A01=Sohl C. Lee
aesthetics of reality
American multiculturalism
art and democracy
art for women's liberation
Author_Sohl C. Lee
Category=AGA
Category=JBSL
Cold War modernism
Collective painting
conceptual art
counterpublics
decolonization
decolonizing modernism
democracy movement
dissent
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminism
General Park Chung Hee
Global Cold War
Global Conceptualism
global contemporary art
historiography
Hyonjang misul Site-contingent art
Japanese leftist art
Kolgae kurim Hanging picture
Korean modern art
Lee Han Yeol
mass protest
Metonym of democracy
Minjung art
Minsok Vernacular Folk
Nationalism and gender
New York City
North Korean socialist realism
origins of Minjung art
politics of aesthetics
post-revolution
postcolonial theory
pro-democracy movements
public murals
Pyongyang
Reality and Utterance
Reality Group
reproducibility
South Korea
South Korean democracy
state violence
Summer of 1987
Tokyo
transnational art history
Turong
vernacular mass culture
yosong art
Product details
- ISBN 9781478029809
- Weight: 572g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 21 Apr 2026
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Emerging as multifaceted cultural activism, the minjung (people’s) art movement defined the aesthetics of the pro-democracy movements in the 1970s and 1980s in South Korea. Tracing minjung art’s history and legacy, Sohl Lee explores how artists associated with the movement mobilized images, print, and performance to build movement publics and reimagine sovereignty. Hundreds of artists questioned the underlying assumptions of liberal democracies and the art-making practices of the global Cold War. Their decolonial critiques of international modernism were inseparable from reimagining democracy and refiguring the relationship between art and democracy. Recuperating overlooked performance-oriented practices and the protest aesthetics that helped usher in parliamentary democracy in 1987, Lee shows that South Korea’s globalization in the 1990s and its rise as cultural soft power in the new millennium cannot be understood apart from a pro-democracy culture that was both political and popular.
Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University.
