I had assumed that for my first post, I would cover an art show I saw most recently in Toronto. But if I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that whatever I think is going to happen is usually not what actually happens.

Given the political blow up taking place in South Korea, with its president setting off a political fire alarm with his spontaneous declaration of Martial Law, I’d be inviting regret into my late-night brain if I didn’t address some aspect of Korean art. I was born in Seoul after all, spent my childhood summers there and have allotted a chunk of my middle-aged life learning about Korean art and its relationship to political activism. There are also about 55,000 Koreans living in Toronto, a city with a total population of about 3 million people. I had assumed the number was higher. 55,000 is roughly the same size as this city’s Polish population and a touch smaller than the number of Torontonians from Portugal. Then again, 55,000 isn’t a drop in the bucket as it’s roughly the size of the student population at Toronto’s second largest university.  

Maybe the reason for my surprise has to do with the undeniable popularity of Korean culture in the English-speaking world, and the wider world in general. If you watch movies and TV, listen to music, eat food and/or spend an outsized proportion of your income on skincare, Korea is present in your day-to-day life. In light of Korea’s global success — think Squidgame, Crash Landing on You, APT, BTS, Korean BBQ, LANEIGE and sheet masks — Koreans understandably gave a hard Hell no, not this again to their sitting president. For everyone else, it’s a weird progression for your favourite K-pop band and candy cane flavoured lip mask to suddenly hail from a country run by a dictator. 

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, Martial Law, it basically puts to a stop any political activities critical of the presiding government. Martial (meaning “military”) Law essentially gives the president the power to govern the country using military might. Martial Law also affects the media, which is no longer free to report the news as they wish. Universities, known to be places encouraging independent thinking and activism, tend to get shut down as well. Free speech and opposition to the government are therefore off the table, or off to jail you go.

The history of art in Korea has a lot to say about how everyday Koreans have dealt with political oppression. I’ve highlighted here a few artworks by Korean artists from the late twentieth century. Several have an obvious and pointed political message. They also show how jumping to your feet when government is going off the rails is nothing new in Korea. Making art isn’t always just for fun. For some, there are circumstances in which this activity becomes an urgent priority because other liberties (like the press, higher education, and your identity as a free and empowered person) have been suppressed. This was the case in modern Korean art and history.

I know some people think art is frivolous and unimportant. For most people, art doesn’t put food on the table. I get that. But there is a point to be made about art being a quintessential form of human expression. It is undeniably a part of human culture which is made up of all the explicable and oddball things, like making art, that we do because we are compelled to do them.

Art offers a point of view. Art, and the assertion that beauty, intelligence, and a past exists in Korea acquired a critical kind of importance when that country became occupied by a neighbouring country — Japan — from 1910-1945. Yes, at one time, the Japanese came over to Korea and pulled the ol’, “I’ll take that, please and thank you”. The existential loss that comes with an event like that – where one’s personhood becomes subservient to someone else’s agenda – unfortunately went on for several decades, even after Korea’s liberation. After Japan’s surrender and exit from Korea following WWII, and the ceasefire between North and South Korea following the Korean War, a series of South Korea’s presidents proceeded to govern in a manner familiar to Koreans, who up until that point had endured and opposed decades of authoritarianism under colonial rule. It's complicated. The latter decades of the twentieth century were also those in which Korea transformed its economy from destitute to prosperous.

If you don’t know much about Korean art, you might look at Hong Sung-dam’s A United World I, and think…meh. Knowing what I know, I look at it and see an artist who’s made a stylistic choice to use the technique of a woodcut print — woodcut printing has been around in East Asia since antiquity. Here, the technique’s been used to heroize ordinary civilians fighting for democratization. Woodcut printing is also a manual process, where a handheld carving tool is used to gouge strips and bits out of a piece of wood to create a stamped image. A printed image using the woodcut method can also be delicate and virtuosic work like the examples of woodblock prints that record Buddhist scripture in calligraphy from the Koryo dynasty (918 CE -1392 CE).

When viewing these centuries old woodblocks and prints, it is remarkable how the script narrows, expands, curves and flicks, as is done with a handheld brush. Other times, calligraphy and images of the Buddha, and other deities from the Buddha realm, were executed in gold paint onto a roll, or folded booklet, of handmade paper the colour of the deepest darkest indigo. There’s a quietness and reverence to these sutras. By comparison, A United World I is far less exacting and much more energized. This image is part of a series of woodcut prints that depict scenes of battle, struggle, community and victory of civilians fighting for freedom.

