1
A black-and-white woodcut print titled My Name Is … (1981) holds a charged stillness (Figure 11.1). A mound of grass, carved in sharp vertical strokes, rises against impenetrable darkness. Beneath it lies a human figure, buried yet present. A wide-open eye stares out from below, as if to refuse closure. Caught between silence and witness, the figure seems to be pressing against the weight of earth and memory alike. The work’s incomplete title, voiced in the first person, invites a confrontation
Hong Sungdam, My Name Is …, 1981. Woodcut print, 24. 8 × 21.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist
The rise of the woodcut movement in Asia has often coincided with periods of turmoil, and South Korea was no exception (Ng et al., 2020, p. 1). In the wake of military oppression in Gwangju and across the country, artists gravitated towards realist aesthetics and media associated with minjung misul [people’s art], practicing them as tools of resistance and critique.1 This political art movement emerged from a desire to challenge the modernist values, and address the lived realities of the people, whose lives were shaped by the entangled forces of colonial legacies, authoritarian rule, and extractive structures of capitalism. Among its various forms, woodcut printmaking stood out as especially effective, not only because of its accessibility and affordability, but also its narrative quality. The bold, stark imagery served as a powerful tool for documenting and illustrating the turbulent times, often depicting solidarity against oppression, and scenes from the everyday life. Freed from the confines of galleries and museums, the prints could be disseminated through the streets, progressive publications, and even calendars, reaching the people by way of circumventing the logic of capitalism.
Although numerous artist and activist groups eagerly explored the creative and critical potential of the woodcut throughout the 1980s, the network formed by the founding members of Gwangju Freedom Artists Association, namely Hong Sungdam, Choi Yeol (b. 1956) and other graduates of his alma mater, Chosun University, including Lee Sangho (b. 1960) and Jeon Jeongho (b. 1960), deserve particular attention.2 As young artists fresh out of university with a shared experience of May 18, they initiated the Citizens Art School (Korean 시민미술학교, Romanization simin misul hakgyo) specifically for non-art-professionals, probing the possibility of communal artmaking and ultimately
Education without demand is bound to be short-lived. Recognizing this, Hong and his fellow artists also sought to cultivate interest in printmaking by distributing the Twelve Madang (literally, twelve courtyards; Korean 마당, Romanization madang) calendar since 1982. Featuring autobiographical woodcut illustrations, the calendar was designed as a functioning object, as much as a vehicle for introducing art into daily life. Circulated widely, it found its way into kitchens, shops, and homes, where it quietly became part of the visual environment. For many, the calendar offered a first sustained encounter with woodcut print, sparking curiosity and opening a pathway that gradually nurtured public demand for learning. Built on such a momentum, when the school opened its week-long course to the citizens, featuring talks, site visits, group discussions, and printmaking-related activities that culminated in a public exhibition, it was met with great enthusiasm.
