Tradition as Method: The Minjung Art Movement and Decolonial Democracy in South Korea

In the 1970s and 1980s, dissident artists associated with South Korea's minjung (people's) art movement rejected both state-sponsored modernism and imported Cold War formalism. Yet their opposition to authoritarian rule did not entail a rejection of tradition. Instead, they turned to precolonial vernacular practices—Buddhist visual traditions, folk imagery, communal performance, and indigenous cultural practices—as critical resources for political expression. Drawing on The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea, this lecture argues that minjung artists did not simply revive tradition but strategically reactivated it. By reworking visual and performative genealogies fractured by Japanese colonialism and Cold War developmentalism, they transformed inherited forms into vehicles for contemporary political struggle. Tradition became not a static inheritance but a method: a means of repairing historical rupture while articulating cultural sovereignty in the present.

Through close analysis of protest banners (kŏlgae kŭrim), murals, printmaking, and performance-oriented practices, the lecture demonstrates how Kim Bong-jun and artist collective Turŏng mobilized Buddhist and vernacular aesthetic languages to embody what I call the conjoined aspirations of decolonization and democracy. In doing so, the minjung art movement unsettles dominant art historical narratives structured around rupture, offering instead a model of politically activated continuity that expands the meaning of liberal democracy and proposes an alternative genealogy for global contemporary art.

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About the speaker:

Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), specializing in modern and contemporary Asian art, decolonial visual culture, socially engaged art, and ecological art history, with a particular interest in oceanic and transpacific frameworks. Her first book, The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2026), historicizes an influential movement of activist art from the 1970s and 1980s. Her current book project, “Seaweed as Method: Art History with Oceans, Multispecies Life, and Empire,” examines the global visual cultures of seaweeds through the intertwined lenses of ecology, decolonization, food sovereignty, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020) and has received grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), the Korea Foundation, the Korean Ministry of Culture, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Getty Research Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation, among others.

Image Caption: Kim Bongjun, Ten Thousand Figures and Thousand Pictures, 1981-2, pigments on silk. Work no longer extant. Courtesy MMCA Research Center Collection, Gift of Ch’oe Yŏl.