When making art, artists are constantly making choices. Hong Sung-dam, like other artists, also worked with different media and techniques. It is not, therefore, by accident or lack of versatility that this series of woodcut prints has a fast and folksy appearance. Could he have spent more time making the figures look more realistic? Perhaps. Was he capable of pulling that off? Maybe and that’s not the point. A woodcut print with extremely fine details doesn’t hit you in the same way as something coarser, especially when the image is meant to be politically charged. There is a boldness and immediacy to Hong’s image. The message and the style are very much in sync. The people in the scene look celebratory and a tad bit crazed. I’m not sure I’d ever lift my child up to high five a guy standing on the back of a truck loosely holding a shot gun, even if our politics are aligned. It’s clear the image is telling us that an exception should be made. The people pictured are the good guys and the underdogs.

Hong was an artist and political activist when he created A United World I. He had attended Chosun University, one of the country’s oldest universities located in Kwangju, a city that became the site of the Kwangju Uprising – an historic rebellion undertaken by civilians for over a week in May 1980 to oppose the government of then President Chun Doo-Hwan. Like Korea’s recently impeached President, Yoon Sook Yeol, Chun pulled the Martial Law lever when he was in office. Then, as now, this move did not endear him to the people. The demonstrations of May 1980 took a violent turn and lasted for several days, during which several thousands of people lost their lives. Something else to remember is that many women participated in pro-democracy activities and demonstrations. Their presence and contributions are pretty much absent in the public’s collective memory. This is also an issue with the history of art in Korea, which has been dominated by male artists. I’ll be addressing this more deeply in another post.

While Chun was president, many artists formed groups with one another to create work that addressed a host of issues from authoritarianism and poor working conditions to inadequate housing. Their activities became known as the Minjung Art Movement. Hong was among the many artists engaged in this movement. In the late 1980s, Hong was criminally charged and imprisoned for nearly a decade after sending copies of his art, along with artwork by hundreds of other artists, to the North.

Reunification between the two Koreas has long been a hot button issue in the South. I’ve come to understand over the years the extent to which the topic of the North is difficult in the South. It’s kind of like being in a family with very loving and domineering parents who forbid you to be in contact with a relative you all used to be close to. You know better than to ever reach out for fear of being promptly cut off and disowned. Or worse, placed in the cellar. It is a sad reality that many families on both sides were separated from one another after the establishment of the Demilitarized Zone.

Much like the food, modern art in Korea is far from bland. The spectrum of Korean cuisine includes the soothing comfort of seolleongtang (ox bone soup) and the flame throwing sweetness of buldak (fire chicken). Similarly, there is a good deal of variety in Korean art from over the course of the twentieth-century. There were cool, minimalist works like those by Park Seo Bo and Lee Ufan. This is the kind of art that looks like it’s not trying too hard. Even though its origins are rooted in a desire to push the envelope and allow for a greater freedom of interpretation, for both artist and audience, this kind of art has sometimes been cast as a kind of High Art antagonist to the kind of art made by minjung artists, which is often overtly political and made with inexpensive materials. Minjung basically refers to the common people.

There were also art critics at the time who dismissed minjung art as protest art. To this I would say that art used for protest is still art. Another criticism I’ve come across against minjung art is that it lost its relevance. I’m not sure I agree with this as a premise for critique. Is art supposed to be timeless in its appeal? This is like saying that a work of art is only good if it appeals to everyone all the time. That’s just not possible and so not the point of art, especially minjung art. I’m guessing that Hong’s main motivation in making A United World I was not whether art critics would approve of it. A United World I, and the other prints in the series, is very much an of-the-moment work of art. I’d argue that this is true of any work of art. People and institutions with cultural and social capital help create a system of value around works of art. Who you know matters.

The public also has its role in generating a gravitational pull around an artist. By writing about certain works of art, I too am casting a vote on who I think deserves a spotlight. This notion that one’s perspective matters, is a driving force behind the desire to create art and being politically engaged. The history of Korean art and politics present multiple and well-documented examples of this overlap. When you think about it, the history of modern art in Korea is remarkable for the very fact that it acknowledges art and activism as companion themes in that country’s art historical canon.

Art offers a point of view. For every inscrutable, starkly beautiful or serene work of art hanging on the walls of a white cube gallery or museum, there is also art that is loud, busy, discomforting, in your face and out of place from established norms. That they all exist and are worthy of consideration is what matters and a point that is hard to miss with even a brief perusal of the art made in Korea over the late twentieth-century.