Minjung art

In 1979 artists including Kim Jeong-heon and Oh Yoon, with critics, founded Reality and Utterance, challenging the modernist art that dominated the scene and criticising dansaekhwa for turning away from reality. In the 1980s the work moved into protests as banners, posters and pamphlets. Woodblock prints, which can be printed in quantity and passed around, became a favoured medium, alongside oil painting, collage and photomontage, mostly in a figurative, narrative style that showed the plight of workers and farmers. In 1985 police sealed off the exhibition The Power of the Twenties and removed more than thirty works; it was also that year that minjung misul became the standard term. In 1989 Shin Hak-chul's oil painting Rice Planting was confiscated under the National Security Act.

Look at the black and white of the woodcuts: where the knife cut the wood away, no ink is printed and the paper stays white; only the surface left standing prints black. Follow the direction and width of the cuts.

Was this work made to hang in a gallery, or to be carried into the street?

• Dansaekhwa 단색화→Minjung artists defined themselves against dansaekhwa of the same period, which they saw as distant from the public.