Rendering the real: Shin Hak-chul and the politics of modernism and realism in contemporary Korean art

Abstract This article interrogates the entrenched binary between modernism and realism in postwar Korean art through an analysis of the multifaceted practice of Shin Hak-chul (b. 1943). While often associated with 1980s minjung (people’s) art, Shin’s work resists reductive classification, exploring both modernist experimentation and realist critique. From the 1960s to the 1980s, his trajectory challenged the formalism of institutional modernism while reimagining the conceptual, affective, and material scope of realism. Examining his use of object-installation, photomontage, sculpture, and painting, this study shows how his work rendered the real as a convergence of material presence, perceptual immediacy, and historical consciousness. Central to the analysis is Shin’s Modern Korean History series (1980–1985), which exemplifies what I term “monumental corporeality”: a visual language of embodied memory and historical trauma. Situating Shin’s practice within both the Korean art world and broader postwar currents, the article advances an original, elastic historiography of contemporary Korean art – one attentive to how artists negotiated intersecting esthetic and sociohistorical imperatives amid rapid modernization. More broadly, it reframes realism as both a critical method and a transhistorical form within global debates over history, form, and representation.