghwang (situation) over hyeonsil (reality) when writing their own manifesto—delineating a difference between the two that was reflected in their activities as a group in the aftermath of the Gwangju Uprising. They responded to the specific situation by creating placards and distributing them to activists, and spraying slogans around the city. After the Uprising, and in contrast to Reality and Utterance, the association eschewed a typical indoor art exhibition for kut, a shamanistic ritual of mourning (1980), and outdoor show with over a hundred visitors looking at paintings and performances (1981).
The members of the association distanced themselves further from established art institutions by concerning themselves with pedagogy in open schools and public engagement with the arts. Their interest in education, influenced by recently translated texts like Paolo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, reimagined the artist as facilitators for minjung to produce their own work. The importance of accessibility and deemphasis of the individual artist with reproducibility led them to embrace woodblock printing.
Dureong Other elements of minjung art were also present during the time, such as the use of geolgae geurim (banner painting) by the collective Dureong (Levee), and which then spread to other collectives like the Association of Gwangju Freedom Artists. Buddhist painting inspired the composition and collective approach in making banner paintings. Leader of Dureong Kim Bongjun's Painting of All Things Heaven and Earth (1982) evinces Buddhist influences and the language of folklore that were often in play for banner paintings. The repetition of motifs and dissolution of individual authorship, and emphasis on the site of the banner in constructing its meaning, all evince an interest in the specificity of place and adaptability that was crucial to later minjung art. Dureong also worked with local communities in lieu of galleries to create woodblock prints, illustrations, cartoons, banner paintings, and murals.
Critical reception and changing imperatives