Min Jeonggi, a founding member of *Reality and Utterance* (1979). From barbershop paintings into high-art corridors, then to Yangpyeong's sansu — four decades.
Late 1979. Reality and Utterance was founded.
Min Jeonggi (閔晶基, b. 1949) was a founding member. Through the group's official dissolution in 1990, he settled as a core figure of Korean minjung art. Forty-plus years since. Min Jeonggi's brush has passed through many sites in Korea's visual topography — from the kitschy barbershop paintings to Yangpyeong's sansu.
Bringing Barbershop Paintings Into the High-Art Corridor
Early Min Jeonggi brought the so-called barbershop painting — awkward, unrefined images — back into imitation and placed them inside the high-art corridor.
"He touched the self-awareness we all share — of living vulgar lives in a vulgar society." A critic's summary. An anti-aesthetic, Dadaist project. An allegory of a dark era. His early work was a provocation: placing the boundary between art and vulgarity itself on the exhibition stage.
A gaze of compassion that could not turn from the shadowed corners of popular life. That was Min Jeonggi's starting point and the tone that has stayed as undercurrent wherever he goes.
To the Forest, to the Land, to the Stratum
In 1987, Min Jeonggi moved to Yangpyeong, Gyeonggi. The move preceded Reality and Utterance's official dissolution (1990). And he began the work of pictorially recording human life — , flower-and-bird painting.
