This dissertation examines connections between North and South Korean art during the late Cold War period. Despite the radical social and political differences between the two countries, in the 1980s and early 1990s conspicuous connections emerged between the work of state-sponsored North Korean artists and South Korean artists associated with the minjung democratization movement. Throughout this time period artists on both sides of the peninsula employed various modes of realism in order to advance the project of reunification through aesthetics. The works they produced vacillated between reflecting actual conditions on the peninsula and projecting a utopian socialist future founded on three primary thematic supports: student activism, collectivism, and nativism. I argue that by collapsing art historical distinctions between propaganda or “totalitarian art” and politically engaged art directed against capitalism, these works approached the issue of reunification in more complex and dynamic ways than the minjung cultural movement itself, or the two Korean governments, which remained preoccupied with spectacles of national homogeneity.

Creator

• Gabriel, Douglas

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-vbgx-n420

Subject

• Art history

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14681
• etdadmin_upload_663166

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright