TO BRING BACK TO LIFE

Focusing on the summer months of 1987, this chapter offers a historical investigation into the emergence of mass protest aesthetics as a process of transforming participating citizens’ relationship with art and also with democracy. The chapter traces how an image of the student martyr Lee Han Yeol undergoes multiple iterations on different bases as it emerges as the image of protest against police brutality: first, as a palm-size woodcut print made by the carpenter-turned-artist Choi Byung-soo based on a journalist’s photograph; second, as a mass-produced silk screen print worn by activists; and last, as a large hanging picture displayed outdoors. The chapter explores the state violence against citizens and artworks at the height of South Korea’s pro-democracy movement, just as it shows how the materiality and performativity of protest objects opened an era of newly defined relationships between art and democracy. Art is theorized as the metonym of democracy.