Minjung Art and the Reclaim of Seoul’s Significance in the 1988 Olympics

When one talks about the Olympification of Seoul in the template for economic development in the summer of 1988, the manic preparation for the remote sphere of the city without access to public employment opportunities. The emergency of the social sphere in every class from the fishing village to subjects of interest patrol later displays the outrage of selective criterion for the first-time host of the worldwide event.

Minjung art is an emergency by side of a pro-democracy movement in the 1980s. The remembrance of the movement can be seen through a trace in a wide range of dissented practices within performance and conceptual and for that, the criticism slowly transpired to the 1970s. The connection between the realm of both freedom and imagination comes at an utterance in which the foundation of goal articulation can be seen in the amplification of the June Uprising in 1987. The sought critical perspective and the cultivation of sociocultural framework characterize a movement in the ethos of 1980s South Korea. The significance of Minjung arts is not limited to the scene of production but also criticism. It reveals a sense of “critical realism” and “critical modernism”. The Minjung movement can be seen as an antenna for the manifestation of pro-unification and pro-democracy in which the very act of engagement carries a sense of support for aesthetic experimentation of the anti-elitist subjectivity.

In the reference of form in the Global circa 1988, the day after Korea Central Daily with its announcement for the opening of the minjung exhibition, the manipulation of Korean-born and internationally based, Nam June Paik made an entrance onto the New York studio of broadcasting. The Seoul Olympics for that “Wrap Around the World” retransmit TV signals from 10 countries. This acts as a significant landmark for the Olympics in the sense that it was the first time in over a decade following the Cold War Olympics boycotts of the Olympics 1980 and 1984, that the United States and the Soviet Union were a part of. For the project entitled “Wrap Around the World” with the details of political significance within the Seoul Olympics, after the commencement of Paik’s project. Such interaction for the event compromises the possibility that humanity will become dismantled in their sense of hierarchical visual between the disintegration of both spatial and ideological borders.

Minjung art is an emergency by side of a pro-democracy movement in the 1980s. The remembrance of the movement can be seen through a trace in a wide range of dissented practices within performance and conceptual and for that, the criticism slowly transpired to the 1970s. The connection between the realm of both freedom and imagination comes at an utterance in which the foundation of goal articulation can be seen in the amplification of the June Uprising in 1987. The sought critical perspective and the cultivation of sociocultural framework characterize a movement in the ethos of 1980s South Korea. The significance of Minjung arts is not limited to the scene of production but also criticism. It reveals a sense of “critical realism” and “critical modernism”. The Minjung movement can be seen as an antenna for the manifestation of pro-unification and pro-democracy in which the very act of engagement carries a sense of support for aesthetic experimentation of the anti-elitist subjectivity.

Talking about the emergence of identity from Japan in 1945 through the direct participation of Korea through the resistance of colonial forces, the bargain in the trajectory of decolonization through historical narrative needs to be taken into consideration. Geopolitics with the relocation of identity through the cold-war system by the force of the US really dictates the dominant historical narrative of Korea’s modernity. Within Korea's postcolonial consciousness, a lingering sense of Korea’s consciousness where all contemporary ideological, social, and political remain within the sense of contingency. The longing and loss of the contribution for bloody civil war led to the emergency of an undemocratic system that divides both South and North Korea. For the criticism of South Korea’s postwar aesthetic to be deeply ingrained in the notion of anticommunism in which the state policy can be seen as a bewitching psyche in their pervasiveness. Thus, a sense of reconstitution in identity reveals a sense of cultural development in the embodiment of the Korean peninsula.

Considering the Soo Yoo Culture Exchange House that the collective of Korean artists and critics based in South Korea alongside the US comes to issue a proposal with multiple international venues. The conceiving of minjung art to be a political tribulation masked within the movement by the prominent rhetoric. It could be seen as a significant proposal for the compressed global space circulated in anticipation of the Seoul Olympics. Taking in the case of Underground of Sports Republic: Kim Dong-Won's Sanggye-dong Olympics, the request of Walworth for the exhibition to be captured by a documentary on the plight of a community in Seoul where the eviction and demolitions to be developed in the preparation for the Olympics. The video of the official Olympics advertisement is followed by flags from around the world. The opening of this image series for the placement of Kim’s video in the ambit of contemporaneous representation for the global space remained dramatized in the series of celebratory music. (Kim 1) An official reemergence of the world on the horizon for the pristine greenfield opens a series of images. Kim opens a video for the ambit of contemporaneous representation of global space dramatizing the marching of undivided political ideologies. For the contrast of video mounts in the aesthetic argument for the urban space with the addressing of the displacement that resulted from the South Korean government’s effort in the secure position of global networks of power. For Kim Dong-Won with an indirect identification alongside with involvement of the minjung cultural movement alongside with the exhibition show. (Kim 2) An acknowledgment of conceptual consistent immediate goals with a larger diversity of critical demonstration that is exclusive to the landmark of 1988 contemporary visual representation in the localized sites.

The case of Seoul in the connection to the world tends to reflect the exhibition in the New York art world where national identity remains symptomatic of the reflection acclaimed by North American audiences. For the problems of non-Korean in contributing to the interpretation of Korean critics for the artworks in her essay. The modernization of geographic disparate processes creates a sense of social interest in which the political investment is a force accessible to the outer immediate social situation that carries an ability to analyze the contextual logic of the artist's space. The production beyond the framework of problems such as identity politics reinforced a sense of non-Korean audience to endure the approach of minjung art in the already ensconced Western canon within the late 1980s.