This dissertation is about Shin Hak-chul’s The series of Korean Modern·Contemporary History, which was a great result of 1980s Minjoong Art. The series of Korean Modern·Contemporary history works are considered as the most typical art of the published history paintings from 1980s Minjoong Art. The works were also known for it created a beauty of structure based on modernism, which was not just a reconstruction of a historical event. Shin Hak-chul’s history paintings continued even after the 1990s and continuously questioned about the role of Art as social statement. Therefore, it was a work which shows the attribute of visual culture reflecting the symptoms and features of that era.
Minjoong Art was the social communication with art and a Realism Art Movement based on visualizing neglected people’s real life. Shin Hak-chul joined the Minjoong Art movement by his the series of Korean Modern·Contemporary History starting from 1980s Korean Modern History 1. However Shin Hak-chul was an artist of affiliation with Modernism which was emphasizing purity of art starting ever since his college year. He started as an artist at ‘Korean Avant-garde Association(AG)’ with objets in 1970s. Before joining ‘AG’, he worked on Pop Art and Surrealism. On the other hand, Shin Hak-chul changed his point of view of the world and art by denying Modernism Art’s self-contradiction. It was put together to his piece by his doubts and introspections of the art and reality of the 1970s dark political situation and the resistance of the new consumer society. The Korean Modern History work was born in these changes and opened the gate to history painting in Minjoong Art.
The Korean Modern History work saw Korea’s problem was from Japanese colony’s dividing system. And criticized the problem of politic powers living on the contradiction of the system. This was visualizing the Korean modern history from the public’s point of view, which was put to silence until then by the nation.
The Korean Modern History work shows the optimistic view and the failure that came along with the 1987, ‘June Resistance’, which was the turning point of the Korean modern history. The ‘June Resistance’ ended as a perfunctorily democratization, leaving the old system’s problem unsolved. Shin Hak-chul exposed the selfish snobbery of the a historical hierarchies and the middle class, who brought failure to the ‘June Resistance’. The Korean Contemporary History-Invocation of the Spirit of a Deceased work was a report on the fabrication of the history settling operation after the middle 1990s. And it has the character of a monument memorial for a bad accident by remembering in Shin Hak-chul’s formative language of the people who were falling back in to the past for the political investigation and the social unification from the advanced democracy’s space.
Shin Hak-chul history painting’s middle evaluation, Gapsoonyee and Gapdolyee-Korean Contemporary History (2002), was a piece that restructured the Korean modern history by gathering the individual’s memory instead of the public. It meant that change of history was not a record of facts from the past of the nation or the people. It was rather the creation and destruction of the individual’s memory and desire that created the history. It was not a perpendicular social structure where it was divided in to ruling caste and subjugated class that created history, it was when everyone were a minority and were tied up together. Furthermore, the change from vertical to horizontal composition in works reflected the change in artist’s historical awareness and Korea society after the 1990s.
Shin Hak-chul’s The series of Korean Modern·Contemporary History did not intend to formally reconstruct the historical accidents and chose to go with modernism. The combination and intended collision between the advertising image of consumer society and the pictures recording historical accidents created a montage, which catched the dynamic change of the whole Korean society. And the surreal muscle-mechanic mass, born by montage, showed the suppressed wounds and the monster like created by the Korean modern history’s compressed modernization. Shin Hak-chul’s The series of Korean Modern·Contemporary History were a layout of creation between the piece and the tension of reality, and a visualization of the artist’s introspect of the reality which will go on as long as the society exists.