ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

The 1980s was an era of cultural politics. The military government and the civil people confronted each other, using cultural policy and cultural movement, respectively, to seize cultural hegemony. Culture is the basis that rules human minds. Both the military government of the fifth Republic of Korea and the Minjung (People’s) Cultural Movement had the same goal—the establishment of national identity and pride based on the traditional national culture. However, the military government sought to establish nationalism based on the traditional nobility culture, characterized by the thought of loyalty and filial piety, while the Minjung Cultural Movement sought to bring about people-orientedness, defining the people as the main agents of history. The two parties had different perspectives on history. The 1980s was an era of the Minjung Cultural Movement. Although the Minjung culture generally belongs to the realm of culture, there appeared a unique structure in which the Minjung Cultural Movement was above cultural movement due to the political environment of the military government in the 1980s. The Minjung Cultural Movement was a cultural struggle and a cultural politics which put up the people as the main agents of history with the ultimate aim to overthrow the military government. The Minjung Cultural Movement developed ideologies with the focus on humanities, such as sociology, aesthetics, and philosophy, while art fields were actively engaged in practices at protests and rallies. The Minjung Cultural Movement was represented by Marxism and the people’s nationalism in terms of ideology, and by traditional performing arts in terms of practice. Minjung Art was active in the visual art field, including posters and engravings. The art fields played a greater role in the late 1980s when the aspiration for democracy was supported by the people across the country and large-scale protests took place. As such, the Minjung Cultural Movement was also called as the Minjung Art and Cultural Movement or the Minjung Literary Movement. University students played an important role in expanding the Minjung Cultural Movement. Some people had an aversion to dissident intellectuals participating in the movement due to their pro-North Korean tendency. In contrast, the public accepted and regarded university students’ activities as a pure aspiration for democracy. Meanwhile, a dissident movement took root as a university culture and this led to the formation of small groups studying socialist ideologies. Traditional performing art clubs, such as play, masked dance, and nongak led such university culture at the front. In particular, Daedongje, an annual university festival, led political rallies and protests against the military government. Daedongje of Korean universities aroused interests in the victims who died violent deaths for the people’s revolution throughout history, consolidating the will to bring about democracy and the hope for healing in reality. The purpose of calling attention to the sacrifice of the people was to consolidate the imperativeness and inevitability of creating the people-oriented world. The Minjung Cultural Movement was a cultural protest to change the ideological direction of society through art and culture where such art and culture was not a means of protest, auxiliary to the economy and politics. Finally, the military government was put to an end.

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