THE MEANING AND EVALUATION OF 15 YEARS OF MINJUNG ART: 1980–1994
Since January 2017, Jonggil Kim, chief curator of the Gyeonggi Museum of Art, has chronicled Minjung art (People’s art) in a series for the monthly art magazine Misulsegye, examining the period from 1979 to 1994. The extensive volume of this series (thirty-five articles) has been suspended as of December 2019 because the publisher’s management rights were transferred to another party. The reason that Kim sets the starting point of Minjung art as 1979 is because the Gwangju Artists Association for Freedom (Gwangju jayumisurin hyeopoe, hereinafter Gwangjahyup), as well as Reality and Utterance (Hyeonsilgwa bareon), were both founded in the same year, which he recognized as the beginning of a Minjok art (National art) and Minjung art movement.2 Kim decided to complete the series by examining the year 1994, as he believed that Minjung art had reached a turning point that year, coinciding with the exhibition 15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980–1994 (1994, hereinafter 15 Years) held at the MMCA.
15 Years was criticized on numerous grounds from the moment it opened to the public. To date, the criticism most frequently levied has been that Minjung art faced its own funeral when it became “institutionalized” as an art form. Some point out that the reasons for the rapid decline of Minjung art—starting with 15 Years as the turning point—include the collapse of socialism in the late 1980s; the emergence of pseudo-democracy in the Republic of Korea; the lack of goals for progressive social movements internationally; and the loss of a driving force with a goal for Minjung art due to the influences of world in all aspects of thought, culture, and art.3 As for likening the exhibition at the MMCA to a “funeral,” Yeol Choi, who was in charge of carrying out 15 Years with me, reasoned that the rapid decline of this art movement was rooted in “the cynical view that the confrontation was not over yet, but Minjung art had reconciled with the power” and “the view that the Minjung art movement was also just a trend of the times, and it was time to end itself.”4
This raises the question of how a proponent of the Minjung art movement understood the circumstances of this period. Jongryul Yi, who was then the editor-in-chief of the Korean People’s Artists Association (Minjok misul hyeobuihoe, hereinafter Minmihyeop), took note of signs pointing to changes that emerged inside the Minjung art circle in the period immediately prior to 15 Years being held. This included an increase in solo exhibitions by Minjung artists at exhibition venues involving commercial spaces, Minjung artists moving to rural areas, and young critics in Minmihyeop’s Criticism Department studying abroad. Regarding this change, Yi stated: “If art in the 1980s had adopted a clear figurative language that counterposed ‘Minjung’ (people) and ‘dictatorship,’ then the position of Minjung art would have inevitably narrowed as a result of the reality of the times, when such counterposing became uncertain. Therefore, it was both a shift in creative perception that directly faced the changes of the times and an instinctive act of self-preservation to survive by developing an adaptability to reality.”5
What does this “strange” phenomenon ultimately mean? Whether it was those who willingly participated in the Minjung art movement and endured its accompanying suffering and hardships, those who criticized it as “art that was subordinate to the politics of rampant propaganda,” or young researchers studying Minjung art, all of them uniformly declared the end of Minjung art beginning with 15 Years. In order to better examine whether Minjung art came to an end with 15 Years, this paper will first examine Minjung art theorists’ perceptions of reality and the logic of the Minjung art movement as it relates to what Korea was experiencing in the 1980s and 1990s, then analyze the planning, execution, achievements, and limitations of 15 Years. From this basis, this paper will argue that 15 Years was not the end of Minjung art, but rather a venue that provided a new starting point; as well, this paper will contend that 15 Years played a significant role in the democratization of the MMCA.
Minjung Art: A Transition from Communication to a Rational Worldview Examining the goal of 15 Years, the organization and methodology of presenting the exhibition, the exhibition organizers’ ideologies and perspectives on Minjung art, and how the works were selected to present these ideologies and perspectives visually is all inherently linked to the social background that played a role in Minjung art’s formation and development. Accordingly, it is essential to examine the period that 15 Years covered, namely, the relationship between Minjung art and the political, economic, and cultural environment of Korean society from 1980 to 1994. However, as the history of Minjung art was already presented in the organization of 15 Years and has been covered in extensive writings on Minjung art, we may refer to such earlier research for further details. That being said, it is necessary to at least briefly review how theorists at the time were aware of the characteristics of and prospects for Minjung art in the late 1980s, at the time that Minjung art was being promoted.
In late 1989, a journal published a feature titled “Reckoning the Art Movements of the 1980s” that included essays from six theorists. Among these, Young Chul Lee considered the developmental process of Minjung art in “The Development of National and Minjung Art in the 1980s and Realism” by dividing it into “critical realism” and “people’s realism.” He then emphasized that Minjung art should take a step forward to a new qualitative level through “progressive realism” or “factional realism” by focusing on the factional nature of the working class as a guiding principle to unite people as a transformational subject.6 This article is a condensed version of the discussion at a seminar hosted by the Research Society for Art Criticism (RSAC), which was formed in 1988, from Lee’s point of view. While a reader with an understanding of Minjung art’s process of development will likely be able to surmise the meanings of critical realism and people’s realism, there could well be a question as to the meanings of progressive realism and factional realism. To understand this, it is necessary to read the essay by Kwang-hyun Shim that was published in the same journal. Shim divides the ten years of Minjung art into four stages: “Awareness of Reality and the Recovery of Communication” (1980 to the first half of 1983); “Diversification of Art Movement Spaces and the Rise of Minjung Art” (the second half of 1983 to 1985); “The New Exploration of a Minjok Art Movement as an Organizational Movement” (1986 to the first half of 1987); and “The Transition Period of the National and Minjung Art Movement” (June 1987 to the present). He then traces the qualitative changes in Minjung art by linking these four stages with the changes in Korean society over that period of time. A close reading of the two essays makes apparent the insistence of both authors that Minjung art needed to be more grounded in reason as a movement. This sentiment can also be found in the manifesto printed in Minmihyeop’s Fifth General Assembly Sourcebook for the general assembly that was held on February 24, 1990: “We overcome art for art’s sake, culturalism rooted in civil (or petit bourgeois) individualism, and, on the other hand, narrow cultural instrumentalism that shackles the diversity of art culture and creative individuality, striving to build progressive Minjok art through creative practices based on an abundance of the people’s characteristics and rational worldviews.”7
This raises the question of the rational nature that the previous theorists raised and the rational worldview that Minmihyeop’s manifesto claimed. To better grasp this, it is necessary to consider the two goals that existed within the Minjung art camp. First, there was a tendency to seek social engagement and integrate this into the practice of art, and this tendency began with raising questions about the practices of established art institutional structures and aestheticism. This tendency was led by artistic groups such as Reality and Utterance, Imsulnyeon (formed in 1982), the Silcheon Group (founded in 1983), and the Seoul Art Community (formed in 1984). Second, there was Gwangjahyup, which advocated the “restoration of art’s healthiness” and pursued “collective excitement” by contributing to human dignity through “testimony” and “honest speech utterance,” as well as the group Dureong, which rejected elitism as a long-held feature of art creation in Korea and instead chose a method of collective creation to realize “living paintings.” The activities of these small groups were variously called “1980s figurative art,” “a new art movement,” and “the art of life,”8 but Minjung art entered a new stage with the establishment of Minmihyeop, which was spurred by police suppression of the exhibition 1985, Korean Art, the Power of People in Their 20s (1985, hereinafter The Power of People in Their 20s) and centered around artists who were influenced by the incident. As evidenced in themed exhibitions such as The City and Views (1981) and The Look of Happiness (1982), artist groups like Reality and Utterance examined the visual images of industrial societies, such as advertisements, in reaction to Korea’s modernist art in the 1970s. If Imsulnyeon mainly focused on criticizing civilization, then Gwangjahyup advanced a more militant “combative, community excitement” throughout the progression of the Gwangju democratization movement in 1980, and the association launched an art school open to all that enabled “the public to create and share” art through the production of prints.9 In particular, Dureong—which borrowed creative methodologies from folk arts like mask dance, gut (shamanistic rituals), folk paintings, and Buddhist paintings—forged links with working-class people in rural communities and workplaces.
