The Beginning of Minjung Art: On “Reality and Utterance” and South Korean Art in the 1970s and 1980s
By Sohl Lee, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook
Wednesday, November 29, 2017 at 6:30 - 8:00 PM
Korean Cultural Center New York
(460 Park Avenue, Floor 6, New York, NY 10022)
Free admission; refreshments provided
AHL Foundation Public Lecture Series 2017
In Collaboration with Korean Cultural Center New York
O Yoon, Marketing I—Hell Painting (1980), Mixed media on canvas, 131 x 162 cm
Minjung art (or “people’s art”) emerged alongside South Korea’s pro-democracy social movement in the 1980s. While many remember colorful banner paintings and large funerary portraits that amplified the revolutionary spirit during the June Uprising in 1987, the beginning of minjung art can be traced to an earlier moment in history. A wide range of dissented practices in performance, conceptual art, painting, and art criticism began to transpire in the 1970s, expanding the realm of freedom and imagination conceivable in authoritarian Korea. By 1980, the art group Reality and Utterance was founded with the goal of articulating the previously scattered ideas about art, innovation, and avant-garde spirit in the post-colonial nation.
This talk will chart how a Korean vernacular art movement was incubated and a new relationship between aesthetics and politics germinated, by examining works by artists (O Yoon, Sung Neung-kyung, Shin Hakchul, Joo Jaehwan, Kim Jeongheun, Min Jeongki, Kim Yongtae) and writings by critics (Sung Wan-kyung, Kim Yoon-su, Won Dong-suk), as well as thematized exhibitions organized by Reality and Utterance (“Images of Happiness,” “City and Vision”).
Sohl Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art in East Asia, postcolonial theories, socialist aesthetics, histories of the avant-garde, and globalization. She is currently completing the first art historical monograph on South Korean political art, tentatively titled “The Democratic Avant-garde: Minjung Art and Social Movement in South Korea.”
The Beginning of Minjung Art: On “Reality and Utterance” and South Korean Art in the 1970s and 1980s is presented as a part of Korean Culture Day 2017 for November Program