MINJUNG Art is Resistance

Minjung is the name given to a politically and culturally motivated popular movement in South Korea at the end of the 1970s, from which Minjung Art emerged as a revolutionary art movement.

In South Korea at that time, the military governments generally promoted a politically non-committal art based on the Western model. Minjung artists, on the other hand, developed a narrative visual language with clear political statements and distanced themselves from the cultural influences of the Western consumer world. Minjung art was always a radical and oppositional folk art movement, which fell victim to state repression after its emergence and only gained official recognition in democratic Korea.

Meinblau is now showing an exhibition of the two important Minjung artists LEE Sangho and JEON Jeongho from Gwangju. Both were active against the military dictatorship in the 1980s. In 1987, they were the first artists in South Korea to be arrested and separated for violating the National Security Law due to the presentation of their politically motivated banner painting “A New Day Dawns at the Foot of Paektusan”. After their release, both continued to work independently as Minjung artists and human rights activists. Their work is now being reunited for the first time in Berlin, far from their homeland. (bd)