Minjung art

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.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Minjung art”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Minjung art is South Korean art of the Minjung movement, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