It was Yoon Oh who connected the two so-called trends of “exhibition hall art” and “field art.” Through Reality and Utterance, Yoon Oh also released a “marketing” series that satirized and criticized consumer culture by borrowing images of hell that typically appear at the bottom of Buddhist Amrita paintings while also expressing people’s joys and sorrows and excitement through woodblock prints created with thick strokes and unequivocal messages. His prints were more widely known to the public through poetry book covers and illustrations than exhibitions, and the icons that he created influenced many Minjung artists. Other active artists included Hak-Chul Shin, who compressed grand historical images of modern and contemporary Korean history into paintings through photomontage techniques; the female art group Siwol, which sought to reveal the reality of women’s lives; and Minhwa Choi, who harnessed the powerful visual communicative power of comics. In short, there was a wide variety of Minjung art, ranging from traditional paintings and sculptures to prints, comics, photographs, and crafts. In addition, a unique form of painting called geolgae (banners) emerged to serve the purpose of propaganda at demonstration sites, while other varied artistic methods that were employed included assemblage, collage, readymade, parody, and publishing. Therefore, defining Minjung art as “realism that emerged in Korea in the 1980s”
risks making the mistake of equating Minjung art with realism, even if one were to put aside the ambiguity of the concept of “realism” itself. In order to apply realism as a creative methodology or as a concept to Korean reality, Minjung art translated the term as hyeonsiljuui (realism) and proceeded to fervently apply it to art-related theories after 1986. It is worth noting that Minjung art in the early 1980s featured a characteristic diversity that was not encompassed by realism in terms of form and content.
Dongseok Won, who advanced the theory of Minjung art even at the time of the movement’s formation, made an observation about the process of its transformation and development, arguing that “the realization of a world in which people become the subject of culture and art will not be achieved without a transformation in the awareness and thinking of those who have lived within the framework of conventional culture.”10 As noted in his writings, he contended that Minjung art had reached another turning point as of 1986. Fueling this was a heated theoretical debate that played a significant role as the pro-democracy movement—which had begun with anti-dictatorship and anti-fascist movements—developed into a transformation movement along with the emergence of Minmihyeop. While autonomy measures at schools were instituted by the Chun Doo-hwan military regime in 1984, progressive intellectuals and students were given the opportunity to strengthen the meaning of the movement to transform Korean society, at least in limited areas. In this process, theories of revolution—including those of the Civil Democracy Revolution (CDR), the Constituent Assembly (CA), the National Liberation Revolution (NLR), the National Democratic Revolution (NDR), the People’s Democratic Revolution (PDR), and the National Liberation People’s Democracy Revolution (NLPDR)—emerged, along with instances of confrontation and opposition between each other. With the rise of utopian aspirations for the transformation (reformation) of Korean society, the debate developed into a more acute structure—the so-called “debate on social formation” to define the nature of Korean society, which was centered around a journal called The Quarterly Changbi.11 The debate on “social formation,” which borrowed the concept of “economic-social formation” that Karl Marx employed in his Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Fundamentals of Political Economy Criticism), was carried out with a view toward expanding conservative academic research by accepting activist groups’ achievements during debates on praxis from the perspective of “self-reflection of academism.”12 The debate around “social formation” developed from “peripheral capitalism” (Daegeun Lee) to “colonial semi-feudalism” (Byeongjik Ahn) to “state monopoly capitalism” (Hyeonchae Park). This discussion identified Korean society as a virtual colony of the United States, and because of this political definition, people characterized Korean society as a colonial semi-feudal society. Consequently, these claims were redefined as the theory of the NLPDR, which distinguished itself from the general transformation theory of the West.13
Throughout the general worker strikes and the presidential election in late 1987, the progressive camp was divided into two factions: the National Liberation (NL) camp, which sought to find the distinctiveness of Korean society in terms of national divisions, and the People’s Democracy (PD) camp, which emphasized class divisions in response.14 It is generally fair to identify the minority coalition of activists that staged a “people’s candidate nomination campaign” in the presidential election as the origin of the PD camp.15 At the same time, state monopoly capitalism morphed into Neo-Colonial State Monopoly Capitalism (NCSMC) based on the judgment that post–World War II US policy placed Korea into a new colonial situation.16 In the political debate over the NLPDR, non-juche ideology groups17 that interpreted it as “anti-imperialism, anti-monopoly” and “anti-imperialism, antifascist” revolutions sought to build a working class, avant-garde party based on Marxism–Leninism and achieve a socialist revolution. On top of that, as scholars studying Marx participated in the debate, NCSMC spread from the mouths of students and workers as well as activists who participated in the movement. NCSMC, which emphasized that “strengthening monopoly is, in other words, deepening subordination,” spread widely to the Minjung art camp, and the ideology of NCSMC was widespread among progressive intellectuals and artists of the time, as shown by the fact that both Hak-Chul Shin and Buldong Park produced individual works by the same title: Neo-Colonial State Monopoly Capitalism.18 Artists studied NCSMC through organizations like the People’s Cultural Movement Alliance (Minjung munhwa undong yeonhap), but such activities were based on the analytical conclusion that the US demand for the Korean won’s appreciation and pressure on Korea to open itself to more imports represented economic interference and dominance over Korea, as the US itself had been plagued by chronic trade and fiscal deficits. It is not difficult to find this awareness in Hak-Chul Shin’s painting Rice Planting (1987, Fig. 1), in which farmers use a harrow to push US nuclear weapons and all types of popular culture “trash” into the sea to the south of Korea.
