The Place of Vernacular Folk Culture in Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement in South Korea

March 4, 2022

EVENT DESCRIPTION

During the South Korean democracy movement in the 1970s and 1980s, lessons learned from non-colonial, vernacular folk traditions were central to devising a decolonial model of art practice, art education, and art history. This talk explores the so-called nativist turn in South Korea’s Minjung art movement (people’s art movement) by focusing on an art collective Turŏng during its inception in 1982. For one, the collective’s inventive reactivation of Buddhist vernacular traditions contributed to the introduction of a new genre of painting: the “hanging picture” for protest sites.

SPEAKER
SOHL LEE

Sohl Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Criticism at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary art in East Asia, visual culture, vernacular modernism, postcolonial theories, socialist aesthetics, histories of the avant-garde, and pedagogical curating. Her upcoming book, Reimagining Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement and the Birth of Contemporary Korean Art (Duke University Press), traces the multifaceted process in which a particular decolonial aesthetics emerged during the country’s democratization.

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This event is organized by Hong Kal (the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York), presented by the Korean office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University which is funded by the Academy of Korean Studies.

This is a free event but registration is required. Upon registration, you will receive a Zoom link.