Minjung art

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"General Green Pea", 1985 colored woodcut by O Yun (1946-1986), portraying Chon Pong-jun, a leader of the Donghak Peasant Revolution in 1894.

Minjung art was a South Korean political and populist art movement, born in 1980.

The Minjung ("people's") cultural movement came as the popular and artistic response to the Kwangju or Gwangju Massacre by South Korean dictator General Chun Doo-hwan in May of 1980. Minjung artists used visual arts, especially painting and woodblocks, to call for democratization and Korean reunification. Their artworks glorified nature, laborers, and peasants, and criticized imperialism, Americanization, and the authoritarian South Korean government. In the 1980s, many Minjung artists were accused of sympathizing with communism and North Korea, and tortured or imprisoned.

The first Kwangju Massacre artworks were a 1980 series of woodcuts by Tomiyama Taeko, a Japanese female artist with a long history of activism. Their primitive style would inspire Minjung art. Notable Minjung artists included Kim Pong-jun (b. 1954), who led the Turong Group, Hong Song-min (b. 1960), Pak Kwang-su (b. 1960), Sin Hak-ch’ol, O Yun (1946-1986), and Hong Song-dam.

With the democratization of the 1990s, Minjung art stopped being a protest movement, and became part of the mainstream. In 1994, the Kim Young Sam government allowed a large-scale exhibition entitled "Fifteen Years of Minjung Art: 1980-1994" in the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Gwacheon, and in 1996, the government even commissioned Hong Song-dam, one of the most acclaimed and radical Minjung artists, to create a 42-meter Minjung mural for a wall of Chonnam National University in Kwangju itself. Possibly as a result of this greater acceptance, while earlier Minjung artwork has become sought after, little new art in the Minjung style is being created. Later Korean artists tend towards post-modern and avant-garde styles.