In essence, the 1980s was an era of social science, and the fact that both Minmihyeop’s manifesto and Kwang-hyun Shim demanded that the art movement become more rational in its approach is relevant against this backdrop. Regardless of which camp people belonged to, the debate on social formation was led by revolutionary leftists who dreamed of transforming Korean society. Through this process, leftwing theory—which was almost annihilated by the powerful anticommunist ideology that dominated a South Korea still in recovery from the Korean War and the ensuing dictatorship following the country’s liberation—was revived, leading to an era of countless groups debating leftist theories in the late 1980s. Specifically, the craze for Marxism normalized the publication and reading of books dealing with the aesthetics of Marxism–Leninism, including historical materialism. Furthermore, Vladimir Lenin’s Chto delat’? (What Is to Be Done?) was read like a textbook of the transformation movement, and in 1989, the Korean-language version of Das Kapital, translated by Soo-haeng Kim, was published in Korea.
The Russian policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“openness”) implemented by Mikhail Gorbachev as the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union were also required learning for Korean revolutionaries who dreamed of transforming Korean society. However, the debate on social formation already had a tendency towards being theoretical in its heyday, so it could not escape being self-absorbed in its point of view and revealed the limitations of textbook Marxism.19 In the end, as made evident in the comment that “the (new) state monopoly capitalism debate in Korea was largely based on old literature up until the 1970s and later based on perestroika’s rightist innovation literature. Thus, this situation must have contributed to people criticizing and liquidating the theory of state monopoly capitalism,”20 from the 1990s onwards, the debate on social formation declined drastically, and it was eventually discarded.
It was the Research Society for Art Criticism (RSAC) that introduced Marxist aesthetics as well as the debate on social formation—including György Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s “commodity aesthetics” (Warenästhetik)—to the Minjung art camp in Korea. Kwang-hyun Shim was the central force in coming up with theories for exploring new Minjung art that responded to the zeitgeist of the 1990s.21 The RSAC, comprising theorists who studied aesthetics, art history, and art criticism, discussed Marxist–Leninist aesthetics, postmodernism, popular culture, and art institutions in regularly held seminars. They also conducted joint research and carried out collective criticism in response to the collective creation practices of Gwangjahyup and Dureong.22 The RSAC also participated in the production and reinforcement of internal theories through Minmihyeop’s Criticism Department Subcommittee and took part in debates on postmodernism with critics whom the Minjung art camp regarded as a modernist faction. The RSAC evaluated the achievements of Minjung art in the 1980s as positive, but they were adamant about the need to find an ideology to surpass the existing Minjung art, so they sought to find a breakthrough in transformational/factional realism. Therefore, it seems accurate to point out that Minjung art evinced a tendency in the direction of social science, in that “the artists, who were inclined towards the theory of typicality and factionism based on Lukács’s theory of realism, replaced art in the practical realm with the framework of a socio-scientific world view, thereby exposing clichés due to an excess of idealism and enlightenment, which in turn diminished the richness of their imaginations as well as diminished their multifaceted approach to the relationship between society and art.”23 However, this argument largely misread the context of the time. As seen in the fact that many creators and theorists characterized Minjung art as “Minjok and Minjung art,” the influence of Lukács’s literary aesthetics on Minjung art’s aesthetics was limited.24 In the context of aesthetics, Lukács’s “critical realism” was overshadowed, to some extent, by “people’s realism.” In addition, “transformational realism,” which emerged from the RSAC, ended in experimental discussions without being closely connected to actual art scenes, similar to how only theorists enjoyed debates on social formation following the changes that Korean society underwent in the late 1980s.
Minjung Art in the Face of a Demand for Change
When Jong-chul Park, a Seoul National University student, was tortured to death by the authorities after being detained during an investigation in January 1987, protests erupted across the country. President Chun Doo-hwan declared the so-called “April 13 Measures to
Defend the Constitution,”25 rejecting any reform of the Fifth Republic Constitution, which had been unilaterally amended in 1980 under martial law. The National Assembly even organized a special committee on constitutional reform based on demands for constitutional reform that had received widespread support from the people since 1986, but Chun Doo-hwan banned all discussions on constitutional reform when the pro-democracy movement intensified after Park’s death. Angered by the military regime’s attempt to hold on to power indefinitely by maintaining a constitution in which the people could not directly elect the president, students and citizens formed the National Movement Headquarters with the purpose of helping push through a democratic constitution, and declared June 10, 1987 as a day of mass resistance. When students at Yonsei University advanced toward the school’s front gate to participate in a pan-national rally, Hanyeol Lee was struck by a tear gas canister, which only enflamed what came to be known as the June Democracy Movement. Byungsoo Choi’s banner painting Revive Hanyeol! (1987, Fig. 2) and Minhwa Choi’s With Your Open Eyes (1987) were created at that time for Hanyeol Lee’s funeral, and many banner paintings were produced along with the July–August general rally of workers to heighten the intensity of the protest. During the June Democracy Movement, which was a turning point in the pro-democracy movement, banner paintings were used as an important propaganda tool in streets and public squares. Minjung art reached its peak around this time as well. Amid the push for democratization, works on unification kept appearing. Jeong-ho Jeon and Sang-ho Lee’s banner painting O Dawn of Unification, Breaking Upon the Foot of Baekdu (1987, depicting workers and farmers, as representative of working-class people, tearing apart the American flag) and Hak-Chul Shin’s Rice Planting were also painted during this period.
The energy of the June Democracy Movement converged on a slogan of “Overthrowing the dictatorship, repealing measures to defend the existing constitution of the time, and instituting democracy.” Roh Tae-woo, the ruling party’s presidential nominee, was finally forced to issue the June 29 Declaration to accept the amendment of the constitution for direct presidential elections.26 The presidential election in December 1987 went through a process of procedural democracy, but with a split between the opposition parties’ candidates; the democratic movement forces, including Minjung artists, were also divided into critical supporters, supporters of a unifying candidate, and those for independent candidates. As a result, the Sixth Republic emerged when Roh Tae-woo, one of the leaders of the Coup d’état of December Twelfth, was elected president. On top of that, Korea’s cultural topography
was changing as a stronger consumer culture began spreading across the nation alongside the government-initiated open-door policy, the liberalization of imports, and increased access to overseas travel in the run-up to the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The spread of popular culture, which emerged in the late 1980s, was also closely related to this opendoor policy. The Roh Tae-woo administration instituted a pardon for artists who were critical of the regime, and the administration further lifted the ban on the works of writers who had defected to North Korea. Yet those who were critical of the Sixth Republic mockingly called it the “5.5 Republic”—as it essentially continued the existing form of the Fifth Republic—and Minmihyeop held an exhibition under the theme of “5.5 Republic” from May 19 to 25, 1989. Meanwhile, the MMCA opened its newly constructed venue in Gwacheon just in time for the 1986 Asian Games, thus opening a new phase for Korean art. However, Minjung art was still excluded from the magnificent new art museum.
