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 mediums, 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. 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. 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.
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." 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.