Reactivating Tradition: Indigenous Genealogies in the Minjung Art Movement

How did tradition become a method of political resistance? Focusing on South Korea’s minjung (people’s) art movement of the 1970s and 1980s, this lecture examines how artists transformed Buddhist visual traditions, folk imagery, communal performance, and ritual practices into new forms of artistic activism. Rather than reviving tradition, they strategically reactivated it, turning inherited visual and performative forms into methods of confronting colonial legacies, Cold War developmentalism, and authoritarian rule. In doing so, minjung art reimagined democracy as a cultural practice and proposed an alternative genealogy for global contemporary art.

Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University (SUNY). Her first book, The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2026), is the first comprehensive art historical study of South Korea’s influential movement of activist art during the 1970s and 1980s. She is currently completing Seaweed as Method: Art History with Oceans, Multispecies Life, and Empire, which explores the global visual cultures of seaweed through the lenses of ecology, decolonization, food sovereignty, and Indigenous knowledge.