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Forgetting and Remembering in Postcolonial South Korea: the minjung politics and art of the 1980s and 1990s

  • Journal of History of Modern Art
  • 2005, (18), pp.2-2
  • Publisher : 현대미술사학회
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Art > Arts in general > Art History

Park Soyang 1

1Univ. of Oxford

Candidate

ABSTRACT

My thesis explores the history and psychology of the Minjoong (grassroots) Realist Art and Culture Movement which emerged during the democratisation period in South Korea in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following territorial decolonization and 35 years of rapid industrialisation led by the military dictatorial regime, the 1980s and the 1990s marked a time of insurgence of popular antagonism against the regime and the dominant norms of society which had repressed the expressions of the grassroots people in the society. I examine how the emergent culture a 'visual culture of haunting' is instigated and formed by numerous haunted subjects and the return of repressed memories. This culture is marked by works of Lim Oksang and Oh Yoon who materialised the ghosts of the minjoong, who had long been repressed by "silencing structure" and "culture of forgetting" of Korean society. They actively dealt with the personal and historical trauma and haunting imagination of a future as part of the incorporationprocess of the internal images of "the Real". The 'Real' translates the irreducible core of memory and imagination of the minjoong which has previously unrepresented.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.