A wide range of scholarship has explored these issues through the lenses of history, sociology, political science, feminism, communication, and memory studies. For instance, Su Young Choi and Younghan Cho (2017) offered early insights into Korea’s protest culture in the 2000s and 2010s, examining social media’s role in shaping counter-public spheres. Additionally, South Korean scholarship on the 1980s Minjung (people’s) art and cultural movement highlights how visual language contributed to the democratization movement and protest culture. Namhee Lee (2009) reexamines the Minjung movement through sources like underground pamphlets, newspapers and court documents. In art history, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Korea showcased major works from the Minjung art movement and contemporary socially engaged art in its exhibition The Square: Art and Society in Korea (2019–2020).
Building on these studies but focusing on the cutting-edge of contemporary visual landscape, this panel highlights creative forms of protest using the perspectives of socially engaged, eco-critical art history, visual culture, performance, and media studies. These disciplines and methods are increasingly essential for understanding the evolving forms of Korean protest culture today, as well as the intertextual narratives behind these creative protests.
This proposed interdisciplinary panel will contextualize artistic forms of protest appearing across various spaces in Korea, addressing key social issues that remain unresolved. Hong KAL explores how photographs of victims of the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster—captured by their families and created by artists—appear across memorial sites, classrooms, streets, and exhibitions, acting as dynamic mediums that connect the deceased with the living. Vicki Kwon discusses how women artists leading Gangjeong peace activism on Jeju Island use ecofeminism and feminist antimilitarism in their fight against the doctrine of national defense and development, and how they communicate this struggle through art that embodies attentive viewing. Hayana Kim investigates how technology is reconfiguring protest practices by analyzing the 2016 hologram protest staged by Amnesty Korea in Gwanghwamun Plaza, arguing that technological mediation can serve as a powerful intervention in political discourse. Christine Choi examines Gina Kim’s VR film trilogy—Bloodless, Tearless, Comfortless—as a critical intervention into the historical erasure of U.S. military comfort women, Korean women who engaged in sex work in camptowns surrounding American military bases after World War II. While KAL and Kwon examine the power of art in generating empathy with socially marginalized victims and nonhuman beings through visual art, performance, and exhibitions, Kim and Choi explore the affordances of visual and technological representations of the trauma experienced by marginalized publics, and the risks of creating public spectacles through these very technologies
Together, this panel analyzes these artistic media as forms of protest, considering their narratives, sensorial elements, and their power to generate affect, and thus change among citizens. It also explores the ethics of representing the suffering of the marginalized communities, the efficacy of art in offering collective witnessing and mourning, demanding justice, and creating empathy. This panel aims to provide a more critical and attentive understanding of the festival-like mass protests that combine art and pop culture in public spaces.
This panel consists of scholars at various stages of their careers, representing different generations and institutions. After each panelist delivers a 12-minute presentation, the chair and presider will lead an unstructured discussion with the audience and the panelists.