Join author Sohl Lee at Midnight Books for a special presentation on her recent publication The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a striking form of activist art emerged in South Korea during the mass pro-democracy struggles that culminated in the establishment of direct presidential elections in 1987. Known as the minjung (people’s) art movement (minjung misul undong), this multifaceted cultural activism defined the visual language of dissent under conditions shaped by authoritarian rule and the global Cold War. Drawing on Sohl Lee's recent book—the first comprehensive art historical study devoted to the artists and collectives of the movement—this talk argues that minjung art articulated what Lee calls the conjoined aspirations of decolonization and democracy. Hundreds of artists mobilized printmaking, murals, performance, and image circulation to build what she describe as movement publics, reimagining sovereignty not as a constitutional endpoint but as an ongoing collective practice.

Tracing the genealogy of these aspirations back to the late 1960s, the lecture examines key discursive concepts such as hyŏnsil (“reality”), hyŏnjang (“a site under transformation”), and hyŏnjang misul (“site-contingent art”). It also analyzes how artists critically reinterpreted precolonial visual traditions while mounting decolonial critiques of Cold War modernism. By recuperating overlooked protest aesthetics and performance-oriented practices, the talk shows that South Korea’s democratic transition—and its subsequent rise as a global cultural force—cannot be understood apart from this political and popular art movement. Minjung art ultimately expands the meaning of liberal democracy and offers an alternative genealogy for global contemporary art.

Thank you to Midnight Books for hosting this event, and organizers and community partners GYOPO, Women Cross DMZ, and Nodutdol.

Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), specializing in modern and contemporary Asian art, decolonial visual culture, socially engaged art, and ecological art history, with a particular interest in oceanic and transpacific frameworks. Her first book, The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2026), historicizes an influential movement of activist art from the 1970s and 1980s. Her current book project, “Seaweed as Method: Art History with Oceans, Multispecies Life, and Empire,” examines the global visual cultures of seaweeds through the intertwined lenses of ecology, decolonization, food sovereignty, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020) and has received grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), the Korea Foundation, the Korean Ministry of Culture, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Getty Research Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation, among others.

About the book:

The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea

Emerging as multifaceted cultural activism, the minjung (people’s) art movement defined the aesthetics of the pro-democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. Tracing minjung art’s history and legacy, Sohl Lee explores how artists associated with the movement mobilized images, print, and performance to build movement publics and reimagine sovereignty. Hundreds of artists questioned the underlying assumptions of liberal democracies and the art-making practices of the global Cold War. Their decolonial critiques of international modernism were inseparable from reimagining democracy and refiguring the relationship between art and democracy. Recuperating overlooked performance-oriented practices and the protest aesthetics that helped usher in parliamentary democracy in 1987, Lee shows that South Korea’s globalization in the 1990s and its rise as cultural soft power in the new millennium cannot be understood apart from a pro-democracy culture that was both political and popular.

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The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea

Book event with Sohl Lee at Midnight Books

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