The momentum of the pro-democracy movement, which was heightened by the June Democracy Movement, briefly came to a lull during the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Still, Minjung artists continued to produce works under the themes of labor movements, student movements, and the struggle for the right to live of the urban impoverished who had been driven out of their residential homes due to violent redevelopment projects ahead of the Olympics. This was all done through banner paintings, prints, photographs, and art for publications. However, after a brief pause in the conflict between the state and the pro-democracy movement, government authorities soon began to suppress the forces for democracy. Following the formation of the National Democratic Movement Federation in January 1989, the National Farmers Movement Union in March, the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union in May, and the National Poverty Alliance in November, these groups demanded higher wages and a revision of labor laws and rallied against the crackdown on labor movements. The Roh Tae-woo regime responded by classifying the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union as an illegal organization in order to suppress it. The visit to North Korea by the Reverend Ik-hwan Moon and those who accompanied him in March 198927 was followed by a visit to Pyongyang by the Korean People Artist Federation’s spokesperson, novelist Sok-yong Hwang, and then a visit to North Korea by Su-kyung Lim,28 who was sent by the National Council of Student Representatives as a representative of South Korean students. This created a politically charged situation. The culture and art worlds also witnessed an unprecedented number of artists being arrested in another wave of arrests. Oksang Lim’s For Oneness (1989), a paper relief work that shows the Reverend Ik-hwan Moon crossing the barbed wire of the Military Demarcation Line, was produced during this period. This artwork was exhibited at 15 Years without being prohibited by public security authorities, and it was made part of the MMCA’s collection after the exhibition. However, it was replaced for dubious reasons just before the opening of the exhibition Zeitgeist Korea , which was held in November 2013 to commemorate the opening of the MMCA Seoul, sparking a controversy over censorship.29
While works on the theme of national unification were produced amid the suppression of art by public security authorities, rural community issues also emerged as a major theme. Participants at the 8th General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) cabinet meeting in 1986, the so-called “Uruguay Round,” sharply confronted one another in areas such as agricultural products, intellectual property, trade in services, textiles, and emergency import restrictions, resulting in a deadlock between nations on certain issues. Yet a rising sense of crisis emerged with the concern that the opening of the agricultural market would lead to the collapse of Korea’s agricultural economy, and farmers fiercely resisted as Minjung artists produced artworks responding to this situation. Following the Uruguay Round, the Green Round of GATT saw an expansion of Minjung artists’ interests to encompass environmental pollution issues.
From 1989 onwards, Minjung art encountered the shock experienced by society and the demand for changes brought about by the rapid spread of popular culture under the Korean government’s open-door policy that it implemented before and following the 1988 Seoul Olympics. This took place in tandem with drastic international changes, including the dissolution of the socialist bloc in Eastern Europe. Enforcing the “National Security Act,” the Roh Tae-woo administration strictly cracked down on private visits to North Korea by South Korean citizens, including visits by the Reverend Ik-hwan Moon and Su-kyung Lim. At the same time, however, it established diplomatic ties with socialist countries in Eastern Europe through the Northern Foreign Policy, starting with Hungary in 1988. Following the absence of many Western and Eastern European countries at the Moscow Olympics (1980) and Los Angeles Olympics (1984), the 1988 Seoul Olympics brought symbolism to Korea as a divided nation, serving as a catalyst for the South Korean government to push forward diplomatic ties with the socialist camp. The South Korean government established diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union in 1990 and also with the People’s Republic of China in 1992. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, which came in the wake of the successive collapses of countries in the Eastern Bloc, immediately silenced the previously mentioned debate on social formation in Korea. However, the Korean government’s Northern Foreign Policy, which it pursued while excluding and isolating North Korea, still left room for controversy on inter-Korean relations and unification issues. In the meantime, the Minjung art camp was being divided. It had now been split into Minmihyeop, which advocated the People’s Democracy (PD) line, and the Preparatory Committee for the Minjok and Minjung Art Movement Federation (hereinafter Minmiryeon), which was formed in September 1988 and pursued the National Liberation (NL) line, although they did not explicitly say the latter in public. Minmihyeop and Minmiryeon sought to integrate their groups into a nationwide art organization at a three-party meeting that included representatives from the National and Minjung Art Joint Practice Committee in the Gyeongin and Gyeongsu areas, but the plan collapsed when Seong-dam Hong and other key figures of Minmiryeon were arrested in 1989.
In contrast with South Korea’s rapidly changing society, Minjung art was at a standstill as it continued to vocalize the same logic and employ the same artistic methods that it had in the 1980s; as a result, questions about Minjung art arose from within the Minjung art camp. At the annual Minjung art exhibition in the summer of 1990, which was held under the theme of “unification between the two Koreas” and organized by Minmihyeop, Wan-kyung Sung pointed out the following:
In addressing this theme in which national unification, national independence, and the safeguarding of democracy are all intertwined, many young Minjung artists’ works at the exhibition reflected a lack of imagination and a lack of rational quality and concreteness in recognizing the said theme. Additionally, their repeated use of symbolic icons from the limited repertoire of those used in flag paintings or banner paintings at people’s rallies is disappointing both to artists and for viewers due to their simplistic awareness of reality, their chauvinistic self-satisfaction, their lack of imagination, and the consequent loss of cultural persuasiveness.30
Youngwook Lee also identified the problems with Minjung art as the following:
“(1) It lacked a formal consideration for artworks; (2) it was returning art to the realm of politics; and (3) it represented exclusivity.” As alternatives to each of the identified problems, he demanded: “(1) Actively giving meaning to the creativity of artworks and breaking from all ideas that hinder this creativity; (2) acknowledging that the connection between art and politics is multifaceted and complex, and strengthening realistic efforts to maximize influence through this indirect connection; and (3) attempting to cultivate a delicate understanding of the varied efforts to help build a democratic art culture, all while pursuing active solidarity between such efforts.”31
Chan-kyong Park, who was in his 20s in the early 1990s, expressed frustration in 1992 when organizing an exhibition titled City Mass Culture, which focused on popular culture, with Ji-sook Baek. As Park said, “The changes in Minjok art were linear towards changes in society, and, with the exception of moral positivity, they were unable to catch up with the pace of the changes in many areas.” For him, the possibility of the 1990s was “the politics of expression,” not “the expression of politics.”32
At an open forum held at Hongik University on November 20, 1993 that explored the 1990s art movement under the theme of “Art Movement, Succession or Transition,” theorists who had participated in the discussion on Minjung art since the late 1980s identified the present as a period of change and agreed on the need for new change. The gist of my presentation at this forum was: “As the goal of the art movement in the 1980s was neither achieved nor completed, its validity should still be inherited, but it is necessary to develop countermeasures and creative methodologies to address a society that is changing.”33
As such, we can see that immediately before the opening of 15 Years, Minjung art was being asked to seek out future prospects and change from within due to changes in circumstances both domestically and internationally. However, for me, this era seemed to be about “the difficulty in seeking prospects in an age of lost prospects.”
