THE VISUAL CULTURAL TURN FOR DECOLONIAL DEMOCRACY

Focusing on the early years of the arguably best-known artist group of the minjung art movement, Reality and Utterance (est. 1979), this chapter identifies the group’s experimentation with the exhibition platform—by way of thematized shows—as a singularly important contribution to the politics of aesthetics in 1980s South Korea. The examination of exhibition themes like urban visual culture and the Korean War is interwoven with close readings of select individual artists and their works, each of which as an “utterance” intimated an expanded spatiotemporality of what artists considered the neocolonial hegemony of Korean modern art. While the artist group was often accused of having an elitist position within the minjung art movement, at the heart of their inquiry was the question of vernacular mass culture and of audience as much as the question of realist aesthetics and artistic consciousness in postcolonial Korea.