Emerging as multifaceted cultural activism, the minjung (people’s) art movement defined the aesthetics of the pro-democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. Tracing minjung art’s history and legacy, Sohl Lee explores how artists associated with the movement mobilized images, print, and performance to build movement publics and reimagine sovereignty. Hundreds of artists questioned the underlying assumptions of liberal democracies and the art-making practices of the global Cold War. Their decolonial critiques of international modernism were inseparable from reimagining democracy and refiguring the relationship between art and democracy. Recuperating overlooked performance-oriented practices and the protest aesthetics that helped usher in parliamentary democracy in 1987, Lee shows that South Korea’s globalization in the 1990s and its rise as cultural soft power in the new millennium cannot be understood apart from a pro-democracy culture that was both political and popular.

Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University.

List of Illustrations  ix
Note on Transliteration and Translation  xv
Preface and Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction  1
1. Decolonizing Modernism during the Cold War: Origins of the Minjung Art Movement  41
2. The Visual Cultural Turn for Decolonial Democracy: Forms and Methods of Reality and Utterance (1979–1984)  87
3. The Decolonial Place of Vernacular Folk Culture in Democracy: Turŏng, Collective Painting, and Sited Knowledge Production (1982–1985)  137
4. To Bring Back to Life: On the Metonym of Democracy (1987)  197
5. Exhibiting Minjung Art Abroad: Tokyo, New York, and Pyongyang in the Twilight of the Cold War (1986–1989)  237
Conclusion. Revolutionary Presents: Making Histories of Decolonial Democracy  283
Notes  307
Bibliography  363
Index