At least eleven cycles of the School were successfully conducted in Gwangju until 1990 (Seo, 2022), and the curriculum was subsequently hosted by other organizations around the country, including Mokpo, Busan, Seoul, and Incheon, resulting in the temporary formation of an interregional and interinstitutional alliance.5 It is important to note that Hong and his peers were not the only ones to explore alternative methods of art education for the public at the time. The Seoul-based collective Durung, for instance, is known to have organized three folk art programs between 1983 and 1984, which stemmed from the members’ interest in revitalizing traditional folk aesthetics, such as Korean decorative coloring and Buddhist paintings through woodcut prints, murals, and large-scale banners (Kim, 2018). However, while these classes lacked a formal curriculum or system, the Citizens Art School established a clear pedagogical framework from the outset. In this sense, the use of the term
2 Singular Plural: Bi-Directional Approaches to Art
The Citizens Art School posits that its mission is to “foster and enhance participants’ ability to critically discuss and think through issues, enabling them to make informed decisions and take necessary actions when required” (Hong, 1986, p. 32). This vision assumed that art could meaningfully shape everyday life by cultivating critical consciousness. As a result, the school’s curriculum rejected the passive assimilation of art discourses, especially those of the West, and challenged the structures of conventional education. Most notably, it regarded the role of the instructors and scholarly research as secondary. Artist-instructors were to act as guides, instead of teachers, and the participants were encouraged to delve into actual sites of living to witness and encounter, rather than study from a distance. As many have pointed out, such treatment of learners as a co-creator of knowledge drew inspiration from recently translated pedagogical texts like Brazilian educator Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), which redefines the relationship between teacher, student, and society based on critical analysis of the social class system (Lee, 2014, p. 81). Yet in fact, a more foundational source of inspiration for the school was Bertolt Brecht’s (1898–1956) Lehrstück [learning play], also known as didactic or teaching play (S. Leam, personal communication, July 11, 2025). Conceived as “stages in a process in which a limited number of plot structures that could be reworked for new variants and versions,” Brecht envisioned learning play as a space for self-education through practice, rather than a vehicle for delivering messages to a passive audience (Cohen, 2021, p. 198). Performed primarily by amateurs in small group settings, these plays aimed to cultivate political awareness and social consciousness through the act of performing, and by employing various theatrical strategies. In this way, theater became both a platform for representation and a site of education in its own right.6
What Brecht foregrounded was the productivity of the audience. The learning play fostered disciplined self-reflection, training individuals to align
Although original blocks are no longer extant, the participants’ works are reproduced in Shared Bread (Korean, 나누어진빵, Romanization, Nanueojin ppang) (1986), a publication co-edited by the school and the Justice and Peace Committee of the Gwangju Catholic Archdiocese.7 Featuring a selection of 221 black-and-white prints produced over the years and documentation of the school’s activities, the book covers a wide range of subjects; it ranges from religious faith and the trauma of May 18 to labor struggles and everyday survival (Figure 11.2). Rendered in bold, expressive lines, the images reflect a process rooted in self-exploration and shared spirit. Participants’ reflections included in the publication indicate how group discussions shaped what to depict and how to narrate a story through an image. One wrote, “At a time when we turn a blind eye to the stories we yearn to tell,” we should “seek our true selves through the image of a mother crying over her dead son” (Citizens Art School, 1986, p. 40).
Front cover of Shared Bread, 1986. Courtesy of the May 18 Archives
According to the School’s promotional flyers, each cycle brought together 50 to 60 participants, with a modest fee of 5,000 to 7,000 Korean won, covering materials, travel, and field trips. At first glance, the structure of the program—weekday session lasting several hours—may suggest a middle-class audience, with participants who could afford both the time and the cost. Indeed, early cohorts included churchgoers and young activists who had encountered the artists through protest networks. Lim Young-hee, for instance, joined the inaugural cycle after learning about Hong Sungdam’s initiative, drawn to the school as a safe space for self-expression under the state surveillance and repression (13th Gwangju Biennale Education Team, 2020, p. 49). Yet as the program expanded beyond Gwangju and was adapted by night schools, regional
Artist Jeon Jeongho acknowledges that the instructors were particularly inspired by the affective quality of the participants’ prints: “For us, as activist-artists, we had to be confrontational, direct, and fierce. It was difficult to focus on feelings when you are fighting against military dictatorship” (13th Gwangju Biennale Education Team, 2020, p. 153). But through the process of working with civilians, the artists came to understand the felt experience as a binding force
By its third cycle, the school had expanded its concept of reality and community, revising the curriculum to prioritize group activities and field trips, particularly to marginalized areas of society, including tuberculosis hospitals, leper colonies, nursing homes, coal mines, markets, and farming villages. These encounters reshaped the participants’ perspectives and encouraged them to shift their focus from personal concerns to the underlying social conditions and structures. The school made clear that the purpose of the visits was not to find a “subject matter” for art, but to immerse in “total life” (Choi, 1983, p. 2). Prints from this period reflect such shift. In one image, a visually impaired couple is shown against a barren landscape, reaching out into the void as they beg, accompanied by the words: “people must rely on each other,” and “support one another” (Citizens Art School, 1984, p. 6). Another work showing an elderly farmer with his cow is paired with the reflection: “Through the sweat-soaked printmaking workshops, it became clear that we are all one; that we are a unity and a community” (Citizens Art School, 1985, p. 5). The recurring word “friend” throughout these works call viewers into the imagined community, where individual stories give way to a shared consciousness across class, age, and political affiliation.
