Research Question: How has the South Korean democratization movement in the 1980s influenced the emergence and decline of Minjungmisul(People’s art)?
Minjungmisul — Minjung art is the South Korean political and populist art movement which emerged in 1980. The movement started when the progressive artists participated in the democratization movement as a result of their introspection towards the popular Western abstract art, which neglected the social changes occurring around them.
Although Korea was a democratic country from the moment we elected our first president in 1948. However, as human’s desire for power never disappears, until the June 29 Declaration was announced in 1987, Korea was never a truly democratic country. During the 1970s and 1980s, the military took the power of the state and they repressed the nation. As a result, starting from the 1970s, people began to rise up against the government and slowly moved closer to democratization. And in the midst of this movement, Minjungmisul, emerged to raise awareness and stimulate the Minjung(People) rather than staying in their studio creating Western art.
For my research, I want to focus on the rise and decline of the Minjunmisul in relations to the democratization movement that marks an important period in Korean History. There is nothing more important than knowing our past to move on to a better future. I proudly claimed myself to know a lot about history, but I was ignorant of the history that really mattered. And it was two years ago when a movie called 1987 released that I started to feel the importance of knowing all of the histories, even though some time periods are boring and dismal.
Because this is a part of history is most significant to Korea as it reflects on an internal turmoil, there won’t be a lot of resources on this subject in the English based databases. Therefore in order to conduct this research, I would have to focus on Korean websites to find relevant and reliable sources. Like Google Scholar, there is a NAVER Academic, and there are also government run databases that stores articles and news.
In my research, I will mostly focus on researching the arts during the Gwangju Democratic Movement and the June Democratic movement, especially on the widely used arts that sparked the uprising of the people against the corrupt government. And as of the establishment of the Sixth Republic, in relation to the recline in protests, I will also research how the Minjunmisul declined.
