1. Woori Bank
Informed the buyer of the artwork's existence during the sale.
A citizens' petition to preserve Oh Yoon's 1973 terracotta artwork and restore estate rights
Gathering 10,000 names — now
A relief carved in 1973 — about to vanish, fifty years on.
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.
1973. He was twenty-seven. 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, together with fellow artists Oh Kyung-hwan and Yoon Kwang-ju, to carve terracotta reliefs into the interior walls of its Dongdaemun and Guui-dong branches. Young men who were laborers themselves, carving at a spot the laborers passed every day.
Even after carving this relief, 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.



This spring the building was sold. But three sequential acts have opened a path to preservation.
Informed the buyer of the artwork's existence during the sale.
Recognised the work's value, contacted the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, located the artist's family, and reached out personally.
Oh Yoon's family has actively wished for the work to be preserved and transferred to public ownership.
With citizens' hands added now, the work returns to all of us.
We ask Seoul's next mayor and the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism
to take responsibility for
the safe removal, preservation, and transfer of Oh Yoon's 1973 Guui-dong terracotta relief.
Just your name, email, and phone — that's all it takes.
↓ SignIf you would like to put your name forward more firmly, join the citizen committee. Your name appears on the founding declaration.
↓ Check the committee box on the formSend this page to just five people. If they each pass it to five more, we reach 10,000 names together.
↓ ShareFrom this August, the building will be torn down and replaced. In that process, the work disappears.
Note
If citizens' names are not gathered now, a work that endured fifty years is finally lost.
This petition is a citizens' movement begun by the Korea Smart Cooperative (an artists' cooperative). Hand in hand with Oh Yoon's family, the cooperative has taken on the work's conservation removal and public transfer, and has signed an artwork removal agreement with the buyer.
The Oh Yoon Artwork Preservation Committee will be founded in early May, gathering co-chairs and members from the art world, civil society, and academia.
The list of co-chairs will be posted here as soon as it is confirmed.
SAF (Seed Art Festival) 2026 is a mutual-aid platform easing financial discrimination against Korean artists. The conditions a living artist deserves (mutual-aid loans), and the place a departed artist's work deserves to reach (the Oh Yoon petition) — different in kind, but the same intent: restoring the social standing of Korean artists and the public value of their work.
About SAFCommemorating together
Oh Yoon (吳潤, 1946–1986), the artist who carved the very terracotta relief this petition seeks to save in 1973. He carved the shadow of his era and the cheers of the public square onto a single blade, and left us in the summer of his fortieth year.
The 100 or so woodblock prints Oh Yoon left behind remain a spiritual map of Korean people's art in the 1980s, and a body of imagery that still touches the public closer than any other. In his hands, the carving knife was not a tool but a question put to its time; a single print was not merely a picture but the faces of countless unnamed people. Forty years after his passing, his cuts still ask us — whose faces are we keeping unforgotten?
To mark Oh Yoon's 40th anniversary, SAF has prepared a special exhibition that opens his world of work to citizens once more. From the 1985 Song of the Blade series to the 1996 posthumous print collection, scattered plates are gathered in one place — and you can follow them slowly, with curated text alongside each work, tracing what the artist was asking and what he meant to inscribe. It is a place where you can meet, work by work, the full range of Oh Yoon that a single Guui-dong terracotta relief could never tell on its own.
When those who have added their names to this petition also meet the artist's broader world of work, this movement becomes more than protecting a single relief — it becomes the citizens' way of remembering an artist's era together. Welcoming a single work into your home is itself another way of carrying the departed artist's beliefs forward to the living artists of today: proceeds from each sale fund mutual-aid loans for working artists, rebuilding the place his lifelong colleagues deserve.

Also worth seeing
His art, and the future of fellow artists
Meet the spirit of an era carved into roughly 100 woodblock prints. Every purchase becomes a mutual aid loan fund — carrying the artist's belief into today's living artists.
SAF is a mutual-aid fund built by artists, for artists facing financial discrimination. Artwork sales fund low-interest loans that reach working Korean artists directly. Becoming a member makes you part of that solidarity.
He left in the summer of his fortieth year — and the faces he carved are still here with us today.
Thank you for adding your signature. You can keep exploring Oh Yoon's other works and the lineage of Korean Minjung art at Seed Art Festival.
Oh Yoon's 1973 work faces demolition after 50 years.
Now let us protect it together.
Bring Oh Yoon's work into citizens' hands.
Sign now