Editor: Sohl Lee
Author: Kim Chang-nam, Namhee Lee, Sohl Lee, Wan-kyung Sung
Publisher: Hyunsil Publishing, 2013
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From the distributor’s website:
Many artworks from recent South Korean history are located in the nebulous but fertile contact zone between public/popular culture and democracy movements. Being Political Popular attempts a thematically focused and historically interventionist inquiry into the current status of South Korean contemporary art, exploring the work of 17 artists and art collectives.
Being Political Popular documents the complex lines of thinking that scholars such as Chang-nam Kim, Namhee Lee, and Wan-kyung Sung have nurtured on the topics of the popular music and resistant youth culture of the 1970s, the politics of minjung subjectivity during the 1980s democracy movement, and the 1980s minjung art movement. The book also includes artists’ writings and manifestos by Minouk Lim, mixrice, Hein-kuhn Oh, and Sangdom Kim–primary materials that provide the reader with a closer look at their art-making. It serves as a reader’s gateway to the recent history of South Korean visual arts and public culture, marking the beginning of a more nuanced and multifaceted investigation of the South Korean aesthetics of politics.
Table of Contents
Sohl Lee
- Introduction: Between Minjung and Taejung
- Sites of Resistant Collectivity: Choi Byung-soo, Kim Dong-won, Labor News Collective, Park Jae-dong.
- Reenacting History: Kim Min-gi, Hong Sung-dam, Hein-kuhn Oh
- Between One and Many: siren eun young jung, mixrice, Minouk Lim
- Seoul Tour / Pyongyang Express: Chan-kyong Park, Seung Woo Back, listen to the city
- The Past is the Future: Park Bul-dong, Nam Gung Ho Seok
- Play to Fly: Sangdon Kim, Minari and Hack
- A letter to the future of Korean Art
Minouk Lim
- The (Im)Possibility of Art as Life
Namhee Lee
- Minjung, History, and the Crisis of Historical Subjectivity
Chang-nam Kim
- Kim Min-gi and the 1970s Korean Youth Culture
Wan-kyung Sung
- The Rise and Fall of Minjung Art