An examination of Korea’s modern history.

This year is the 40th anniversary of the May 18 Democratization Movement. It marks a civic demonstration in 1980, which was a pivotal event in South Korea that catalyzed its move toward democracy. Spring of Democracy is commissioned by the Gwangju Biennale Foundation to remember this defining moment in South Korea’s history.

The exhibition is organized across two floors of Art Sonje Center in Seoul. On one floor, viewers are first invited to walk back in time, weaving their way between photographs taken by Korean journalists during the ten days of civic resistance against the military government and works of art generated over the span of four decades that represent various moments of this important democratization movement and its resonance in contemporary South Korean society. Presented works include woodcut prints from the 1980s by Hong Sung-dam, one of the key figures of minjung art (people’s art) movement, and Yeon-gyun Kang’s iconic painting Between Heaven and Earth I (1981), usually housed at the Donggang University Museum in Gwangju that documents the first hand experience of these intense days of brutality, literally depicting the blood on the streets. Other works, made in the 2000s for the Gwangju Biennale, by South Korean artists, such as Navigation ID, From X to A (2014) by Minouk Lim or Heaven and Earth (2007) by Lee Bul, link the democratization movement in their native country to wider histories of state repression and Cold War conflict. The monoprints Dust to Dust (2014) by Romanian artist Mircea Suciu and Permanent Holydays, how come some leave and others stay behind? (2016), a film by the Mexican artist collective, Cooperativa Cráter Invertido, draw from diverse archival materials and references to recent global histories of protest to create their own languages of the archival.

Spring of Democracy, furthermore, reviews how documentation of the civilians' resistance has permeated popular culture through cinematic imagination. Gwangju Story (1996), photographs by South Korean photographer Heinkuhn Oh that he took on the film set of A Petal (1996), a re-enactment of the 1980 uprising, and Escaping Gwangju (2000), posters of a imagined film about a low ranking solider in the South Korean army attempting to escape the memory of torture, span both floor levels of the exhibition. These works offer a bridge between the images taken by journalists in May 1980 and a cinematic language that appeals to audiences too young to have been present themselves.

All images courtesy of Gwangju Biennale