3 Staging the Collective
What does it mean to rehearse ideas before articulating them in images? How might collective expression begin with shared gestures, voices, and improvisation? One of the ways the Citizens Art School adapted Brecht’s idea of the learning play was integrating elements of Korean folk theater into its curriculum. Before the participants turned to printmaking, they often engaged in collaborative exercises, such as writing scripts, crafting masks, and performing scenes, that underscored the power of storytelling to reconfigure the present conditions. These practices drew from people’s theater (Korean 마당극, Romanization madanggeuk), a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional Korean mask dance (Korean 탈춤, Romanization talchum). If the mask
However, talchum and its contemporary interpretations are not solely instruments of subversion and critique. They equally embody a state of intense joy or spiritual exhilaration (Korean 신명, Romanization shinmyeong), rooted in Korean folk culture. As historian Kim Heo-kyung has noted, many dissident scholars and minjung artists of the time recognized shinmyeong as the emotional foundation for fostering and practicing collective bonds (Kim, 2018). Participants typically “crafted masks that reflected and typified the characters of the contemporary era” and “enjoyed improvising plays while wearing them” (Work and Play, 1983, unpaginated). Characters ranged from farmers and children to billionaires and ghosts; figures that evoke both the lived and spectral dimensions of capitalism. If these exercises offered a foundation for exploring how to embody a character, build a scene, and shape a narrative, then the subsequent translation from performance to print opened ways to translate movement, dialogue, and emotion into static yet expressive images.
The works produced throughout the course were ultimately curated into an exhibition, which became the defining feature of the Citizens Art School. Organized by the participants, these exhibitions brought the collaborative energy of the program into public view. They offered a space to engage with new audiences and publicize the discussions and insights the participants had developed, either individually or in groups, throughout the course. Preparation—selecting works, designing brochures, and creating promotional materials—added another layer of group practice. Exhibitions were held in venues like Kodume, a local art space, theater, and café, as well as at the Catholic Church’s art space. Posters bearing reproductions of participant’s work were placed along outdoor walls, turning the street into a temporary exhibition site. Considering that at least 2,000 copies of the brochures were printed, and that a significant number of prints were sold on site, the student exhibitions appear to have attracted considerable public attention. The proceeds from these sales were donated and used to support the organization of the school’s next cycle, reinforcing a self-sustaining model. As Hong Sungdam recalled, “the exhibitions were a place to critically reflect on the self and at the same time relate to one another. It, too, enabled the students to gain a shared sense of responsibility” (Hong, 2025).
In 1985, the founding members of the Citizens Art School notably organized a traveling exhibition, bringing together 70 works by the participants and
4 Citizens Art School Reactivated
The pedagogy formulated by the Citizens Art School was inseparable from the political and cultural conditions of its time. Grounded in the ethos of the 1980s democratic movements, the school embraced a model of solidarity shaped by organized, goal-oriented community of citizens (Kim, 2013, p. 104). This framework reflected a period when artists believed in a shared political agenda and collective responsibility. However, the same qualities that gave the movement the coherence, also opened it to criticism. The woodcut prints’ crude visual language and lack of formal nuance were often seen as limiting, and the school’s curriculum was shaped, in part, by the ideological convictions of the founding members. Though the end of the authoritarian rule in 1987 was seen as a major victory for the artists and participants alike, the rise of neoliberal globalization soon introduced new pressures, intensifying the very capitalist structures the school had set out to critique.
Paradoxically, it was in the context of the international biennials—those deeply entangled with both the global circulation of art and locality—that the legacy of the Citizens Art School found renewed relevance, precisely for its early commitment to self-education, collectivity, and socially engaged practice. This was possible also because biennials, characterized by their scale, recurring format, and attention to both local and global dynamics, increasingly came to be seen as valuable platforms for alternative knowledge production.
