Cut, Paste,
and Read the World

Park Bul-ttong's tools are elementary: scissors, glue, a printed page. The method — photomontage — has a lineage reaching back to the Berlin Dadaists and Russian Constructivists of the early twentieth century, who discovered that cutting images out of their original contexts and placing them in new ones could produce meanings their sources never intended. That discovery was itself political: it revealed that no image is neutral, that every photograph is already an argument.

In the Korea of the 1980s, this technique acquired particular urgency. Newspapers and magazines operated under strict state censorship; the visual landscape of public life was shaped by a media apparatus that served military power. Park's move was to take those same images — the glossy surfaces through which power projected itself — and cut them apart. To take the president's portrait and reassemble it into a new image; to take the advertisement and splice it with the factory; to take the hero and show the body behind the propaganda.

The resulting photomontages are then photographed and reprinted, producing works in which the distinction between “original” and “reproduction” is deliberately dissolved. The hand-made collage is only a step; the final printed work is simultaneously original and copy. In a society where the state controlled images and declared some of them subversive, Park's insistence that there is no single original — that images circulate, multiply, and can be seized by anyone — is itself an act of defiance.

In the summer of 1985, a group of young Korean artists organized an exhibition at the Arab Cultural Center in Seoul under the title Korean Art, The Power of the 20s. Park Bul-ttong was among those who planned and contributed works. The police entered the venue, confiscated works on display, and arrested artists who protested the crackdown. It was the first exhibition in the history of Korean art to be forcibly closed by the state.

The suppression failed in its purpose. Soon afterward, the confrontation catalyzed the founding of the Minjung Misul Hyeopuihoe (민족미술협의회) — the National Artists' Association — which became the organizational backbone of the minjung art movement through the late 1980s. Park took part in the movement and continued as a member of its successor associations: the Korean Minjung Art Association (민족미술협회) and the Federation of Korean Artists (민족예술인총연합회).

Through Geurimadang Min (그림마당 민) — the primary exhibition space of the minjung art movement in Seoul — Park mounted three major solo shows in the late 1980s and early 1990s: 〈Nunbit〉 (눈빛, 1985, Gwanhun Gallery), 〈Joljak〉 (졸작, 1987), and 〈Gyeolsa Bandae〉 (결사반대, 1989). Each title carries a characteristic Park Bul-ttong ambiguity — “mediocre work,” “resolute opposition” — that pairs self-deprecation with political sharpness, collapsing the distance between the artist's posture and the work's edge.

The targets of Park Bul-ttong's collages have remained consistent across four decades: military dictatorship, the machinery of capital, and the visual culture of mass media through which both project their power. What distinguishes his approach from agitprop is the form itself — the collage does not illustrate a political position; it enacts one. By demonstrating that any image can be cut apart and made to mean something different, it performs the act of critique rather than simply announcing it.

The 1992 solo exhibition 〈Confession on the Disability of Desire〉 (관능의 불구에 대한 자백) at Kumho Museum of Art marked a mature statement of this method, bringing together the political and the psychic — desire, censorship, and the body — within the collage frame. Subsequent major shows, including 〈Alchemy of Daily Life〉 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2004, extended the practice into new registers: consumerism, everyday routine, and the slow violence embedded in ordinary visual life.

The retrospective 〈Park Bul-ttong 1985–2016〉 at Gallery 175 in 2016 gathered three decades of work and confirmed what critics and institutions had already recognized: that the collage practice Park began in the years of military rule had not been a response to a historical moment but a method capable of addressing any moment in which images are used to manage perception. The Seoul Museum of Art holds works from across his career as part of its permanent collection — evidence that a practice born from scissors and newspapers has earned its place in the documentary record of Korean contemporary art.