A painting hung in the street,
a cry to the world

On the afternoon of June 9, 1987, Lee Han-yeol — a second-year student at Yonsei University — was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired by police during a pro-democracy demonstration. A Reuters photographer, Jeong Taewon, captured the moment: Lee collapsing, held up by a fellow student, blood on his face. The image went out over the wire and circled the globe.

Choe Byeongsu, working with members of Yonsei University's “Manhwasarang” (comic art) club, took that photograph and expanded it into a 걸개그림 approximately 7 metres wide by 10 metres tall. The banner was hung from the walls of Yonsei University and carried through the streets during the funeral procession when Lee Han-yeol died from his injuries on July 5, 1987 — twenty-five days after he was struck.

The image worked the way great protest art works: it made the individual into the collective. One young man's face, rendered ten metres high, became the face of everyone who had been beaten, suppressed, or silenced. In the weeks and months that followed — as millions took to the streets and the Roh Tae-woo government conceded direct presidential elections in the June 29th Declaration — 〈Save Hanryeol〉 was everywhere. It is now considered one of the emblematic images of the June 1987 democracy movement and of Korean minjung art.

There is something fitting about the way Choe Byeongsu became an artist. He went to a mural site to help — to build the scaffolding, to make the physical structure through which others could paint. A police officer detained him, asked his occupation, and when he said “carpenter,” wrote “painter” on the report. The state, attempting suppression, authored an identity instead.

This biographical detail matters not as anecdote but as structure. Choe had no formal training, no art school pedigree, no gallery connections. What he had was the ability to make things with his hands — to build what needed building — and a political consciousness sharpened by years of laboring alongside people who were excluded from power. The tradition of 걸개그림 suited him precisely because it required craft over theory: you needed to know how to stretch a surface across a large frame, how to scale a small image to a monumental one, how to ensure the work would survive being carried through the streets in the rain.

By joining the mural division of the Minjung Misul Hyeopuihoe in 1987, Choe found a context — artists working collectively, for political purposes, in public space — that matched both his skills and his convictions. His biography is not the exception in the minjung art movement; it is the rule. Many of the artists who made the most enduring work of that era came from outside the formal art world, and brought with them the knowledge of how ordinary Koreans actually lived.

In 1988, the year after 〈Save Hanryeol〉, Choe Byeongsu turned toward a different kind of urgency. The democracy struggle had been one form of the question of how human beings treat one another and the world they share; environmental art posed the same question at a larger scale — toward the living systems that sustain all of it.

Over the following decades, he developed an environmental and ecological practice that took him across the world. Works were presented at venues abroad as well as across Korea — installations engaging with climate, the natural world, and what is at risk. His practice in this mode is less extensively documented than the iconic banner work of 1987, but it represents the majority of his creative life: a sustained engagement with the living world, carried on through the same directness and handmade physicality that characterized his protest banners.

The book 『목수, 화가에게 말 걸다』 (A Carpenter Speaks to a Painter, 2006), co-authored with critic Kim Jinsong, offers the most sustained account of his journey from labor to protest art to ecological practice — a biography that tracks, across four decades, the through-line between political urgency and environmental urgency. They are, Choe's life suggests, not different concerns but the same concern at different scales.