| Minjung art | |
| Hangul | 민중예술 |
|---|---|
| Hanja | 民衆藝術 |
| Revised Romanization | Minjung Yesul |
| McCune–Reischauer | Minjung Yesul |
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.[1]
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,[2]: 47 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.