This dissertation is the first monograph on social realist art in South Korea. Defying mainstream Modernism such as Impressionism combined with Academic conventions during the Japanese occupation (1910--1945) and abstraction in post-Korean War (1950--1953) South Korea, socially critical art, commonly called minjok (national) or minjung (ordinary people) art, emerged in 1980. Modernist art idealized a permanent, essential and metaphysical idea of nation and its harmonious relationship with the trajectory of modernization, or Westernization, of Korean society. On the other hand, social realist artists represented the contradiction between the state-sponsored idealistic nationalism and the minjung's uprooted life in the pursuit of Western values and materialism. They sought to re/locate historical positions of their personal identities with regard to minjung-oriented nationalism, and anticipated, reflected, and participated in the nationwide democratization movement centered on the creation of historical subjectivity during the 1980s. Specifically this study examines the work of first two social realist groups, Reality and Utterance (Hyoˇnsilgwa baloˇn, 1980--1988) and Imsullyoˇn (1982--1987), and a prominent social realist artist Shin Hak-chul (b.1943).;From a methodological point of view, this study uses Fredric Jameson's concept of "national allegories" implicit in third-world cultural productions as the equivalent to his own definition of "postmodernism"---the fragmented and isolated cultural expression of the current stage of capitalism in the US-led first world. Third-world "national allegories" reveal a blind spot of first-world postmodernism, a totalizing vision of the global system. In this way, South Korean social realism embodied an expression of resistance against the standardizing ideology of multinational capitalism. After the Kwangju Biennale was founded in 1995, social realism again offered, within and outside the Biennale, an alternative to an attempt to substitute the supposedly centerless multiculturalism and globalization for the old notion of modernization. In an increasingly ambiguous boundary between the global system and South Korea as its subsystem, the future of South Korean social realism, particularly in relation to the nation's most urgent agenda---the reunification of South and North Korea---remains to be seen.
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