What grants particular attention are instances that specifically turn to the Citizens Art School and redefine its relevance for today. These include Gwangju Lessons (2020) curated by Binna Choi in collaboration with Rwanda-born Dutch artist Christian Nyampeta for the Gwangju Biennale Foundation’s special exhibition project commemorating the 40th anniversary of May 18, and Malaysian artist group Pangrok Sulap’s participatory woodcut print workshops held at the 14th edition of the Gwangju Biennale.10 The idea for the Gwangju Lessons is known to have sparked during a visit to the newly opened May 18 Archives as part of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale. It was there that the Biennale’s then-curator Choi and participating artist Nyampeta encountered the publication Shared Bread and learned about the school. Drawing from this discovery and his close collaborations with Choi in the following years, Nyampeta developed a work centered on the concept of ‘rematerialization,’ beginning by teaching himself to carve into square linoleum plates based on the 70 black-and-white reproductions featured in the book. These newly produced plates were displayed as tiles on a wall for the exhibition Gwangju Lessons, first held at Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne, Germany. Visitors were invited to take a plate from the wall and print it at a workstation set up in one corner of the gallery, activating the original images once again. When the exhibition traveled to Gwangju later that year, the curator and the artist commissioned Gwangju based artist cooperative Cokkiri to generate a new set of wood plates, this time depicting an entire collection of images featured in Shared Bread with a 3D printer. As in Cologne, visitors were encouraged to make prints on site, rendering the exhibition space a site of collective artmaking (Figure 11.3).11
Installation view of Gwangju Lessons featuring Christian Nyampeta’s Scenes from the Revolution (2020) and the Gwangju version of ARAC’s Un/Chrono/Logical Timeline (2020) composed by the exhibition’s participants from Chonnam National University and the 13th Gwangju Biennale Education Team. National Asian Culture Center, Gwangju. © Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and the curator
Building on his longstanding interest in the question of “how to live, rest, and work together,” Nyampeta’s central work conceived for the Gwangju Lessons deliberately refused to offer technical training on the medium or historical studies of the school (Nyampeta & Engqvist, 2018). Through the process of rematerializing the images once produced by the participants in the past, the exhibition effectively destabilizes the notions of authenticity and authorship, as much as it unravels the school’s historicity. Referring to the depictions of everyday landscape “scenes from the revolution,” Nyampeta suggests the
For the Malaysian collective Pangrok Sulap, the enduring history of the Citizens Art School—particularly the continued artistic activities of key members such as Hong, Lee, and Jeon—deeply resonated with their own commitment to empowering rural and marginalized communities. Established in 2010, the collective primarily employs woodcut prints to disseminate social messages that reflect the narratives of Borneo’s communities, including their endangered lifestyles, environmental concerns, and issues of human rights and ecological exploitation. Strong advocates of the Do-It-Yourself ethos, Pangrok Sulap views community engagement as a crucial part of the creative process. The stories and experiences shared by local people become sources of inspiration, while the act of carving and printing woodcuts transforms into a performative event. During these events, participants often join in traditional Sabah folk dances, transferring ink onto the final woodcut prints through their movements. Music is an essential part of this communal dancing and printing, as suggested by the collective’s name, “Pangrok” (local pronunciation of punk rock) and “Sulap,” a traditional hut or resting place used by farmers in Sabah.