How Would 15 Years Be Held? Director Young-bang Lim called me when 15 Years closed. I was at the conference table in Director Lim’s office when he instructed me to write a fact-based report and record everything, from the time when this exhibition was first discussed through the execution process and the final results. That is how I wrote “The Organizing Process and Evaluation of 15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980-1994.” This report was included in volume 5 of The Journal of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (1994).34 Based on the report I wrote at that time, I utilize this essay to reflect on the meaning of 15 Years from the perspective of the “here and now” and reevaluate the exhibition’s achievements and limitations.
How did 15 Years ever get off the ground? If the launch of the civilian government can be cited as an external factor that enabled this exhibition, then Director Lim’s strong determination was an internal factor that should not be overlooked. President Kim Young-sam’s civilian government, which was inaugurated on February 25, 1993, eliminated Hanahoe (Group of One), which was a symbol of military dictatorship, and carried out reforms that included a real-name financial transaction system and the disclosure of public officials’ assets through the “Public Service Ethics Act.” The civilian government’s reforms received enthusiastic support from people who had long suffered under the dictatorship of the military regime. When receiving a briefing from the Minister of Culture and Sports (the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Sports and Youth were combined) on April 1, 1993, President Kim ordered the following: “The cultural policy in the civilian government era is to truly respect the creativity and autonomy of people involved in cultural activities […] I hope that the Ministry will make these changing cultural policies clear by outwardly supporting the healthy cultural activities of opposition cultural groups.”35 However, the civilian government’s reforms, which were pushed forward as quickly as a flash of lightning, were being blocked by the conservative establishment—so much so that the government’s reforms were called “reforms from above” and “lone reform forces.” The government was unable to begin an effective reform process because its reforms were essentially handed down without listening to what the people wanted.36 Moreover, the emergence of a civilian government was tantamount to a change in government within the same political party, and the reforms were almost all led by the president himself, so their internalization throughout society was limited. In other words, as long as there were numerous opposing forces that still viewed Minjung art as a rebellion against society, and as long as the “National Security Act” was the law—even if the exhibition promotion committee defined the meaning of 15 Years as a “symbolic event through which the spirit, aesthetics, and rtistry of Minjung art are officially recognized by the authorities”37—inevitably, some limitations to presenting the true sense of Minjung art were imposed on the exhibition. Furthermore, when taking into consideration the characteristics of Minjung art, which had up to then resisted the power of the authorities, it was necessary to critically examine the rhetoric of being “officially recognized by the authorities.”
Despite these limited conditions, Director Lim stated that “[the MMCA] planned this exhibition with the belief that the existence and traces of Minjung art should be properly illuminated and that Minjung art should be elevated to the position it deserves.” He said this while indirectly criticizing the exclusion, oppression, and suppression of Minjung art in the form of a question: “Why did we have to pretend we didn’t lead uncomfortable lives, something that was naturally reflected in art? What fear or shame made us act that way?”38 Director Lim, who assumed his position in 1992, held an exhibition titled Nam June Paik: Videotime, Videospace that same year and subsequently hosted the 1993 Whitney Biennial in Seoul, overcoming many objections and surmounting numerous difficulties in doing so. In addition, he was deeply aware of the fact that the abilities of staff members at a museum are critical for the development of such an institution. Thus, he not only initiated museology courses within the MMCA to strengthen its staff members’ expertise and capabilities, but also abolished a program—against much resistance—that rented out exhibition spaces for long-running annual contests held by media companies and art organizations. Furthermore, he provided opportunities for in-house curators to independently organize exhibitions even though they had previously only performed simple administrative work for exhibitions. Today, this type of policy is considered quite natural in museums, but at that time Director Lim’s decisions had a significant impact on the normalization of the MMCA. In this context, I think that Director Lim’s dedication and contribution to the establishment and development of the MMCA during his tenure deserves a historical evaluation. When looking back at 15 Years—excluding the abovementioned facts—there is a risk of missing the context of why Director Lim held the exhibition despite all the objections and difficulties. After all, 15 Years came about from Director Lim’s serious concerns and determination regarding the role that the museum should play to be “a museum in the truest sense” and “[as a medium for] the communication of contemporary art.” I am still convinced of this.
Director Lim, however, was cautious. At the beginning of 1993, a group of several artists mainly comprising Lim’s former students and who were active in the Minjung art camp pushed for a Minjung art exhibition at the MMCA. This is when the plan to hold the exhibition began to take shape. Even though we had a civilian government at that time, the MMCA still had a number of challenges to tackle in order to hold its own exhibition of socially critical and participatory Minjung art. Above all, it must have been challenging for the director to lack a curator with the necessary information and experience to properly map out the complex branches and substance of Minjung art and realize it as an exhibition. Furthermore, it was a difficult task to obtain approval from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, a higher level of authority, to hold an exhibition of socially sensitive Minjung art. To solve these problems, Director Lim chose to combine the museum with artists and theorists who were actively involved in the Minjung art movement.39 In the end, the exhibition was hosted by the MMCA, but it was jointly organized and implemented by a promotion committee and a planning committee composed of artists and theorists who were key members of the Minjung art movement.
