Painting the Korean Land
into Memory

In late 1979, as Korea's political climate lurched from the assassination of President Park Chung-hee into the military coup of December 12th, a group of young artists and critics gathered with a shared conviction: Korean art had grown blind to the world outside its studios. The collective they formed — twelve artists including Min Joung-ki, Oh Yoon, Im Ok-sang, and Ju Jae-hwan, together with four critics — called themselves Reality and Utterance (현실과 발언).

Their inaugural exhibition opened on 17 October 1980 at the Munye Jinheungwon Art Hall in Seoul. On the opening night, the venue authorities — deeming the works politically suspect — turned off all the electricity. The artists lit candles and exhibited anyway. That candlelight exhibition became one of the defining images of Korean minjung art: a refusal, in near darkness, to let art be silenced.

Min's contribution to those early years was his so-called “barber-shop paintings” — oil paintings that deliberately reproduced the unsophisticated, kitschy images typically found on the walls of ordinary Korean barbershops. The gesture was anti-aesthetic in the most precise sense: an argument that the official art world's devotion to abstract formalism was itself a form of cultural exclusion. If the art world prized refinement, Min would bring the street inside. Art, he argued, should communicate in the language ordinary people already knew.

Reality and Utterance remained active through the decade, producing a succession of thematic exhibitions, and dissolved officially in 1990. But its impact lasted far longer: it became the institutional seed of the minjung art movement that reshaped Korean contemporary art through the 1980s, and its archives are now held by the Seoul Museum of Art.

In April 2018, the historic inter-Korean summit between President Moon Jae-in and Chairman Kim Jong-un was held at the Peace House in Panmunjeom. The cameras of the world were fixed on the two men — and on the enormous painting behind them. Min Joung-ki's 「Panoramic View of Bukhansan」 (북한산 전도, 2007), held in the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), had been selected to hang in the ceremonial room.

The painting is a monumental work: over 500-ho in scale (264.5 × 452.5 cm), completed over more than six months. Its approach departs from Western single-point perspective — multiple viewpoints from different times are fused into a single image, so that the mountain is seen simultaneously as it appears from several vantage points and at several seasons. Kim Jong-un, it was reported, asked how the technique was achieved. The mountain in the painting is called Bukhansan — the great mountain that rises on Seoul's northern edge — but it is also, seen from the north, the ridge that signals the capital of the South. In that room, the painting became something it was not painted to be: a landscape of division and the possibility of its ending.

The episode crystallised what Min's landscape practice had long been about: painting the land not as scenery but as territory — as political and historical ground. A work made in Yangpyeong in 2007, from direct observation of a mountain north of Seoul, traveled to Panmunjeom in 2018 and became the backdrop for one of the most-watched diplomatic moments of the decade. The land, in Min's hands, carries more weight than paint.

In the winter of 1987, Min Joung-ki left Seoul. He had spent the early part of his career in the urban social satire of the Reality and Utterance years: barber-shop paintings, grotesque cityscapes, the language of mass-culture kitsch deployed as critique. He moved to Yangpyeong and converted a cowshed into a studio. He stayed.

What followed was a decade-long renegotiation with the landscape itself. Yangpyeong sits in the upper Han River basin, ringed by mountains. Direct encounter with that specific topography — walking the ridgelines, sketching in the fields, observing the light change across seasons — pulled his practice away from social allegory and toward actual-scene painting (실경화). From the 1990s, his work drew on the Korean tradition of jinggyeong sansuhwa— “true-view landscape painting” — the practice of painting places as they actually exist rather than as idealized or imaginary scenery.

But Min's approach departed from simple realism. His panoramic compositions fuse multiple viewpoints and time-layers into a single image: what appears on the canvas is not any single walk through a landscape but a humanistic synthesis — the history of the place, the labor embedded in its terrain, the slow accumulation of time that makes a mountain more than rock and light. The land in his paintings is read, not merely seen.

The effect of his move extended beyond his own practice. Over the years, more than three hundred artists established studios in the Yangpyeong area, drawn in part by the precedent he had set. He had opened the cowshed and stayed; they followed. In this respect too, Min Joung-ki embodies the spirit of this campaign — not as a subject of hardship but as someone who made conditions possible for those who came after.