Past Exhibitions

Before the Wind

2021-08-18 ~ 2021-11-07

The grass is lying flat.
It lies flat before the wind does.
It weeps before the wind does.
It rises before the wind does.
- Kim Soo-young’s poem, “Grass”

Minjung Art (people’s art) refers to a school of socially engaged art that arose amidst the historical turmoils in South Korea’s 1980s. Contemporary South Korean
art history accepted Western paintings into its fold under the Japanese colonial era, thereby coming under the formal influence of Western art history.
With socially engaged art losing hold in the throes of the Korean War and the subsequent division of the peninsula, Modernism became the leading trend in the
1960s. The maturation of democratic civic awareness, meanwhile, triggered attempts to develop new artistic forms of critique and resistance synchronously across
regional centers such as Seoul, Gwangju, and Busan. As the center point of Gyeonggi Province, Suwon also pioneered efforts to raise social awareness, hosting
exhibitions alongside Seoul and Gwangju. Many art groups soon emerged to follow suit, introducing artworks that critically reflect reality and convey political perspectives.
While the Minjung Art movement was spread all over the nation, it mainly revolved around Seoul as the cultural capital as with the case of other schools of art, and as such came to be known mostly through mainstream productions. This exhibition’s objective is to address the resultant elisions in documented art history. Since Minjung Art took place at sites of labor and civic protest and was therefore formally averse to existing conventions such as placing artworks in frames or on pedestals, it was difficult to capture the entirety of productions and activities in a national scale. Still, it must be noted that the varied instantiations of Minjung Art share their
thematic focus on labor, division, and women’s rights, encompassing divergent regions including Suwon, Incheon, Anyang, Gapyeong, Cheongju, Ulsan, Daegu, and Busan to create a synchronous yet multi-faceted trend across the southern half of the peninsula. As such, Sec. I of the exhibition focuses on the art groups and artists of Suwon’s Minjung Art, while Sec. II offers a comprehensive overview of the works by Minjung artists across the nation. Our hope is that the exhibition would serve as an opportunity to introduce a wide spectrum of Minjung Art productions, which constituted a key area of South Korean art since the 1980s.