Those who were skeptical about the exhibition after the MMCA’s plan to host 15 Years was announced included Wan-kyung Sung and Kwang-hyun Shim, both of whom had played important roles in the formation and development of Minjung art, and who were both still writing influential texts as Minjung art theorists. Their common opinion was that the exhibition 15 Years was premature. Earlier, Sung took part in selecting artists and writing manuscripts as the co-curator for the exhibition Min Joong Art: A New Cultural Movement from Korea, which was held at Artists Space, New York, in 1988. That experience may have served as the basis for a prudent determination that 15 Years should be more carefully prepared. Prior to that, Sung had engaged in organizing Min Joong Art: New Movement of Political Art from Korea, which was held in New York at Minor Injury and in Toronto at A Space, both in 1987.40 Inspired by the modest but positive reception of the exhibition, Sung
then proposed that a Minjung art exhibition be held at a more important and well-known space, Artists Space, which ultimately accepted Sung’s proposal. In this process, Hyuk Um, a freelance curator in New York, played a major role in this decision. Wan-kyung Sung and Hyuk Um organized their own exhibition to highlight critical voices that had been suppressed in South Korea in the concurrent monumental-scale exhibitions officially prepared by the Korean government ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympics—and which did not include any Minjung artists. In addition, Sung and Um sought to organize an exhibition with the aim of challenging the idea that the Olympics would promote “harmony and progress” as the official slogan of the Olympics promised.41 However, in the course of the discussion, the title of their exhibition, originally titled “Political Art,” was changed to “Cultural Movement.” And while observing exhibitions led by the government, including Korean Art Today,42 which was held in commemoration of the opening of the MMCA Gwacheon, and Contemporary Korean Art, commemorating the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Sung came to realize how difficult it would be to hold a Minjung art exhibition during the period of transition after the June Democracy Movement.43 Sung, in particular, said that he had felt the conflicted pain of challenging Minjung art in the form of his earlier questions because “technically packaging confirmed values or known items” was not the solution when the task at hand was how best to convey Minjung art across the different cultural contexts of the US and Korea.44 When the plan to hold 15 Years was announced, Sung may have been worried that the event might end up as a formal and decently packaged exhibition rather than one raising difficult questions about Minjung art, which was still being produced on an ongoing basis.
Organization of the Exhibition 15 Years
15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980–1994 was held at the MMCA Gwacheon’s Galleries 1, 2, and 7 and Main Hall from February 5 to March 16, 1994. The 389 artworks in the exhibition included 234 paintings and 68 prints by 246 artists, including Yoon Oh, as well as 200 pieces of reference materials, including documents on the incident involving Hak-Chul Shin’s controversial painting Rice Planting. The exhibition organized the formation and development of Minjung art related to the democratization movement in the 1980s in Korea together with the movement’s leading artists and works, organized by the movement’s major trends.
Following the intentions of the director at the time, Youngbang Lim, the exhibition undertook to include those artists who had been abused and persecuted for their regime-critical and socially participatory artistic activities—including censorship, inspections, and arrests—during the democratization process in Korea, as well as the young artists who were inheriting the spirit of Minjung art. As a result, the exhibition itself could be seen as somewhat distracted. However, the goal of the exhibition was not to assess artistic value by selecting works based on strict criteria, but rather to comprehensively organize works and artists’ activities in accordance with the rapidly changing social situation. Unfortunately, the exhibition did not provide a full picture of Minjung art because it lacked participation by artists such as Bongjun Kim—a key artist from Dureong, which played an important role in the currents of Minjung art in the 1980s—and woodcut artist Chul Soo Lee. The exhibition was largely organized under three themes: the small group movement and the formation of Minjung art; the establishment of a nationwide artists’ organization and the spread of art movements; and Minjung art’s achievements and progress of creation. In addition, an archive space housed a chronology of Minjung art, and related reference materials were separately installed to help visitors better understand Minjung art.
Gallery 1 (The Small Group Movement and the Formation of Minjung Art) largely contained major works by artists who had been active in groups such as Reality and Utterance, Gwangjahyup, Imsulnyeon, Dureong, and Seoul Art Community since the early 1980s, as well as artists who directly or indirectly participated in the Minjung art movement, including Yeongyun Kang, Kyoungin Kim, and Hak-Chul Shin.
Yoon Oh had passed away in 1986, and the museum exhibited many of his works in a special room, including Marketing I: Painting of Hell (1980, Fig. 3), colored woodblock prints, and Korean War: Vindictive Spirits (1984), which remains unfinished. Hak-Chul Shin’s Korean Modern History: Synthesis (1983) was not displayed because the MMCA was unable to borrow the work from the museum that owned it, but Shin repainted another work of his, Rice Planting—which had previously been seized by the authorities—for the exhibition. Kihwan Son’s TA! TATATA!! (1985) was exhibited—although it had previously been confiscated by the authorities at the time of the earlier exhibition The Power of People in Their 20s—but the artist group Dureong was unable to present their works because many of these works were closely related to the labor movement and had been confiscated or lost.45 Chung-dong Landscape (1986) by Kyuchul Ahn, who was studying in Germany at the time, and Mr. Kim at Mapo Market (1984) by Tae Ho Lee were both displayed at the exhibition. The latter work was owned by art historian Hong-jun Yu, who donated the work to the MMCA after the exhibition.
The brutal history of censorship and oppression of Minjung art is also an important element of 15 Years, so I would like to summarize this history briefly.
The prelude to the oppression of Minjung art was the opening of Reality and Utterance’s exhibition that was scheduled to be held at the Korean Culture & Arts Foundation’s Art Center (now the Arko Art Center) on October 17, 1980, but was canceled due to objections by the Art Center’s steering committee and the Art Center’s subsequent decision to turn off its electricity. Between 1981 and 1982, the Ministry of Culture and Information singled out Kwang Kang, Kyoungin Kim, Kyoungho Shin, Oksang Lim, and Seong-dam Hong as “threatening artists” and proceeded to seize their works. At the same time, the Ministry issued warnings to artists who were teaching at schools and urged them to withdraw from their organizations. The charges levied against them included those of “leftist” and “pro-communist” behavior. For example, the authorities insisted that the manner in which the red ground was dug up by an excavator in Oksang Lim’s The Earth IV (1980, Fig. 4) suggested “unification under communism.”
On July 13, 1985, the police arrested young artists who submitted their entries to The Power of People in Their 20s, which was held at the Arab Museum in Seoul, and subjected them to a summary trial on charges of violating the prohibition on spreading groundless rumors under the “Punishment of Minor Offenses Act,” after which the police confiscated their works. The incident involving The Power of People in Their 20s provided the impetus for the formation of Minmihyeop, a powerful and unified group of socially critical and participatory artists of that era. However, because the government instigated public security episodes out of political motivation, the brutal history of censorship and oppression by state power shifted from the “Punishment of Minor Offenses Act” to the “National Security Act.” Starting with the comic Kkangsuni, which was serialized in The Workers Newspaper(Nodongja sinmun) by Dureong member Eunhong Lee, the banner painting O Dawn of Unification, Breaking Upon the Foot of Baekdu, which was painted by Jeong-ho Jeon and Sang-ho Lee, and Hak-Chul Shin’s Rice Planting faced charges of violating a certain clause of the “National Security Act”: producing or distributing materials to benefit the enemy through “praise and incitement” of North Korea. As a result, the artists were arrested, and these specific works were confiscated by the authorities. In 1989, Seong-dam Hong and a number of other artists were arrested on charges of violating the “National Security Act” for sending photo slides of Hong’s banner painting series History of National Liberation Movement (1989, Fig. 5) to the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang. Hong was even charged with espionage for this action.
