History stacks vertically
through a single body

When Shin Hak-chul graduated from Hongik University in 1968, Korean modernism was dominated by monochrome abstraction. He was part of the generation that contested it: joining the AG (Korean Avant-garde Association) exhibitions from 1970, he worked through objet, installation, and photographic collage across the 1970s — a period when using a photograph as raw material was itself a formal provocation.

The turn came not from theory but from a book. Encountering the photo anthology A Century of Korea in Photographs in 1978, he was struck by the accumulated weight of documentary image: this was not aesthetic material but evidence — of colonization, war, and the daily violence of modern Korean history. From that encounter forward, photographic images from newspapers, magazines, and textbooks became the primary medium. The goal was no longer formal innovation but testimony: to show that what happened, happened.

The 〈Korean Modern History〉 series, begun around 1980, is the direct result. Where his peers were refining their monochrome surfaces, Shin was cutting and stacking — bodies, machinery, crowd photographs, maps — into vertical columns that compressed a century of history into a single image. The modernist became a witness, and the witness built archives.

The key formal choice in the 〈Korean Modern History〉 and 〈Korean Contemporary History〉 series is vertical compression. Western history painting arranges events horizontally — a frieze of time. Shin's photomontages stack them. Bodies occupy the full height of the canvas: a foot planted in the peasant uprisings of the late nineteenth century; a torso bearing the colonial period; a head breaking through the surface of the 1980s. A single body contains multiple eras. Time is not narrated; it is geological.

The series spans forty years from 1980 to 2021 — around forty major works. Among the most significant: 〈Korean Modern History — Who Said They Saw the Sky?〉 (1989, MMCA collection) and 〈Korean Modern History — Synthesis〉 (1982–83, MMCA). In these canvases, unnamed figures — not leaders or heroes — are the protagonists of Korean history, a formal argument about who carries the weight of a nation's past.

Critics have described the series as establishing a new form of critical figuration within Korean art — the photomontage not as experiment but as political archive. For four decades, from the first wave of minjung art through to the 2021 works, the series has remained the most sustained single-artist reckoning with Korean modern history in the medium of painting.

In 1987, Shin Hak-chul completed 〈Rice Planting〉 — a photomontage depicting farmers bent in the act of planting rice, a scene of collective labour and the desire for reunification embedded in its imagery. It was exhibited at the 1987 National Art Association Reunification Exhibition.

In September 1989, prosecutors determined that the work constituted subversive material in praise of North Korea under the National Security Act. The painting was seized. Shin was detained and charged. He was acquitted in the first trial, and acquitted again on appeal. In 1998 the Supreme Court sent the case back for retrial; in August 1999 he was convicted — ten months, suspended, with the work confiscated.

The case did not end there. In 2004, the United Nations Human Rights Committee — the treaty body monitoring compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — ruled that the Republic of Korea had violated Article 19 of the Covenant (freedom of expression) and recommended redress. It was the first time a UN human rights body had ruled on a South Korean artwork.

The painting has been held in MMCA custody since 2018. Its legal rehabilitation has not been enacted. The work remains a singular case in the global history of art and law: a painting prosecuted, acquitted, convicted, condemned by an international body — and still waiting.