Pangrok Sulap’s series of public classes organized around their work Gwangju Blooming (2023) for the 14th Gwangju Biennale celebrated the spirit of mutual
While grounded in the urgencies of its time, the Citizens Art School’s emphasis on shared learning and mutual agency continues to hold relevance, particularly in the face of growing threats to democratic values globally. Reactivations of the School through platforms like the Gwangju Biennale open up new ways to revisit its legacy, less as a closed historical event, and more as a set of questions that can be taken up differently in the present. These contemporary returns do not simply preserve the school’s legacy but suggest how its core concerns around pedagogy, collectivity, and intervention, might resonate across contexts. In this sense, the educational activities centered around woodcut printmaking, as devised by the school, might be understood as rehearsals, for learning, for agency, and for democracy. Rather than exercises in technical mastery, they were a shared practice in forming political imagination. Echoing Brecht’s notion of the learning play, doing and reflecting, individual expression and collective inquiry merged into the Citizens Art school’s pedagogical process. Critical exploration of the school’s legacy today is therefore not about retrieving a fixed model, but about engaging its ethos as a living proposition: that self-education and organization of committed collectivity are not ends in themselves, but practices that must be continuously worked through, especially in moments of political polarization and precarity.12
Notes
On the general introduction to minjung misul and cultural movement see, Lee (2007). On the historiography of minjung misul, see Yoo (2020).
Gwangju Freedom Artists Association was formed in September 1979 by eight artists from Gwangju, including Hong Sungdam and Choi Yeol. The members’ first-hand experience of the atrocities of the May 18 was formative in shaping the group’s grassroot activities in the following years. The Association subsequently changed its name to Visual Media Center in 1985. As art historian and critic, Choi has served as an important chronicler of the group’s activities and of the broader history of Minjung Art, see Choi (1994).
Simin misul hakgyo has been variously translated as People’s Art School, Civic Art School, or Community Art School, among others. This essay follows the translation that is closest
The Justice and Peace Committee of the Catholic Archdiocese of Gwangju, for instance, played a pivotal role in issuing an official statement against the military government, and circulating information about the brutalities of the Gwangju uprising in and outside of South Korea.
Existing studies on the Citizens Art School has tended to focus on its activities until 1986 due to the lack surviving records, but Seo Yuri’s extensive research into the school’s archives reveal that the courses were held in Gwangju until the early 1990s. Her influential study also highlights collectivity forged by the medium of woodcut, and especially the participants’ shared sensory experience, see Seo (2020).
In the 1980s, Brecht received exceptional scholarly attention in South Korea across German literary studies as well as broader literary and theatrical discourses. This reception intensified as it intersected with cultural movements committed to social transformation. Within this context, Brecht was regarded as more than a playwright or a theorist. He was taken up as a paradigmatic figure of socialist realism, whose work exemplified uncompromising dedication to revolutionary praxis, see Oh (1993).
Shared Bread (Gwangju: Justice and Peace Committee of the Gwangju Catholic Center, 1986). The reproductions were a selection from over 500 prints made by the participants. The book also contains their hand-written notes.
A mookji refers to a publication that took on the format of a magazine but was permitted to be published as a book due to the difficulties in issuing periodicals following the Policy for Merger and Abolition of the Press implemented by the Chun Doo-hwan regime. In 1983, with the release of numerous mookji, it developed into a publishing movement.
For more information on the Open School and The Village project, see LOT-EK (2012). Upcycle. LOT-EK; Seoul Museum of Art (2020). Seoul Mediacity Biennale 1996–2022 Report. Seoul Museum of Art.
Founded in 1995 to commemorate the spirit of civil resistance manifested during the May 18, the Gwangju Biennale distinguishes itself from other exhibitions born out of regional development and tourism.
According to Binna Choi, due to pandemic-related scheduling changes, it became impossible to ship the works made for the Cologne exhibition, prompting collaboration with the collective Cokkiri. The curatorial concept Choi and Nyampeta developed for the exhibition is detailed in the exhibition catalogue, MaytoDay (2020). For the Gwangju iteration of the exhibition, they also invited a group of students from Chonnam National University to follow parts of the school curriculum and conduct research into its history. The publication 2020 Gwangju simin misul hakgyo (2020 Citizens Art School) was put together as a result of this collaboration with the Chonnam National University students.
I am deeply grateful to Hong Sungdam for generously sharing his experiences and insights into the organization of the Citizens Art School. My sincere thanks also go to Yoo Hye-jong and Binna Choi for their invaluable feedback, and to Byun Youngsun for sharing archival materials that informed this research.
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