Save Oh Yoon's muralfrom demolition. Bring it home.

Oh Yoon (1946–1986). In a life of just forty years he left some 400 works across painting, printmaking, and sculpture. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Cultural Merit (Jade Crown) in 2005, and a major retrospective followed at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in 2006. The weight of a life given to that work still reaches us today.

1974. He was twenty-eight. Discharged from the army on medical grounds, he was working at brick kilns in Gyeongju and Ilsan — handling clay, sweating beside the laborers. In that very period, Commercial Bank of Korea (today's Woori Bank) commissioned him to carve terracotta reliefs into the inner and outer walls of its Dongdaemun and Guui-dong branches. A young man who was himself a laborer, carving on both sides of a wall the laborers passed every day — a singular early example of Korean public art, made in an era when young artists were rarely entrusted with such work.

Even after carving this wall, the medium he devoted himself to most fiercely was woodblock printmaking. The rough laughter of Busan's markets, the sweat of dock workers, the people's vitality that turns crushed han (恨) into the rapture of dance — all of it he carved into wood with the edge of a blade. And those prints, pressed not by machine but by a spoon rubbed against paper, he gave away unsparingly — to the covers of poetry collections, to leaflets at workers' sites, to the illustrations of children's storybooks. ‘Art should be shared by everyone' — exactly as he said above.