As oppression by the government persisted, Minmihyeop held an exhibition titled Cases of Oppression (1988) and published a white paper. In 1990, the exhibition Arrested Artists’ Works was held under the theme “‘The National Security Act’ and Oppression of Art.” The brutal history of the government’s censorship and oppression of Minjung art was made visible in artworks and photographic materials in each gallery, various archival documents, and posters.
Gallery 2 (The Establishment of a Nationwide Artist Organization and the Spread of the Art Movement) displayed the works of feminist art movements that had been active since the 1980s under the umbrella of Minjung art, combining the struggle for democracy and social movements; prints related to art education and materials connected to murals by artists who had belonged to the Korean Teachers and Education Workers Union; and photographs, comics, and everyday art (crafts). For example, postcards from Somssigongbang (Skillful Workshop), crafts from workshops such as Jiseonteo, Sotdae,and Sunigongbang, Nureongso’s modern hanbok, and Hee-jae Lee and Jae-dong Park’s comics were presented side by side without any clear context. At 15 Years, feminist art was a sub-theme, but it is necessary to reflect on this issue because the exhibition blatantly ignored feminist art despite the importance that it signified. In Gallery 2, murals and a significant number of damaged banner paintings were represented instead with photographs, which made for a cluttered display that was composed using mixed themes and genres, resulting in a lack of unity.
In the Main Hall, which connected Gallery 1 and Gallery 2, exhibits included banner paintings used for demonstrations and rallies, such as Revive Hanyeol! and Worker (1988), which was produced by the artist group Ganeunpae with help from the Labor Art Committee. In addition, Gabo Peasant Revolution (1989), 4.19 and 5.16 (1989), and The Gwangju Uprising (1989) were reproduced in order to be displayed in the History of National Liberation Movement series, which had been destroyed by the police. The People’s Fight: As We Faced the Hardship of This World, which was painted by Sung Min Hong and Gwangsu Park in 1983, was also reproduced in order to be displayed. Banner paintings created for demonstrations and rallies became something to view and appreciate in their own right, as opposed to things to be viewed merely as propaganda, when they were finally exhibited in a museum. This continues to remain an issue that calls for further reflection and thought.
Gallery 7 (The Achievements and Progress of Creation) mainly exhibited the works of young artists who were active in the 1990s. Many of these works featured the theme of demonstrations, most likely because the artists had participated in demonstrations as students during the time of organizations like the Struggle Committee for Reunification, Democracy, and People’s Liberation and the National Council of Student Representatives. On the other hand, with the emergence of the so-called “new generation,” there were works expressing interest in urban popular culture, as represented by Apgujeong-dong, Seoul. For example, there was a critical work on popular culture as represented by the New Kids on the Block, the American boy band that visited Korea in 1992. However, most of these urban popular culture works, which dealt with varied themes ranging from political topics to the environment, remained within the realm of typical representational paintings and did not fully capture how Korean culture had changed in the 1990s. Kyungsook Cho’s work used the editing techniques of print media to shed light on women’s issues, but the rest were mainly paintings and sculptures that were diverse yet distracting, and still not free from representational art. As a result, the exhibition left many to reflect on whether the “progressive realism” claimed by Young Chul Lee had fallen to the level of “critical realism,” or if it had just remained something with the same concept; alternatively, there was the question of whether Minjung art in the 1990s was negligent in developing genres and media that could stand up to a different era and society given that in the 1980s Minjung art had developed and expanded its range with banner paintings, prints, and publication art, in addition to photomontages.
Self-Reflections and Evaluations
At the international symposium titled “What Do Museums Change?: Art and Democracy,” which was held at the MMCA Seoul in 2019, I satirically described 15 Years as “an exhibition held at a museum next to Seoul Grand Park, standing across from mountains and water” during a presentation about the exhibition. After the plan to build the MMCA as a cultural facility for the 1988 Seoul Olympics was finalized, the “faraway museum” problem began when the government chose the cultural facility site at the foot of Cheonggyesan Mountain, which stood between Seoul Grand Park and the Youth Training Center in Gwacheon. As the architect Taesu Kim remarked, the MMCA was designed with a Buddhist temple in mind, where a royal palace is built along the topography of the mountain, just like Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon and Buseoksa Temple in Yeongju. The MMCA Gwacheon sits in harmony with the mountainous terrain of Cheonggyesan Mountain, but its heavy mass, which features a considerable amount of grandeur, overwhelms the eyes of viewers because the exterior of the huge architectural structure is finished with granite. Then there is the road to the museum, which is essentially a pilgrimage given that the museum is accessible only by the four-kilometer road from the entrance of Seoul Grand Park Station. For visitors lacking their own vehicles, traffic was inconvenient and very unkind because they had to walk across Seoul Grand Park or use the park-run Elephant Train. As a Minjung art exhibition, which was more often held at exhibition venues, schools, or worksites in the city center, when 15 Years came to be held at this “distant” museum, the vitality of the site was inevitably reduced. In addition, the exhibition was strictly limited to indoor locations because of the strong sense of resistance against Minjung art from the Ministry of Culture and Sports, even though it was part of a civilian government. Since all events—with the exception of the exhibition and academic events—were banned, even the opening ceremony for the exhibition was “solemn,” and it lacked the loud, exciting rhythms of mask dance performances or pungmulpae (traditional Korean folk music), both of which were common in Minjung art exhibitions in the 1980s. It may have been that the physical context and the psychological pressure felt by bureaucrats at the time had the effect of turning Minjung art into something like an immobile, taxidermied animal. All of the works were separated to limited spaces in the exhibition halls and “closely imprisoned.” Take, for example, a banner painting created when Hanyeol Lee—who was struck in the head by a tear gas canister during a protest in front of Yonsei University’s front gate on June 9, 1987—had been taken to a hospital and was hovering between life and death. The banner’s creation began on June 13, and it was hung on the front wall of Yonsei University’s student center at noon on June 15. At the exhibition of Min Joong Art: A New Cultural Movement from Korea, which was held in 1988 at Artists Space, an alternative artistic venue located in Soho, New York, the banner painting Revive Hanyeol! was hung on the exterior wall on the opening day. It was then displayed on the wall of St. John the Divine Catholic Church the next day. However, this banner painting was hung in the Main Hall of the MMCA together with Byungsu Choi’s Anti-war, Antinuclear (1988), the artist group Ganeunpae’s Worker, Labor Committee’s Sumida series (1991), and even a reproduced painting, National Liberation, side by side, without any context, simply because they were all banner paintings that had been hung at labor movement scenes.
