”Modern Korean History 5” (1982) consists of a beast with sensual lips and sharp fangs, intertwined with a variety of weaponry that may be protruding from its body or stabbing into it, depicted in black-and-white monotone. Among the deformed and disintegrating bodies, there are people who appear to be suffering pain all over their bodies. On the back of this work, Shin left handwritten notes that allow viewers to infer his aim to present the concrete reality through literary language. He regarded the mass that he painted through a subconscious flow as a representation of both the reality of today and the artist himself, confessing “it makes me angry, it makes me sigh, it brings tears to my eyes.” In addition, he also expressed his frustration over the fact that the form of his work gradually transformed into grotesque masses that he himself cannot recognize. The listed names are the real names of people who caused uproar in Korean society with their inhumane atrocities, which highlights the reality dissolved into the entangled mass of surrealist imagery.
Shin Hak-chul (b. 1943) graduated from the Department of Painting at Hongik University in 1968. He has held several solo exhibitions including “Shin Hak-Chul: Invitational Exhibition” at Seoul Museum in 1982; “The Great Statue We Have Created” at ARKO Art Center in 2003; and “Emerging Artist: Shin Hak-Chul” at Gimhae Arts and Sports Center in 2014. He has participated in group exhibitions including “AG” at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA from 1970 to 1975; “Controversial Artists” at Seoul Museum from 1981 to 1984; “The Art of Life” at Arab Culture Center/Gwanhoon Gallery/The Third Museum in 1984; “Anti-Torture” at Geurimmadang Min in 1987; “Reunification” and “Dear Gwangju! Dear May!” at Geurimmadang Min in 1989; “15 Years of Minjung Art: 1980-1994” at National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, currently MMCA, in 1994; “The 1980’s Realism and the Age” at Gana Art Center in 2001; “You Are My Sunshine” at Total Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004; “Korean Rhapsody: A Montage of History and Memory” at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in 2011; “Humans, Humans ？ The Pictorial History of Ordinary People by Shin Hak-Chul and Ahn Chang- Hong” at Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art in 2013; and “Regrettable Times” at Seoul Museum of Art in 2018. He is the recipient of the 1st Korean People’s Arts Award in 1991 and the 16th Kumho Art Award in 1999.
Shin Hak-chul is one of the artists who led the socio-political art movement called Minjung Art in 1980s South Korea. He started his career as an artist in the late 1960s, actively embracing Western avant-garde art. He used collage techniques to portray the materialist threat toward everyday life under the mass consumption society of industrialized Korea in the mid-1970s and began to focus on the material properties of objects in the context of modernist art in the late 1970s. Later, in the early 1980s, Shin released the “Modern orean History” series, comprised of 23 works in total, in which he interpreted and recreated the modern and contemporary history of Korea through his unique imagination. This series encompasses the independence movements during the Japanese colonial period, liberation, the Korean War and the division of the Korean Peninsula, and Korea’s post-war socio-political history. Entering the 1990s, Shin focused on the lives of the ordinary people such as farmers and laborers, and in the 2000s, he portrayed the diverse aspects of Korean society and its growing disorder in the 21st century through the “History of Contemporary Korea: “Gapsuni and Gapdori” series.