The criticism of 15 Years was harsh. As soon as the exhibition opened, some theorists who had been engaged in important activities in the Minjung art movement criticized it not only for its “absence of curatorship,” but also for being the “funeral of Minjung art.” Youngmok Jung looked for meaning in this exhibition as “the exhibition opened the door for an opportunity to evaluate the true nature—as a naked existence—of Minjung art, and that which has been ambiguously considered as a whole.”46 However, Dongseok Won’s harsh reply was that “it only added confusion to the overall understanding of Minjung art and ultimately turned into an effort to make Minjung art a star, displaying an exhibition that was no different from so-called institutional art.”47
Wan-kyung Sung, who expressed very sensible opinions, pointed out the problems of the exhibition in detail as follows:
First, the exhibition was decidedly insufficient to break the fragmentary and incomplete awareness, or cynical and skeptical view, that the general public or artists in our society have about Minjung art.
Second, it failed to present the prospects of Minjung art for the 1990s in a persuasive way.
Third, it is confusing and boring in terms of content, as it is shown mechanically and comprehensively by focusing on the apparent beginning, development, and diffusion of Minjung art as a whole. It is also regrettable that important artists are missing.48
At the exhibition, Wan-kyung Sung stated, “I suspect that some of the Minjung artists involved in the exhibition have ignored the basic procedures of organizing the exhibition due to hopeless optimism and self-righteousness. I have a strong sense that the exhibition was too loosely organized, as it doesn’t seem certain whether or not there was a responsible curator. In addition, the curators seem not to have thought deeply about the basic concepts and goals of the exhibition, the direction of the exhibition, the arrangement of the narrative, and the selection of artists.”49 I still accept Sung’s comments as relevant and humbling. Since the exhibition had been jointly planned, no artistic director or curator was designated. However, because the exhibition was organized in order to show the formation and development of Minjung art, as well as its systemized presentation, we need to remember that the exhibition was organized not only to look back on Minjung art historically, but also for the purpose of seeking the future of Minjung art. Although described critically earlier in this text, this is why banner paintings, which had been hung at the sites of demonstrations, were taken to the MMCA’s Main Hall, while other works that had been seized, confiscated, or destroyed by governmental authorities were restored or recreated; others were represented in photographic materials for the exhibition.
As a curator who worked on this exhibition, I still view 15 Years without a critical mindset with respect to Minjung art becoming a part of institutional art. That being said, I believe that the exhibition revealed the absence of a curatorial process. In other words, I think that the exhibition relied too much on the solemn morality underlying the concept of Minjung art without clearly conveying the curators’ intention, direction, and goals.50 One day while I was writing this paper, I found myself in a casual discussion about the banner paintings hung at The Square: Art and Society in Korea 1900–2019 (which was held at the MMCA Gwacheon) with Yeol Choi, who had worked with me as a member of the planning committee for 15 Years. When I said, “the Minjung art exhibition (15 Years) was unfocused,” he answered, “but its direction was still clear.” Choi explained that there was a certain consistency in the act of gathering Minjung art together in one place, and that this was an issue separate from the excellence of the works themselves. Even up until now, many people have repeatedly described 15 Years as a funeral—a tomb, even—of Minjung art. This could be considered a result of not properly understanding the direction, goals, and characteristics of the exhibition, or as a result of the ahistorical perspective of “just stating what is heard,” as opposed to critically examining the self-demanding judgment that sought to disparage the meaning of the exhibition and analyzing the exhibition in conjunction with the societal landscape at the time. The changed international situation, in which the socialist camp of Eastern Europe collapsed and the Soviet Union disbanded, did not hasten the end of Minjung art. Nor was the liberation of the people achieved by the launch of a civilian government in Korea. Furthermore, the division of the two Koreas still stifled our lives, while the issues of reunification, labor, farmers, the urban poor, women, and minorities still required Minjung artists to act and participate on behalf of all these people. Along with the spread of postmodernist discourse, the phenomenon of pluralism was also appearing in culture and art, but a wave of neo-liberalism disguised as freedom was sweeping over the country.
It is important to note that in the midst of this change, the exhibition 15 Years was not meant to be a mere reminder of Minjung art or as a “reward” for persecution, but as a chance to predict the future of Minjung art by collecting, investigating, classifying, and presenting the activities of the art movement over the preceding 15 years. On the assessment that it was the passing bell for Minjung art, Chan-kyong Park noted: “The new cultural politics of art has been deferred due to the fall of Eastern Europe, neo-liberalism, globalization, overseas studies, retreat, and survival. Therefore, Minjung art, fortunately or not, has not been fully contemporized, nor has it even been historized.”51 Today, it needs to be rightfully acknowledged that 15 Years was not a funeral, but a venue for consideration and reflection for better progress, and an event that renewed the character of an authoritative and conservative museum. Through the exhibition, the MMCA sought to provide a venue for open debates and rich dialogue on Minjung art, but it could have just as well discarded the opportunity with a devaluation of Minjung art that approached derision, one in which the exhibition was a funeral and a tomb for Minjung art. If the MMCA had not served as the originator of such discourses and instead became a place where the death knell was sounded for Minjung art, then we would need to reflect on whether we deferred the democratization of the museum, or deferred the possibility that people can communicate with each other through the medium of artworks and the possibility that the audience can participate in producing the meaning of an exhibition and its artworks. In conclusion, the fact that many studies published after 15 Years focused on the exhibition reveals that Minjung art in the 1980s faced a turning point with 15 Years. Many see that Minjung art was facing the need for selfrenewal in those days, and that the exhibition provided an opportunity to trigger change. In this regard, looking back at 15 Years after all these years is still of great importance.
Figure 1. Hak-Chul Shin, Rice Planting, 1987, oil on canvas, 160 × 130 cm. MMCA collection. This original work was confiscated by the police in 1989 and then folded into a document envelope and left unattended in the impound storage of the Seoul District Prosecutor’s Office. In 2018, it was handed over to the MMCA as an administrative consignment (the work arrived in an already damaged state, with its paint chipped where the painting had previously been folded).
Figure 2. Byungsoo Choi, Revive Hanyeol!, 1987, woodblock print on Korean paper, 46 × 30 cm. MMCA collection.
Figure 3. Yoon Oh, Marketing I: Painting of Hell, 1980, mixed media on canvas, 90.5 × 122 cm. Private collection.
Figure 4. Oksang Lim, The Earth IV, 1980, oil on canvas, 104 × 177 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
Figure 5. Busan Art Movement Research Institute, History of the National Liberation Movement, 1989. Installation view of Paintings of History of National Liberation Movement held in front of the main library of Seoul National University. Collection of MMCA Art Research Center. Donation of Yeol Choi.
Source: Choi Taeman, “The Meaning and Evaluation of 15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980-1994,” What Do Museums Change? Art and Democracy (MMCA, 2020), 39-71
